by Alan Huffman
The Tolberts farmed on a high, rolling plateau along the Ohio River, where the rock ramparts of Kentucky tower over broad fields of corn, tobacco, and wheat. Saluda was then, and remains today, a pleasant outcropping of rural Americana, of neat farmhouses and calendar-worthy barns, with open land serrated by hollows shrouded in sycamore, poplar, locust, and hickory trees, where ferny creeks plunge in minor cataracts to the floodplain of the river. At the center of the farm stood the Tolberts’ two-story red-brick house, large but unpretentious, with a few curlicues embellishing an otherwise restrained façade. From the front porch the family could see the quaint Tryus Church, where they attended services and whose very name seemed to entreat new supplicants. Through the wavy glass of the dining room windows the landscape tilted down to the family cemetery, where, by the time the war broke out, Tolbert’s father lay. As late as the spring of 1862, Tolbert was still helping to cultivate the crops and tend the livestock, eating his fill at his mother’s table and sleeping each night in his own bed. Jefferson County remained—on the surface at least—comparatively serene, though it existed in a border zone between the solidly pro-Union western states (as the Midwest was then known) and the sprawling slave plantations of the South. The county was home to both rabid abolitionists, some of whom were involved in the Underground Railroad, and Copperheads, who supported the Confederacy. Today Jefferson County has its share of shrines to the Union cause, but it is not unusual to see pickup trucks traveling the back roads sporting Rebel flag decals. On the outskirts of Hanover, on Route 56, stands the Johnny Reb Lounge.
During the Civil War, there was talk of Indiana seceding from the Union to form a separatist government with other western states. A local soldier named Andrew Bush wrote home to his wife in January 1863 to express his dismay over the news, saying, “I trust that it aint so for if it is so us pore soldiers will have to Suffer.” Bush did not share the enthusiasm of certain soldiers who believed that secession would provide a ticket home. He had sworn allegiance to the United States, though he disagreed with “old Abe’s proclamation” and wrote that he would not have enlisted had he believed the war was about freeing the slaves, whom he did not consider human. Such a paradox—men who fought a war to prevent secession, harboring a desire to secede—was not unusual in Jefferson County. The county’s bucolic air belied inner turmoil.
From the outset of the fighting, Jefferson County stockpiled war matériel—kegs of gunpowder, rifles, muskets, revolvers, bullet molds, cannonballs, bridles, and spurs—to outfit and train what was known as the Home Guard. In the summer of 1862, Tolbert and Maddox served their three-month stint in a militia known as Captain Monroe’s Independent Company, an initiation that proved uneventful and took them only as far as Indianapolis, where they were assigned to guard Confederate prisoners of war. By then, four of Tolbert’s five brothers were in the active Union Army.
Then, in July 1863, a few days after the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, a Confederate cavalry division known as Morgan’s raiders swept through southern Indiana and Ohio, looting farms, stealing horses and generally terrorizing the citizenry. Afterward, everything changed. A local woman who wrote an account of the raids seventy years later noted that people were already discouraged about the war and fearful of a possible Rebel invasion. The woman, who was a child at the time, recalled that Morgan’s raiders stole all the horses and guns and forced her and her sisters to bake them bread. As the girls baked, the men sat in the kitchen and read the local newspaper. After the raiders left, as darkness fell, a group of relatives and friends arrived to hold vigil during the night. The next day, a group of Union soldiers passed through on their way to southern Ohio, where they joined other troops who captured or killed more than eight hundred of the raiders near Athens. Morgan himself was captured a week later.
As invasions go, it was not exactly the Mongol hordes, and in fact the raid was as remarkable for its relative tameness and civility as for its unexpectedness and could not compare with Union assaults against Southern civilians. But Morgan’s raid brought the conflict home to a large, previously remote population and prompted a general call to arms. Tolbert, who was of draft age, and Maddox, who was approaching it, were among those who responded two months later. They departed Saluda on the familiar winding road to Madison, the county seat; filled out the necessary paperwork; enlisted for three years in the 39th Indiana Volunteer Infantry; collected their respective $25 bounties; and caught the train to Indianapolis to muster in. Neither apparently took the opportunity to document the occasion in a photograph, though many new recruits did.
Vincent Anderson, a fellow Indiana soldier, recalled that he set off in search of a photographer “as soon as I donned my soldier suit.” The photographer he found kept a few guns and swords as props to place in the hands of soldiers, and “When I went to get my picture taken, and he saw I was a private he took a musket with the bayonet fixed and knelt down and showed me how to form a hollow square out of myself and resist a cavalry charge, I at once took to his idea and down on one knee I went, and with the gun and bayonet, as directed, my picture was taken.”
Most recruits had little or no actual military experience. Ideally they would be given months of drills and training, but that was not always possible. Sometimes they were pulled directly from the farm, or from their jobs, and thrust into the violence of war with a few choice words and the guidance of a two-bit photographer.
Tolbert and Maddox remained in Indianapolis for only a week or so, then headed south to Nashville. A Jefferson County soldier who made the same journey noted that none of the recruits in his group even knew how to pitch a tent and were therefore put up in a hotel upon their arrival in the city. Few had ever ventured far from home, which was a quieter and more self-contained place than most Americans can imagine today. In Saluda, Indiana, in 1863, noise was invariably associated with a meaningful event: The passage of a steam locomotive, the report of a hunter’s gun, the bawling of a cow stuck in a swamp, the thunder of an approaching storm. Tolbert and Maddox had never experienced anything like the unending, insidious, ear-shattering din of battle, and they had no idea whether they were remotely prepared. All they knew was that something big was about to happen.
At the time of their enlistment, the recruits were required to fill out a questionnaire about their physical and mental health. One question was whether they had ever experienced “the horrors,” which is something akin to panic attacks. Tolbert and Maddox both answered no, but in hindsight a more accurate answer might have been not yet.
THE TRAIN THAT CARRIED THEM to war traveled south from the Ohio River into the Kentucky bluegrass. Most of those aboard were novice soldiers on their way to “see the elephant,” as the saying went—to lay their eyes upon the much-ballyhooed beast of war. The recruits wore crisp blue uniforms and carried the essentials in their knapsacks: Fresh underwear and socks, soap, a knife and fork, a toothbrush, a supply of paper and envelopes, pen and ink, perhaps a few photographs, some twine, a needle and thread, a mirror, and a comb or brush (certainly for Tolbert, who tended to fuss over his hair, judging from photos of him). The knapsacks were both their overnight bags and survival kits. Most also carried smaller haversacks of leather or painted cloth, along with their canteens, guns, and up to forty rounds of ammunition. Soon, when they became cavalrymen, Tolbert and Maddox would carry sabers—elegant and deadly props.
The recruits would hold on to their personal possessions while circumstances allowed, but that was not usually for very long. Their accoutrement and baggage would become a burden. The knapsacks alone weighed as much as twenty pounds, and soldiers inevitably discarded their treasured possessions one by one during long marches, or stowed them on the eve of engagements and never saw them again. In the end, most would retain only those items they carried in their pockets, and often those would be lost, too. They would start out sleeping in shared tents, but those would later be left behind, and they would lie on the ground beneath the stars or under a rubber blanket in th
e pouring rain. Eventually, even the blankets would go.
As the train rocked into Tennessee the physical evidence of the war began to drift past the windows: Burned buildings, abandoned towns, clumps of bedraggled refugees. It was obvious they were getting close. For two years Tolbert and Maddox had heard the news from afar, from soldiers on furlough, in letters, in the local newspaper. The headlines had grown increasingly shrill as the fighting intensified and moved closer to home. In the fall of 1862, beside an ad for Dr. Roback’s Blood Purifier and Blood Pills, the Madison Courier had exclaimed:
BRAGG ADVANCING IN KENTUCKY!
GREAT EXCITEMENT!
A FARMER HAS JUST COME OVER FROM MILTON TO
GET HIS GUN FIXED!
STILL LATER!
A Small Boy Passed up Main Cross Street Displaying
A SECESH FLAG.
The People Greatly Excited
The sudden militancy of a local farmer and public outrage over a boy bearing a secessionist flag were evidence of the increasing threat posed by the army of Confederate General Braxton Bragg, who was stirring up trouble in Kentucky, just across the Ohio River. The Courier reported from Perryville, Kentucky, on October 9, 1862: “A portion of Bragg’s army attacked a portion of McCook’s corps d’armee at this place on Tuesday. The fighting was desperate.” Three days, later the newspaper reported that sixteen thousand Union soldiers had engaged an unknown number of Confederates at Perryville and that perhaps six hundred of them, as well as thirteen hundred Rebels, had been killed. Later accounts put the number of troops engaged as thirteen thousand Yankees and nearly seventeen thousand Rebels. The article noted: “Doctor Heard, medical director, has been required to prepare for the reception of three thousand of the Perryville wounded.”
On October 22, the New Albany Ledger reported that the troops had fought hand to hand with the Rebels and that the 22nd Indiana, in which Tolbert’s brothers Tyrus, Silas, and Daniel served, “went in like tigers. They were in the front of the battle throughout the day, and suffered terribly—being cut to pieces. We have heard their loss at over 175 killed, and 350 wounded. They repulsed seven charges of the rebel cavalry.”
This was news that everyone devoured, particularly in the Tolbert household. Among those killed was one of Tolbert’s brothers, identified by the Courier as Second Lieutenant Tyrus Talbert, who was shot through the heart at twenty-nine and left behind a wife and a three-year-old son. For Romulus Tolbert, who was old enough to fight, the news must have been both grievous and provocative. With three brothers now in the army, he was left waiting in the wings alongside his younger brother Samuel, who was just a boy.
Amid the war news was this advertisement: “MANHOOD; How Lost! How Restored!” which offered, for six cents, a lecture by one Dr. Robert J. Caldwell, delivered in a sealed envelope, on the nature, treatment, and cure of “Spermatorrhoea, or Seminal Weakness, Involuntary Emission, Sexual Debility and Impediments to Marriage generally,” along with related problems of nervousness and mental and physical incapacity resulting from self-abuse. Also: “Ohio River Farm for Sale!”
Chapter Three
WAR
DURING THE BRIEF PERIOD THAT THE 39TH INDIANA recruits were pacing around Indianapolis in September 1863, marching in regimental drills and preparing to ship out, Tolbert’s brother Mathew was shot and captured at the battle of Chickamauga. The 22nd Indiana Infantry, in which his brothers Silas and Daniel fought, arrived on the battlefield a few hours before the end, after Mathew was gone. Tolbert now had two very personal disastrous models in which he could imagine himself, both of which involved people he knew well and identified with who had been targeted in different ways.
By the time he and Maddox caught up with the 39th Indiana in October, Chickamauga was already legendary, and once again, though they were soldiers, they had to settle for hearing about it after the fact. They would have little to add when the other soldiers sat around the campfire commiserating about the momentous charge across the Widow Glenn’s farm. The most Tolbert could have contributed was, My brother Mathew got captured there. Perhaps it seemed they had missed the big scene.
Soldiers on the cusp of combat naturally try to imagine what it will be like, though no one knows how they will react to a full-blown mortal assault until it unfolds. A new recruit’s self-image relies a lot on conjecture—on stories he has heard from other soldiers and on his own behavior in stressful situations in the past. Tolbert left no record of how he imagined war to be, or how he felt he had measured up, and as a result a great many of the contours of his life have been lost. But the path he followed is well documented, whether in his own record or in the accounts of others, and for the cast of thousands with whom he shared a succession of dramatic scenes, Chickamauga was pivotal. There were lessons to be learned.
In addition to Tolbert’s brothers, most of the soldiers whose sagas overlapped with his fought at Chickamauga: Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Harrison, who would earn accolades for his command of the 39th Indiana (soon to be reorganized as the 8th Indiana Cavalry); the fearless Lieutenant Colonel Fielder Jones, who would later lead the 8th under Harrison; Perry Summerville, also a cavalryman from Indiana, and George Robinson, a cavalryman from Michigan, both of whom would end up in the same Confederate prison and aboard the same doomed boat; and J. Walter Elliott, whose hapless tale would intersect with his near the end. For those who were there, Chickamauga would have been enough of a war story for a lifetime. Yet, for many of them, it was only the prelude.
Chickamauga, fought just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was not the kind of warfare most of the soldiers envisioned. The battle, which swept back and forth across a patchwork of cornfields and woods near West Chickamauga Creek on September 19 and 20, 1863, was more a series of brutal, chaotic charges and counter-charges than a conventional engagement. At times it devolved into what amounted to armed mob violence, with troops appearing out of the blue and disappearing almost as suddenly into a dense pall of smoke. Soldiers are often thought to put their emotions aside, but combat is about surrendering to one of the most powerful emotions there is—instinctive aggression. Because of the terrain at Chickamauga, the number of troops involved, and the range of weapons, that aggression was channeled in a thousand different directions at once. The 39th would never see anything on its scale again. Over the two-day period, about 125,000 soldiers were involved. But the battle’s irregularity foreshadowed the skirmishes and guerilla attacks that they—including Tolbert and Maddox—would come to know well as the Union Army pushed deeper into Georgia.
No one had it easy at Chickamauga, even those who received what might have seemed comparatively safe assignments, such as George Robinson, the Michigan soldier who was detailed to guard a cavalry supply train. There was no safe place at Chickamauga—no backstage. The fighting was all over the map, and everywhere intense. Colonel John Wilder, who commanded a brigade of mounted Union troops alongside the 39th Indiana on the Widow Glenn’s farm, recalled that when he came upon a group of Confederate soldiers trapped under his men’s fire in a ravine just east of the widow’s house, “It seemed a pity to kill men so. They fell in heaps, and I had it in my heart to order the firing to cease, to end the awful sight.” Noting the defining anarchy of the battle, Wilder later wrote, “All this talk about generalship displayed on either side is sheer nonsense. There was no generalship in it. It was a soldier’s fight purely, wherein the only question involved was the question of endurance. The two armies came together like two wild beasts, and each fought as long as it could stand up in a knock-down and drag-out encounter. If there had been any high order of generalship displayed, the disasters of both armies might have been less.”
For someone like Tolbert or Maddox, hearing of the battle from afar, it would have been hard to know how to prepare for what was to come. Almost as soon as the fighting began, droves of men went tumbling to the ground across the uneven terrain, killed instantly or twisting in agony amid the wildly stamping hooves and boots. A soldier such as Mathew Tolbert
, who was wounded on the battlefield, was horribly exposed. Every bullet that pocked the ground nearby or screamed past overhead presented a new terror, and if a downed man managed to avoid being run over by a horse, he was likely to be shot again or, as happened in Mathew’s case, captured. Everywhere blood flowered on dusty clothes. Bullets and canister shot penetrated arms, legs, trunks, mouths, eyes, and groins, spewing tiny geysers. Men disintegrated before the relentless cannon fire. Death was everywhere; if a man was lucky it only tapped him on the shoulder to say Hey, but everyone got noticed sooner or later. Not that the killing was easy. A soldier who kills, at close range, another man bent on killing him initially feels euphoria, then guilt. Sometimes he vomits.
Across the interconnected battlefields, the fighting grew so fierce that at times the soldiers found their guns too hot to hold, and they had to cast them aside and grab one that had been discarded on the ground or from the arms of a dead man, and begin shooting again. But as long as a man continued to breathe and move and shoot, he had hope that he would survive. That was the nature of war.
For the 39th Indiana, it was all about the Widow Glenn’s farm, which was to be their ultimate proving ground during the war. Eliza Glenn earned her sobriquet after her husband, a Rebel soldier, was killed, leaving her alone with two young children, and unexpectedly found herself in the middle of the first day of conflict inside her crude log cabin. Union General William Rosecrans chose the cabin for his field headquarters, had a temporary telegraph line run to it, and spread out his maps on her parlor table. The maps turned out to be unreliable, and Rosecrans had difficulty ascertaining the patterns of the distant fighting. The terrain along west Chickamauga Creek was broken into hills and bottoms—some open, some wooded—and the noise seemed to be coming from every direction. The Widow Glenn, trapped in her house with an enemy general, decided to help him monitor the fighting by ear. Perhaps she, too, wanted only to keep the assault at bay. As Shelby Foote noted in his seminal trilogy The Civil War, “She would make a guess, when a gun was heard, that it was ‘nigh out about Reed’s Bridge,’ or ‘about a mile fornenst John Kelly’s house,’ and he would try to match this information with the place names on his map.” Soon the roaring extended across the entire front, and, Foote wrote, “A reporter thought he had never witnessed ‘anything so ridiculous as this scene’ between Old Rosy and the widow.” After the Rebels broke through the Union lines, the widow was removed to a safer location.