Diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes: Saturday, May 24, 1862

Flat Top Mountain. — Cold, rainy, and windy, — an old-fashioned storm. Men bivouacking! Colonel Crook, of [the] Third Brigade, was attacked yesterday morning by General Heth with the same force which drove me out of Giles. Colonel Crook had parts or the whole of three regiments. He defeated Heth and captured four of his cannon. Our loss, ten killed and forty wounded. Enemy routed and one hundred prisoners. What an error that General Cox didn't attack Williams and Marshall at Princeton! Then we should have accomplished something.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 277

Lieutenant-Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes to Lucy Webb Hayes, May 22, 1862

Camp Flat Top Mountain, May 22, 1862.

Dearest: — I have written you one or two letters which I suspect fell into the hands of the enemy, but ere this, I do not doubt, you have received dispatches and word by Thomas which relieves you of all trouble on my account.

We have had a good deal of war this month. More than half the time during two weeks we were in the presence of the enemy. Most of the time they [we] were either pursuing them or they were crowding us. The number killed and wounded, considering the amount of firing, was not large. I suppose the total loss of this army would not exceed two hundred. Our force is not strong enough to do the work before us. We have so many points to garrison and so long a line of communications to protect, that it leaves a very small force to push on with. . . .

Before this reaches you, the great battles of the war will probably be fought. If successful, we shall not meet with much determined opposition hereafter. I was sent to meet a flag of truce sent by General Williams and Humphrey Marshall this morning. The officers talk in a high tone still, but the privates are discouraged, and would be gladly at home on any terms.

Affectionately,

R.

Mrs. Hayes.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 276

Diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, Thursday, May 22, 1862

Camp Flat Top. — Today Colonel Scammon with a small escort went over to Packs Ferry to look after affairs with Major Comly and his boat-builders. A Captain Jenkins, of Kentucky, came from General Williams to negotiate as to exchange of prisoners. General Cox detailed Lieutenant-Colonel Hines and myself to meet him. After some reflection, I suggested that it was honoring Captain Jenkins too much to send two lieutenant-colonels, and the programme was changed.

I have caught a bad cold, the worst I have had since I came into the army, caused chiefly by changing underclothes and stockings from thick to thin.

Called on Colonel Moor of the Twenty-eighth. The German officers are neater and more soldierly in dress and accoutrements than ours. The Twenty-eighth has a fine band, twenty or twenty-four musicians. Wrote to Lucy a short letter — no flow in it; but how I love my wife and boys! All the more tenderly for these separations.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 275-6

The appointment of General Fremont to the command of . . .

. . . a Military District is alluded to in the following language by the Frankfort, Ky., Commonwealth:

We do not know how far West the division of the Potomac extends – probably to the Blue Ridge, and includes a greater part of Virginia, the Carolinas and Florida and Georgia.  If so, Fremont’s command is rather a small mountainous district – too hilly for him to show much of his tom-foolery, in the shape of splendid carriages, bands of music, and a menagerie of puffers, painters, reporters, &c., &c.  The North and South Knoxville line will cross very near to Maysville, and will throw into Fremont’s command the Cumberland Gap, the Sandy Valley, and Eastern [sic] Virginia.  Among these mountain men, the Major General, if he has any tact at all, must adapt himself to mountain manners, as well as mountain passes, and if he only had Kit Carson with him he might get along pretty well.

We suppose his appointment was something like Cameron’s appointment to Russia – a sort of politico-State necessity which the President could not entirely disregard; and deemed it better to have the discontented officer off in the woods than to keep in stirring up murmurs and making party combinations at Washington.  We wish, however, he could have found some other place for him – Arizonia [sic], for instance, but we can’t have all things as we wish.  We take comfort in another thought, and that is; that if the rebel main army does not try to force its way through Kentucky by the Cumberland Gap or Prestonsburg, but leaves those points to be defended by Humphrey Marshal and John S. Williams, Fremont can hold his own against them, and is as good a man as either of them, either in patriotism or soldiership.

Now when our seceshers are throwing up their camps over Fremont’s appointment, pretending all the time to be horrified that Lincoln should have done this thing, we beg them to stay their grief, “for this is our funeral,” and none of their business.  We’ll do the best we can with it, and the army will see to it that the war is carried on solely for the union, the Constitution and the Enforcemnt of the Laws.  And it may turn out after all, that all the bad that was in Fremont has been evacuated by the President’s order to him in Missouri to attend to his own duties and let the niggers alone, and hereafter he may turn out better than many expect.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 22, 1862, p. 3