Major Charles Wright Wills: May 9, 1865

Drury's Bluff, Va., May 9, 1865.

We were reviewed by Howard, Logan and Hartsuff this morning as we passed through Petersburg. We lie tonight along the outer line of Drury's Bluff defenses which Butler took a year ago this month. Signs of a good deal of fighting; good many roads, etc. The James river is about one mile to our right. I have been to some very fine forts. Fort Wagner and Fort Stevens (or Stephens) are the best, on the second and main line of Rebel works, which Butler was working against when the Rebels came out and whipped him. From one fort I saw the spires of Richmond, James river and Shipping, Fort Darling and Fort Harrison. Coming back toward camp we found one of our soldiers unburied in the bushes. His skull was brought in by our hospital steward.

SOURCE: Charles Wright Wills, Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, p. 379

Diary of Gideon Welles: Saturday, July 16, 1864

Mr. Faxon, Chief Clerk, is ill and leaves for New York in the Tacoma. Shall greatly miss him. No one can fill his place. Thomas G. Welles is with his general, McCook, relieved from duty at Fort Stevens. I observe and have for some time past that the Gazette at Cincinnati, a paper in the interest of Mr. Chase, has been violent and reckless in its assaults on the Navy Department. With some smattering information of matters generally, there is much palpable ignorance in regard to our monitors, ordnance, etc.

SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 80

Diary of Gideon Welles: Tuesday, July 12, 1864

The Rebels captured a train of cars on the Philadelphia and Baltimore Road, and have burnt the bridges over Gunpowder and Bush Rivers. It is said there were 1500 of these raiders.

Governor Bradford's house, a short distance out of Baltimore, was burnt by a small party. General demoralization seems to have taken place among the troops, and there is as little intelligence among them as at the War Office in regard to the Rebels. General Wallace and his force were defeated, and panic and folly have prevailed.

Admiral Goldsborough and some of our naval officers tendered their services, if required. It seemed to me unneccessary, for I do not believe the Rebels have a large concentrated force in this vicinity, or that they design to make an attack on the city, but for the Navy to hold back when all are being called out would appear bad. I therefore requested Fox to see General Halleck, who much wanted aid, and Goldsborough and the men were therefore ordered and have gone to Fort Lincoln. It would be much better to keep them at work.

We have no mails, and the telegraph lines have been cut; so that we are without news or information from the outer world.

Went to the President's at 12, being day of regular Cabinet-meeting. Messrs. Bates and Usher were there. The President was signing a batch of commissions. Fessenden is absent in New York. Blair informs me he had been early at the council chamber and the President told him no matters were to be brought forward. The condition of affairs connected with the Rebels on the outskirts was discussed. The President said he and Seward had visited several of the fortifications. I asked where the Rebels were in force. He said he did not know with certainty, but he thought the main body at Silver Spring.

I expressed a doubt whether there was any large force at any one point, but that they were in squads of from 500 to perhaps 1500 scattered along from the Gunpowder to the falls of the Potomac, who kept up an alarm on the outer rim while the marauders were driving off horses and cattle. The President did not respond farther than to again remark he thought there must be a pretty large force in the neighborhood of Silver Spring.

I am sorry there should be so little accurate knowledge of the Rebels, sorry that at such a time there is not a full Cabinet, and especially sorry that the Secretary of War is not present. In the interviews which I have had with him, I can obtain no facts, no opinions. He seems dull and stupefied. Others tell me the same.

It was said yesterday that the mansions of the Blairs were burned, but it is to-day contradicted.

Rode out this P.M. to Fort Stevens. Went up to the summit of the road on the right of the fort. There were many collected. Looking out over the valley below, where the continual popping of the pickets was still going on, though less brisk than yesterday, I saw a line of our men lying close near the bottom of the valley. Senator Wade came up beside me. Our views corresponded that the Rebels were few in front, and that our men greatly exceeded them in numbers. We went together into the fort, where we found the President, who was sitting in the shade, his back against the parapet towards the enemy.

Generals Wright and McCook informed us they were about to open battery and shell the Rebel pickets, and after three discharges an assault was to be made by two regiments who were lying in wait in the valley.

The firing from the battery was accurate. The shells that were sent into a fine mansion occupied by the Rebel sharpshooters soon set it on fire. As the firing from the fort ceased, our men ran to the charge and the Rebels fled. We could see them running across the fields, seeking the woods on the brow of the opposite hills. It was an interesting and exciting spectacle. But below we could see here and there some of our own men bearing away their wounded comrades. I should judge the distance to be something over three hundred yards. Occasionally a bullet from some long-range rifle passed above our heads. One man had been shot in the fort a few minutes before we entered.

As we came out of the fort, four or five of the wounded men were carried by on stretchers. It was nearly dark as we left. Driving in, as was the case when driving out, we passed fields as well as roads full of soldiers, horses, teams, mules. Camp-fires lighted up the woods, which seemed to be more eagerly sought than the open fields.

The day has been exceedingly warm, and the stragglers by the wayside were many. Some were doubtless sick, some were drunk, some weary and exhausted. Then men on horseback, on mules, in wagons as well as on foot, batteries of artillery, caissons, an innumerable throng. It was exciting and wild. Much of life and much of sadness. Strange that in this age and country there is this strife and struggle, under one of the most beneficent governments which ever blessed mankind and all in sight of the Capitol.

In times gone by I had passed over these roads little anticipating scenes like this, and a few years hence they will scarcely be believed to have occurred.

SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 73-6

1st Lieutenant Lemuel A. Abbott: Addenda No. 2.The Battle Of Cedar Creek, Va., Oct. 19, 1864. And The Status Of The Sixth Corps With Generals Grant And Sheridan.

I was absent wounded in Vermont at the time of the battle of Cedar Creek, Va., and only know that my regiment fought desperately and lost heavily in killed and wounded. Captain Lucian D. Thompson of Waterbury, Vt. was decapitated by a solid shot from the enemy and Captain Chester F. Nye, Adjutant Wyllys Lyman and Lieutenants George E. Davis, B. Brooks Clark, Austin W. Fuller and George P. Welch were wounded. From June 1st to October 19, 1864, we had seven officers killed which included all the officers who originally went out with my old Company B, twelve wounded and two captured, making twenty-one in all. Surely, the blood shed in the Tenth Vermont for the preservation of the Union should satisfy the most exacting that the regiment stood up to the rack all through the Civil War from the time it entered it.

After the morning surprise at Cedar Creek, Oct. 19, 1864, just a month after the battle of Winchester, the Sixth Corps, I was told by officers of my regiment afterwards, was the only unstampeded infantry organization in the command around which General H. G. Wright soon rallied the better part of the surprised little army which Sheridan, after his historic ride of “Twenty Miles Away” from Winchester, found awaiting him ready to advance and again punish the enemy which it most effectually did. It was the last fight in the valley of the Civil War, and it was fitting that the Sixth Corps should have been allowed so largely to have so brilliantly rung down the curtain on the great Civil War stage in this section. The Sixth Corps was the mainstay of Sheridan's brilliant little army in the Shenandoah Valley campaign, and no one knew it better than he. When the spring campaign opened in 1865, He wanted it at Five Forks again, but Grant wanted it, too, at the same time to break the backbone of the Confederacy by breaking its lines in front of Petersburg on that memorable morning of April 2nd, 1865, which was the greatest possible honor of the day, and it did it. When given his choice by Grant of any corps in the army of the Potomac, Sheridan again called for it, too, a few days later, April 6, 1865, at Sailor's Creek, Va., the last real battle fought in the Civil War by the Army of the Potomac, when the Sixth Corps was rushed forward by Grant's order at pell-mell speed, where in another of Sheridan's characteristic, snappy, short, effective, two-hour fights, it largely helped to capture several — said to be eleven — general officers, 13,000* prisoners and a burning wagon train, almost an entire column, excepting about 2,000 of General Lee's fleeing veterans, including himself, three days before his surrender at Appomattox. It was fitting, too, here, that the Sixth Corps should largely fight this battle and thus again brilliantly and virtually finally ring down the stage curtain of the greatest war tragedy of modern times — The Great Civil War. Surely with all the brag and conceit in late years by members of other corps, that its corps was the best in the Army of the Potomac — and the Second as well as the Fifth were fine corps, and probably both these and the Sixth Corps were about equal — neither Grant nor Sheridan could have regarded the Sixth as an unreliable one, or second to any as a fighting corps however often members of other corps may conceitedly dub theirs the best in the army. And what other than the Sixth Corps can point to any such enviable repeated preferences on the part of both Grant and Sheridan, or to such a proud record in the closing scenes of the great rebellion? Would they not be glad to do so if they could? And still neither of the able commanders of the Sixth Corps — Sedgwick and Wright — have been honored by an appropriation for a monument by Congress in the capital city of the Nation which the Sixth Corps twice saved, once at the battle of the Monocacy, largely by the Third Division, July 9th, and again three days later largely by the First and Second Divisions at the battle in front of Ft. Stevens in the suburbs of Washington, July 12th, 1864, when Early came so near capturing the city.

I do not believe in being invidious, but having been satiated for years by the egotistic statements of the superior qualifications by members of other corps of their particular corps, especially in Washington, and knowing only too well from long experience that frequently true merit goes unrewarded in history and otherwise, because of an over-modest inclination to mention facts by those interested who can, when organizations and persons less worthy get more than is due by being more aggressive, is one of the reasons for my partially treating this matter. There was no corps, during the last few months of the war, to which Grant and Sheridan more frequently turned in emergencies than to the Sixth Corps, which is significant, as it shows their estimate of its merits as a reliable fighting corps, over all others. The Sixth Corps was ever proud of the Second and Fifth Corps and felt honored in being associated with such splendid organizations in the same army all through the Civil War, but the Sixth Corps yields the palm to no other in the whole Union Army east or west when it comes to fighting or any other soldierly qualifications pertaining to a model army corps.

Said General Grant in the closing scenes of the Civil War: “I can trust the Sixth Corps anywhere.” Said General Sheridan: “Give me the Sixth Corps and I will charge anywhere.”

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* So reported then. Generals Ewell and Custis Lee surrendered to our brigade. The guard was about to force them to wade a swollen morass about fifty yards wide, waist deep, but Ewell demurred. The guard said he had to wade it going over for them, and that it was no more than fair that they should wade it going back. Ewell replied that it took brave men to do it under fire, but that the necessity no longer existed for any one to wade it going either way, and so won the best of the argument, and his wish.

SOURCE: Lemuel Abijah Abbott, Personal Recollections and Civil War Diary, 1864, p. 256-60

Colonel Charles Russell Lowell to Josephine Shaw, June 1, 1863

Camp Brightwood, June I, 1863.

I am cross; — “rumpled and harassed” don't begin to express my condition. I feel as if I were playing soldier here, and that I always disliked in peace, and disliked still more in war, — and now I'm doing it.

Now for narrative. Our move to-day was tolerably satisfactory, no end of “bag and baggage,” certainly ten or twelve times as much as there should have been; but we broke up a permanent camp, and reestablished it, and had plenty of daylight to spare. We are now near Fort Stevens, about four miles north of Washington, on rough ground thickly studded with oak stumps; not so pretty a site as our last, but much healthier; we do not present so attractive an outside to visitors, but in reality are probably better off. I have two companies and a half on picket at points fifteen miles apart, and am expecting some night alarms, knowing it to be all play and got up for drill purposes. I would much prefer to drill my men for the present in my own way, not in General Heintzelman's way, hence I am cross, — it is very unmilitary to be cross.

I foresee that this camp is going to be a very cross place, — rough camps always are, — they are so hard to keep clean. It is astonishing how much easier it is to make men do their military duty than it is to make them appreciate neatness and cleanness.

SOURCE: Edward Waldo Emerson, Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell, p. 251-2