We are ordered to Fort Brown, two miles from the city, where we go into a more permanent camp. During our first days at Savannah, the Seventh's boys are seen strolling everywhere, viewing the fortifications and the great guns; they are also seen pacing the streets of the beautiful city, looking with admiration upon her gorgeous buildings, and standing in awe in the shade of the peerless monument reared by a generous people to that noble Pole, Count Pulaski, who fought, bled and died in America's first revolution for independence. Can it be that traitors have walked around its base and sworn that the great Union for which this grand and liberal spirit sacrificed his life should be consigned to the wrecks of dead empires? As we stand and gaze upon this marble cenotaph, we are constrained to say, Oh! wicked men, why stood ye here above the dust of Poland's martyr, seeking to defame his name and tear down what he helped to rear! May God pity America's erring ones! In our wanderings we are made to stop, by an acre enclosed with a high but strong palisade, the work of Colonel G. F. Wiles, Seventy-eighth Ohio Veteran Volunteer Infantry, commanding Second Brigade, Third Division, Seventeenth Army Corps, and his gallant command. This is God's acre and liberty's, and emphatically can this be said, for here three hundred or more of our fallen comrades sleep death's silent sleep. Here in trenches, unknelled, uncoffined, but not alone, "life's fitful fever over," they sleep well.
They fell not in the deadly breach, nor yet on the grassy plain. For them no choir of musketry rattled, no anthem of cannon rolled, but unclad and unfed, their lamps of life flickered out in that worse than Egyptian bondage—a Confederate prison. For long weary months they suffered and waited for the time to come when they would inhale freedom's pure air; for long weary nights they watched the signal lights as they flashed upwards from the monitors to guide Sherman through the wilderness of pines, down to the sea; long did they wait to see the sunlight from the waters flash on his serried lines, but he came not. They suffered on, and died-died martyrs upon the altar of human freedom; died that not one single star, however wayward, should be erased from the Union's great banner of freedom. Has the world, in all its history of blood, from the creation to the christian era, from the reformation to the revolution, ever produced examples of such heroic endurance as this second revolution has given to the world? Echoes coming from the soft south winds that sweep along the Atlantic shore, answer no. These men were murdered! Yes, murdered because they wore the blue, and fought for the flag and freedom. The poet alludes most touchingly to an incident that caused the murder of one of these lonely sleepers who plead for his wife's letters.
"First pay the postage, whining wretch."
Despair had made the prisoner brave-
"I'm a captive, not a slave;
You took my money and my clothes,
Take my life too, but for the love of God
Let me know how Mary and the children are,
And I will bless you ere I go."
This plea proved fruitless, and across the dead-line the soldier passed, and soon a bullet passed through his brain, and his crushed spirit was free with God. What a sad picture.
We remember when we stood there and gazed upon that hallowed acre of God's and liberty's. We thought of those wicked men who whelmed this land into those dark nights of war; who told us then that the Union soldier died in vain; that the names of those uncoffined sleepers there would be forgotten and unsung, and as my comrades and myself stood there revolving these thoughts in our minds, we vowed over those graves, before heaven, to be the enemies of traitors. "Died in vain! sacrificed their lives for naught! their names to be forgotten and unsung!" Who uttered those words in application to the noble sleepers there? Who spoke thus to the weeping mother and stricken sister? Traitors in the North! Traitors on the legislative floors uttered these words! We speak the sentiment of the Seventh when we say that we would not take millions for what we hate these men, contemptible in nature, pusillanimous in soul, with hearts as black as the "steeds of night." Like Brownlow, were we not afraid of springing a theological question, we would say that better men have been going down with the wailing hosts for the last eighteen hundred years.
A few days after going into camp at Fort Brown, Major Johnson is ordered with Companies A, H and K, to proceed down the river to Bonniventure, about five miles from Savannah. Arriving, we take up our quarters in the old Bonniventure mansion, a fashionable resort for the chivalry in the days that have flown. During our stay here we live chiefly on oysters, which are obtained in great abundance by the boys. Major Johnson and his detachment will not soon forget how they gamboled and loitered beneath the shades of those live oaks down by the great Atlantic's shore.
The Seventh remains in camp at Fort Brown and Bonniventure until the latter part of January, 1865. In the mean time Captain Norton, with the mounted portion of the regiment, was ordered across the Savannah river into South Carolina, joining Howard's command at Pocataligo.
SOURCE: Daniel Leib Ambrose, History of the Seventh Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry, p. 290-93
