A soldier cemetery at Gettysburg

Frank Haskell of the 6th Wisconsin of the Iron Brigade was serving as a aide to Gen. John Gibbon when the two went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in November 1863. They were there to represent the Army of the Potomac at the special dedication of a new federal soldier cemetery. The neat row of stones of the fallen was troubling to Haskell. He wrote his brother a short time later:

“…[W]hat is so appropriate for the soldier’s rest as the spot where he died nobly fighting the enemies of the country,--where perhaps the shout of victory went up with his spirit to Heaven—where his companions in arms, his survivors, had lovingly wrapped him in his blanket, and wet with brave men’s tears, had covered him with the earth his blood had consecrated…. But no,--these things were not to be. The skeletons of these brave men must be handled like the bones of so many horses, for a price, and wedged in rows like herrings in a box, on a spot where there was no fighting—where none of them fell! It may be all right, but I do not see it…but as it is now…we have instead a common, badly arranged grave yard, in which names, and graves, if designated at all, are as likely to be wrong as right. But read the newspapers,--Every body says this is splendid, this making the ‘Soldiers’ Cemetery,’ and I suppose it is.”

Frank Haskell was himself killed in 1864 leading a charge of the 36th Wisconsin near Cold Harbor, Virginia. His body was returned to Wisconsin for burial at Portage.

 

Terrible would have been the fate of the 19th Indiana

Thinking today about Fredericksburg in December 150 years ago, and of  the Iron Brigade and Lt. Clayton Rogers:

Left behind a mile beyond what had been the Iron Brigade line in the retreat from Fredericksburg was the 19th Indiana, whose job it was to watch the Rebels and keep them at a distance. General John Reynolds had made the decision to abandon the Hoosiers to prevent an alarm during the withdrawal, but Colonel Lysander Cutler pleaded with the general and gotten permission to make an effort to save the regiment. When the Iron Brigade began marching for the bridges, Cutler sent his aide, Leutenant Rogers, with an order for the commander of the 19th Indiana to call in his pickets and march for the pontoon crossing. The splendidly mounted Rogers, a man with an eye for good horses, “rushed to the extreme left with no regard to roads but straight as a bee flies.” “The left once gained,” a friend wrote, “he moderates his pace and whispers into the ear of each astonished officer.” The order is passed by whispers and Rogers moved out to the picket line in a movement hidden by the stormy weather. A witness described the scene: “One by one our drenched boys are falling back and drawing in together. Silently as shadows the whole picket line steals across the plain. And now as the ranks closed up for rapid marching, ‘double double quick’ is about the pace.” One bridge remained at the crossing point, and engineers were standing by with axes to cut it loose. It is only after the last of the 19th Indiana has passed that the mounted Rogers, “grimly smiling,” rode onto the bridge himself. The rearguard of the regiment arrived a short time after the bridge lines were cut. They climbed into skiffs the engineers had held back for them and began paddling for the north bank. “[I]f we had been left as our head General at first designated terrible would have been our fate,” a private in the 19th confessed in his diary, “or we would have known nothing of the retreat, and when the enemy advanced the 19th is not the Reg’t to surrender without any fight.” The consequence, he added, “would have been a wiping out of the old 19th.”

Old Mickey Sullivan returns for a story or two...

Sgt. James Patrick Sullivan made an appearance at Freedom Hall in the Civil War Museum at Kenosha, Wis., a few days back and it was the same old “Mickey, of Company K”—sharp of tongue, a glint in his eye, and full of Irish blarney.

It was good to see the old veteran of the Sixth Wisconsin and listen as he talked about attending the 1883 reunion of the Iron Brigade Association at La Crosse.

Mickey was to give a talk, he explained, and was trying to catch a few words on paper. He is the first enlisted man asked to formally address the annual gathering, and he admitted looking back to his soldier days triggered a flood of memories.

Sullivan laughed in telling how his new company—the Lemonweir Minute Men—drilled at the Mauston Park in Juneau County before the call to go to Camp Randall at Madison in 1861. School children, fathers, mothers sisters, friends and girls that had not yet been left behind stood watching, he recalled with a smile, and “if they judge by the loudness of the tones of command and our ability to charge the school house or church, they must have felt the rebellion would soon be a thing of the past.”

A couple of darker memories gave Mickey pause. It was at Gettysburg, in the bloody railroad cut, that he was shot in the shoulder and taken to the town on the back of a cavalry horse ordered up by Gen. James Wadsworth himself. At the Court House, he said, he found doctors “busy cutting up and patching up the biggest part of the Sixth Regiment, A good number of the Company K boys were in the same fix I was, and some a great deal worse.”

And there were other memories as well—of “Old Boo” the famous pet jackass of Company K, and a drill session with two new recruits, one German and one Irish, and, of course, Sullivan had to pull from an old chest his faded blue coat and the misshapen famous Black Hat of the Iron Brigade. The old coat was a little tight around the middle and the hat had seen better days, he admitted as he put them on, and then pulled himself up erect soldier fashion to begin his poem:

            There are hats in the closest, old, ugly to view,

             Of very slight value they may be to you.

             But the wreath of the Astors should not buy them to-day,
         
              With letters of honor, old Company K.

            At the end, Sullivan saluted the way the old boys,did in 1861, and then he was gone.

            His return was a funded by a grant given to the Civil War Museum from the Wisconsin Humanities Council. The 40-minute performance featured actor T. Stacy Hicks as Mickey Sullivan. The script was written by Playwright Jim Farris from Sullivan’s Civil War writings as found  in An Irishman in the Iron Brigade: The Civil War Memoirs of James P. Sullivan, Sergt, Company K, 6th Wisconsin Volunteers, by William J.K. Beaudot and Lance J. Herdegen.           

 

Was it a lock of hair of President Lincoln?

While I was working at the Institute for Civil War Studies at Carroll College, a visitor came to show me a small rectangle of glass with a lock of hair inside and tied with a red ribbon. On a card on the opposite side was the note: "A lock of Lincoln's Hair." The relic had been found in an old trunk left at a Milwaukee hotel the family had operated long ago. It was discovered after the fellow living there, Charles King, the famous author, died and trunk was left. A quick comparison showed the handwriting on the note was similar to that of Charles King. He was the son of General Rufus King of the Iron Brigade and served as his father's "aide" early in the war. He was one of four cadets appointed to the U.S. Military Academy by President Lincoln. (Another of the four was William Upham of the Second Wisconsin after he was severely wounded at First Bull Run.) I asked the visitor for just a few hairs from the lock, but was turned down with a smile. For the record, the hair was dark brown and very coarse. Was it the real hair of Abraham Lincoln? I like to think so, but we will never know for sure.

The Black Hats meet Old Abe, the War Eagle.

As the Seventh Wisconsin was at Camp Randall at Madison preparing to leave for Washington and the warfront, companies of the Eighth Wisconsin were arriving. The one from Eau Claire in north central Wisconsin caught the attention of the Western boys. It included the "proud form" of a live bald eagle perched on a painted shield and carried by a bearer. The eagle liked to spread its wings to retain its equilibrium while being carried, presenting a martial tableau. "It was the center of attraction during the day," said a Seventh Wisconsin man. "The [Eau Claire] boys say they were going to take him with them and are not going to return until he shapoos his head in the Gulf of Mexico." Of course, the bird became famous as "Old Abe, the War Eagle" and was carried into skirmish and battle over the coming years. The Seventh Wisconsin was soon a part of the storied Iron Brigade.

He too wanted to vote for Lincoln

One unexpected development in the presidential election of 1864 was that 71 percent of the vote in the Army of the Potomac went to Abraham Lincoln and not its old commander George McClellan. In a strange turn of events that war year, Wisconsin and Michigan men of the Iron Brigade were allowed to vote while those from Indiana could not. The Indiana legislature had voted against soldiers from their state being allowed to vote in the field. "We all agreed that what the Rebels liked was just what we had no right to like, and if it was going to do them so much good to elect McClellan, we just wouldn't do it," one Badger wrote home. In the end the old Iron Brigade regiments voted 749 for Lincoln and 147 for Little Mac. In the 6th Wisconsin, the very satisified  Sgt. Frank Wallar wrote in his diary the vote of his Company I was "unanimous for Abe. I am going to have two canteens of whiskey tonight." During the day-long balloting a lone Confederate deserter stepped into the Michigan picket line to announced that he too wanted to vote for Lincoln. It is not recorded whether he was given that opportunity.

I could have hugged the necks of them all

In all of the letters written by members of the Iron Brigade I think none is as poignant as that written by Lt. Frank Haskell to his family the morning of August 29, 1862. The late afternoon of the day before the four regiments of Gibbon's Black Hat Brigade-the Second, Sixth, Seventh Wisconsin and Nineteenth Indiana-had fought in its first battle at a place they called Gainesville, but we know today as Brawner Farm. "None of the officers could look upon our thinned ranks, so full the night before, now so shattered, without tears," Haskell penned. "And the faces of those brave boys, as the morning sun disclosed them, no pen can describe. the men were cheerful, quiet and orderly. The dust and blackness of battle were upon their clothes, and in their hair, and on their skin, but you saw none of these, - you saw only their eyes, and the shadows of the 'light of battle,' and the furrows plowed upon cheeks that were smooth a day before, and now not half filled up. I could not look upon them without tears, and could have hugged the necks of them all." Haskell himself would be shot dead at Cold Harbor in 1864 and his body returned to Wisconsin.