Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories

by C. Brian Kelly

  Akin did offer one observation of his Richmond surroundings: “The defenses are very strong, indeed, and I think the Yankees will be greatly slaughtered if they ever attack our men in their works.”

  He had been invited, he said, to two eggnog parties, “but have not gone to any.” Instead, he tried to visit Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, also of Georgia. But, alas, Stephens was not home, and Akin returned to his lonely room and resumed writing a letter to his wife. He expressed regret that the House was not discharging its duties this day after Christmas, noting that members for some time had been determined “for going home and frolicking.”

  Akin remained in Richmond for the next several weeks, troubled not only by the Confederacy’s declining hope of survival but also by his family’s difficulties. His wife, their seven children, and six or seven slaves had been forced from their home in Bartow County, and then from a temporary abode at Oxford, southeast of Atlanta, to escape Union forces. They were now in exile at Elberton in Akin’s native Elbert County.

  The legislator finally rejoined his twice-displaced family on March 5 after a “long and tedious journey through the country.” Congress was still in session when he left Richmond, and no reason is given for why such a dutiful member left his post after so much sacrifice earlier. It may be that his sense of duty to family finally prevailed. It may be, too, that he saw the proverbial writing on the wall—the surrender at Appomattox was barely a month away when Akin returned to Georgia.

  Although his home and law office in Cassville had been burned by Union troops, Akin took his family back to Bartow County and picked up his legal practice after the war. He lived until a week before Christmas 1877. His widow lived until 1907. They were survived by two daughters and four sons.

  The seventh child, another son, Elbert, had died in a pony-riding accident. Warren Akin learned that sad fact a few days later on his way home from Richmond in the bleak year of 1865.

  Unlucky John Bell Hood

  JOHN BELL HOOD WAS UNLUCKY IN LOVE AND WAR—INDEED, IN LIFE ITSELF. Although he built a fine combat record at a lower command level early in the war and continued in brave and dedicated service after losing a leg and suffering a crippled arm, he wound up the culprit historically (and somewhat unfairly) blamed for the loss of Atlanta to William Tecumseh Sherman.

  After the war Hood found himself assailed in print again by Sherman over his mistakes and alleged shortcomings. This happened after Hood had endured the public censure of his former commander, the controversial Joseph E. Johnston, whose own dilatory deployments were a major reason the Confederacy lost Atlanta.

  Hood, an 1853 graduate of West Point, started off the war well enough. Initially commander of the Texas Brigade, he fought well at Gaines’ Mill outside of Richmond, at Second Bull Run, and at Antietam, all in 1862. Soon wearing two stars, he was known far and wide as a fighting general.

  Unmarried and still relatively young, this Kentucky native might have been a fine “catch” for many a Confederate belle caught up in the romance of The Cause. Unfortunately, Hood chose to woo a very sophisticated young woman from South Carolina who was in Richmond with her father, the head of the Confederate conscription hierarchy. Sally Buchanan Preston (called “Buck”) was known as a charming but wily “tease,” and Hood was smitten by her charm and beauty until more gripping events swept him away.

  He suffered in other ways, too, from the same doggedness seen in his hopeless pursuit of Sally “Buck” Preston, and unhappy personality clashes often were the result. At Antietam in September 1862 he blindly persisted in a contretemps with fellow Confederate general Nathan George Evans (like Buck Preston, from South Carolina) over a number of ambulance wagons Hood’s men had captured the previous month at Second Bull Run.

  Hood, it seems, had wanted his sick and wounded men to have use of the wagons, but Evans told Hood to turn them over to the South Carolina troops. “Whereas I would cheerfully have obeyed directions to deliver them to General Robert E. Lee’s Quartermaster for the use of the Army,” wrote Hood after the war, “I did not consider it just that I should be required to yield them to another brigade of the division, which was in no manner entitled to them.”

  Hood refused the order, whereupon he was “placed in arrest” and told to expect court-martial proceedings. In the meantime, Lee was moving into Maryland with the Army of Northern Virginia, with the Battle of Antietam soon to take place. At this point Hood persisted in his dispute to the point of dangerous insubordination. “I was still under arrest, with orders to move in the rear of my two brigades,” recalled Hood, a popular commander in those days. At South Mountain, near Antietam Creek, shells began to burst near Hood’s column. He could hear the men, as they angled up the ascent, calling out, “Give us Hood!”

  At the base of the ridge, Hood came upon Lee, who told him, “General, here I am just upon the eve of entering into battle and with one of my best officers under arrest. If you will merely say that you regret this occurrence, I will release you and restore you to command of your division.”

  But the stubborn Hood would not back down, even before the venerated Robert E. Lee. He repeated his long-held assertion that the release of his wagons would be unjust, unless they were given up to use by Lee’s entire army.

  Lee repeated his request, and Hood still would not retreat from his position. An exasperated Lee finally had to concede. “Well,” he said, “I will suspend your arrest till the impending battle is decided.”

  With that, Hood hastily remounted his horse and galloped off to lead his division. He has been credited ever since with stopping the Union attack on the Confederate left near Dunkard Church and West Woods during the Battle of Antietam Creek.

  Almost a year after Antietam, Hood was badly wounded at Gettysburg, his left arm crippled. Hardly recovered from that wound, he bravely traveled to the western theater of war with his commander, James Longstreet, just in time to appear in the field at Chickamauga on September 18 through 20, 1863. There he lost his right leg to another severe wound. Hood insisted upon resuming duty, although he had to be helped in mounting his horse and needed a safety belt to keep him in the saddle. From this time on, he always traveled with an orderly in charge of the general’s crutch.

  After the amputation of his leg Hood was reassigned to his onetime commander (outside Richmond), General Johnston. The touchy Johnston, one of only five full generals in the Confederacy, was widely known for his dispute with President Jefferson Davis, who had ranked him fourth among those five.

  Hood was reunited with Johnston in the face of Sherman’s advance into Georgia, a campaign marked by successive Southern defeats and withdrawals, until finally the two were backed up close to Atlanta. At this point Davis sent the order for Hood to replace Johnston as commander of the Army of Tennessee and do what he could to stop Sherman. Although by now there was little that Hood really could do, some analysts fault the Kentuckian for his apparent confusion in some of his actions as the new head of an entire army.

  Far worse would happen after Hood escaped Sherman’s siege lines around Atlanta on September 1, 1864, and left the city to its fiery fate. Hood next crossed northern Alabama and struck into Tennessee, his avowed purpose to cut Sherman’s supply lines from the rear.

  All on his own as a full Army commander, Hood found himself approaching Franklin, Tennessee. When West Point classmate John Schofield’s Federals escaped Hood’s planned entrapment at nearby Spring Hill, Hood blamed his subordinate Benjamin Cheatham for failing to cut off Schofield, a feat that could easily have been accomplished by seizing the turnpike leading westward to Nashville. So enraged was Hood that he rescinded an earlier recommendation for Cheatham’s promotion. When Cheatham then appeared before Hood to volunteer his error in the matter of the turnpike and to apologize, Hood rescinded again and allowed the endorsement of promotion to stand. Hood then persisted in assaulting Schofield with the most massive infantry charge of the whole war, but the Union troops held for five hours. In the end Hood was forced
to retreat after losing 6,252 men, among them six generals killed outright, to the Union’s 2,326 casualties.

  The curtain came down for Hood at Nashville two weeks later. On December 15 his former West Point instructor, the Virginian George Thomas, dealt Hood’s Army of Tennessee a final, shattering blow in two days of grim battle. On Christmas Day Hood retreated into Mississippi, where he soon relinquished command at his own request.

  After the war, Hood refought many of his battles in a famous “Reply” to Joe Johnston’s final depiction of Hood’s failings. (The “Reply” became the centerpiece of Hood’s personal memoirs.) Sherman then launched a flank attack on the ill-fated Confederate hero, listing various steps his onetime enemy Hood should have taken in response to the Union campaigns in Georgia and Tennessee.

  Meanwhile, Sally “Buck” Preston had retreated from Richmond back to South Carolina before war’s end. Hood apparently found marital bliss with another woman, but their marriage—and their lives—ended in New Orleans during the yellow fever epidemic of 1879. Sadly, at his death at forty-eight years of age, he and his wife were in a severe state of financial duress.

  “On, Wisconsin…On!”

  FE W REGIMENTS HAVE EVER HAD A HERO LIKE THE “BOY ADJUTANT” OF THE 24TH Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, only seventeen when he and his companions marched off to war in 1862. Likewise, few heroes ever had a son as an expert— and moving—chronicler of their deeds. But this one surely did!

  Three battles are the story here. At Stone’s River—the first three days of 1863—his regiment lost nearly 40 percent of its men. Every mounted officer was felled, except for the youthful adjutant. The 24th Wisconsin began one day’s action in a well-prepared line of rifle entrenchments, with artillery in supporting position. So fierce and swirling was the action that the Wisconsin regiment had to change frontal position fourteen times. By nightfall the regiment’s men were back in their rifle pits again, but facing opposite the direction they had started out in that morning. The enemy was still in front, and the young adjutant was congratulated by Phil Sheridan, who noted: “You haven’t lost a foot of ground.”

  The youth’s finest hour was yet to come. He missed the Battle of Chickamauga due to a bout of typhoid fever, and one has to wonder if he really had his strength back by the time of Missionary Ridge on November 25, 1863. Brooding over Chattanooga, Tennessee, late that fall, the mountainlike rise presented a corrugated ground strewn with boulders, etched by gullies and ravines, and covered with difficult underbrush. From defensive lines beginning with rifle pits at the base and continuing up the steep, tough slopes to the crest, Braxton Bragg’s Confederates awaited Union attack from the besieged city below.

  None of it was too palatable for the Union troops under U. S. Grant’s overall command and, in the case of the 24th Wisconsin, under the command of Grant’s able subordinate Phil Sheridan. His troops were given the mission of taking the rifle pits at the foot of the mountain, which was done with bayonets. The rifle pits cleared, the next and far more imposing task was the steep, pitted rise itself, repeatedly swept by shot and shell. Would or could the conquerors of the rifle pits now start up the steep slope into the withering fire from the entrenched enemy?

  Years later, the young Wisconsin adjutant’s famous son would write his account of what happened next:

  No one seems to know just what orders may have been given, but suddenly the flag of the 24th Wisconsin started forward. With it was the color sergeant, the color guard of two corporals, and the adjutant. Up they went, step by step. The enemy’s fire was intense. Down went the color bearer. One of the corporals seized the color as they fell, but was bayoneted before he could move. A shell took off the head of the other corporal, but the adjutant grasped the flag and kept on. He seemed to be surrounded by nothing but gray coats. A Confederate colonel thrust viciously at his throat, but even as he lunged a bullet struck and the deflected blade just ripped a shoulder strap. There was no movement yet from the Union lines. And then, above the roar of battle, sounded the adjutant’s voice: “On, Wisconsin!”

  They come then—with a rush and a roar, a blue tide of courage, a whole division of them. Shouting, cursing, struggling foot by foot, heads bent as in a gale! Gasping breath from tortured lungs! Those last few feet before the log breastworks seem interminable! They falter! Officers are down! Sergeants now lead! And then, suddenly, on the crest—the flag! Once again that cry: “On, Wisconsin!” Silhouetted against the sky, the adjutant stands on the parapet waving the colors where the whole regiment can see him! Through the ragged blue line, from one end of the division to the other, comes an ugly roar, like the growl of a wounded bear! They race those last few steps, eyes blazing, lips snarling and bayonets plunging! And Missionary Ridge is won.

  The adjutant then fell to the ground, “exhausted, his body retching, racked with pain.” He was covered with blood and mud, “his smoke-blackened face barely recognizable, his clothes torn to tatters.”

  Sheridan, no novice to combat, was obviously stunned by his young officer’s feat. “Sheridan, the division commander, utters not a word—he just stares at him—and then takes him in his arms. And his deep voice seems to break a little as he says: ‘Take care of him. He has just won the Medal of Honor.’”

  It wasn’t long before the hero of Missionary Ridge distinguished himself again. At nineteen, he was a colonel, the youngest such officer in the entire Union Army. It was as one of eleven Union colonels leading eleven regiments that he took his 24th Wisconsin up the steep slopes of Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, in 1864.

  One by one, all eleven colonels went down, the youngest colonel of them all struck a crippling blow and left for dead—a shot had passed through one arm and coursed into the chest area. But there it was stopped short of mortal damage by a wadded obstruction. Halting the bullet just outside the walls of the heart was his wallet, and in it, letters from home, a Bible, and a farewell message.

  The farewell message was the result of a meeting the previous night of all eleven regimental colonels. Their concerted conclusion was that their task of storming Kennesaw would be suicidal. Each then wrote a farewell message.

  The former “boy adjutant” from Wisconsin, by now a full-fledged regimental commander, faced one more harsh test before the war ended for him. After recuperating from the wounds suffered at Kennesaw, he found himself at Franklin, Tennessee, a debacle for the South but a tough fight for anyone who was there. Here once again the youthful commander proved himself both hero and leader. His successor as regimental adjutant, Captain Edwin Parsons, later wrote of what happened after the Rebels suddenly struck the Federal line in front of the 24th Regiment—struck hard and fast, and indeed broke through the lines.

  Not an instant could be lost. The whole army was imperilled unless the breach could be closed. I saw the Colonel swing into his saddle and heard his yell, “Up, Wisconsin!” There was no time to form lines. We just rushed pell mell to meet the enemy in a desperate hand to hand melee. I saw the Colonel sabering his way toward the leading Confederate flag. His horse was shot from under him, a bullet ripped open his right shoulder, but on foot he fought his way forward trying to bring down those Stars and Bars. A Confederate Major now had the flag and shot the Colonel through the breast. I thought he was done for but he staggered up and drove his sword through his adversary’s body, but even as the Confederate fell he shot our Colonel down for good with a bullet through the knee. The other regiments of the reserve were now up and we drove the enemy back and healed the breach. When I returned to the Carter House, where they had brought the Colonel, I saw four dead Generals lying on the porch side by side.

  Six generals, all Confederate, died at Franklin, Tennessee, that day, but there were more than a few Union casualties as well. What of the “boy colonel”? Woefully stricken, he recovered and “rejoined the regiment in time to bring it home at the end of the war.”

  At Franklin, he had served beyond the mere call of duty. In the words of Union General David S. Stanley: “It is rare
in history that one can say a certain unit saved the day. But this was the case at Franklin when the 24th Wisconsin, with no orders from higher up, by its spontaneous action, repelled the enemy and rectified our lines. In this it was bravely led by its young Colonel, Arthur MacArthur.”

  With the end of the war, the 24th “marched triumphantly through the streets of Milwaukee before the cheering crowds,” wrote Arthur’s son nearly one hundred years later. “But there was many a sob and tear in that great gathering. The regiment had lost more than two-thirds of its officers and men. They were mustered out on June 10, 1865, and Arthur MacArthur was again a civilian.”

  So wrote a proud son who himself was destined to be first in his class at West Point, to earn seven Silver Stars for heroism in World War I, to be awarded the Medal of Honor for his defense of the Philippines in World War II. So wrote Arthur’s son, Douglas MacArthur.

  Longest Siege

  AS THE GUNS BEGAN THEIR DEADLY DRUMBEAT, ONLY BOYS AND OLD MEN WERE on hand to fight back. In a few days, ninety thousand troops were wheeled up against the ten thousand defenders assembled here. And yet: “No lovelier day ever dawned than June 9, 1864,” one of the surviving women later recalled of the first salvos.

  Like all in Petersburg—even like the enemy at its gate—she was unprepared for the longest siege of any American city. For ten months they would endure shelling; blockade; economic deprivation; starvation balls; death in the trenches; lack of food; the disappearance of dogs, cats, even rats; inflated prices; daily bombardment; and death in the streets or backyards.

  It lasted until April 2 or 3, 1865, just days before Appomattox. Robert E. Lee, accompanied by his horse, Traveller, was here much of the time to direct the defense of Petersburg.

  The siege today is not so well known as the Battle of the Crater, the Uniontriggered explosion beneath Confederate trenches just outside the city that resulted in a Union debacle.