Remembering the Civil War, a century and a half later
BY Dave Gathman dgathman@stmedianetwork.com April 2, 2011 5:30PM
Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM
Exactly 150 years ago this April 12, a simmering debate over slavery and trade that had grated between North and South for four score and five years exploded into bloodshed. That’s when soldiers from South Carolina, a state that had just voted to withdraw from the union, fired on a band of loyal troops inside Fort Sumter.
The next four years of fighting would claim more American lives than all other wars in our history put together. And history buffs from throughout the Fox Valley will be commemorating this sesquicentennial year with re-enactments, museum displays and lectures.
Locally, much of the attention will focus on several dozen young men who played at war long before it broke out, answered Lincoln’s call for troops immediately, and met a brutal reality one year later in the bloodiest day in Elgin-area military history near a little church named Shiloh.
The Continentals
What would become Company A of the 7th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment began as something focused more on games than on killing and dying, according to Ken Gough, a 55-year-old former re-enactor who has written a book about the regiment and has tracked down the service records of 900 Civil War soldiers from Elgin, the Dundees and Hampshire.
“They started in 1855 as a drill team calling themselves the Washington Continental Artillery,” says Gough, who works in retail. “Somehow they had gotten a little 6-pounder cannon. But they couldn’t very well march around pulling a cannon. So they also got hold of a couple of muskets and they looked more impressive.”
Gough believes many of the Continentals were students, former students or teachers from Elgin Academy. From the area’s richer families, they practiced marching and maneuvers and looking sharp for the girls.
When newly elected President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down this “rebellion,” the Continentals were little more than a marching band. But they were the closest thing the Elgin area had to a militia. So on either April 19 or April 22, 1861, they gathered in downtown Elgin. While a brass band played patriotic music and older men gave rousing speeches and girls oohed over brave heroes, about 50 of the Continentals and another 70 men signed up to become soldiers in Company A, under the command of Elgin mayor and newspaper editor Ed Joslyn.
At first, they signed up for just three months. “Everyone thought the Army could deal with this rebellion quickly and it would all be over by three months,” Gough said.
It was the first company that Illinois organized.
The Battle of Geneva
The governor decided the Illinois units should dress in gray — a detail that had to be changed when gray also became the nationwide color for the Confederate armies. Churches canceled their Sunday afternoon services so the women could sew uniforms.
But ”they only had about two dozen ancient muskets sent by the state, and those were in sad shape,” Gough said. “Then Ed Joslyn learned that a group was forming in Geneva and they had gotten together 90 rifles at the Kane County Courthouse.”
The governor told Joslyn he could have the Geneva rifles, Gough said, But the Geneva men had a different idea. So on April 23, Joslyn took about 20 men with him to Geneva and attacked the courthouse.
“They were repairing the streets around the courthouse, so there were piles of paving stones around,” Gough said. “The Geneva men took boxes of the rocks into the courthouse and threw them at the Elgin men. Capt. Joslyn came back with some broken ribs and two others were injured.” But by day’s end, Co. A had stolen its guns.
The company’s war career developed slowly. Gough believes the men were sent to southern Illinois mainly to prevent the largely Southern-leaning people around Alton and Carbondale and Cairo from seceding from the Union. When those first 90 days were up, the Co. A men signed up again. But their own captain, Joslyn, quit and went back to Elgin. He had been offered a better assignment by the governor — the rank of lieutenant colonel in a whole new regiment, the 36th Illinois, that was forming in Aurora. Joslyn was replaced as captain over Co. A by an Elgin gravestone maker named Sam Ward, who had been one of the guys hit by stones at Geneva.
Other regiments and companies were forming, too. A wealthy Irish-American college student named William Lynch came back to Elgin from Notre Dame University and became an instant colonel in charge of a new 58th Regiment. Many of the Fox Valley’s Irish joined it. And they all finally got blue uniforms.
“They staged some raids into Missouri,” a border state with many Southern sympathizers, Gough said. “Here they became indoctrinated into the Civil War custom called foraging, which is basically legal thievery from the local farmers.”
On May 19, the company suffered its first fatality when Private Seargfield Harney died from “a hernia turned septic.” Of the 68 men from Elgin Township who gave their lives in the war, only 24 were killed by bullets or grapeshot. Most fell victim to tuberculosis, malaria or, above all, to raging epidemics of diarrhea.
It wasn’t until winter 1861-62 — 10 months after enlistment — that the Illinois regiments began marching into part of the enemy homeland, the state of Tennessee. In the February Battle for Fort Henry, Tenn., the Seventh Illinois fired their muskets, but the enemy already was evacuating the fort. At Fort Donelson, the former Continentals fought for four days. Their army’s overall commander, an Illinois general named Ulysses S. Grant, earned the nickname “Unconditional Surrender Grant.” One Elginite was wounded.
This “War Against the Rebellion” wasn’t being wrapped up in a few months. But it still must have seemed like a romantic adventure to the Fox Valley boys. Then, on April 6, 1862, less than a year after the Continentals had joined up, came the Battle of Shiloh.
‘Two amateur armies’
“The Battle of Shiloh was a bloody holocaust consuming two amateur armies,” Elgin historian and former mayor E.C. “Mike” Alft wrote. “In no other Civil War engagement were there so many from Elgin on the field and so many casualties among them.”
The Seventh, 52nd and 58th Illinois — all largely recruited from the Elgin-St. Charles-Aurora area — were camping in tents near the Tennessee River when a Confederate force twice their strength smashed into them with artillery fire, followed by an avalanche of gray riflemen. Men who’d been shaving or cooking breakfast suddenly were hit, their arms and faces shattered by mini-ball bullets, chests ripped open by shotgun-style cannon shot. More than half were killed or wounded.
In many units, the officers panicked as much as their little-trained, inexperienced privates did. But the three Fox Valley regiments fought on for hours, pouring so much fire onto the advancing rebels that the Southerners called this “the Hornet’s Nest.” Finally, a bit of flying metal struck a mortal wound to monument-maker Ward.
Another Co. A man from Elgin, Private Samuel Tyler, was killed and four men wounded.
But that was nothing compared to what happened to the Irish of young Col. Lynch’s 58th. As the gray tide pushed beyond both flanks of the Hornet’s Nest after hours of fighting, the Seventh and the 52nd pulled back toward the river. But Lynch’s outfit couldn’t get away. Soon it was surrounded by the enemy. The young colonel himself rode around on horseback, urging his men to keep fighting even after a bullet hit him in the mouth. When one man raised a white flag, Lynch cut it down with his sword.
Finally, the regiment surrendered. Three-quarters of its men had been killed or wounded, according to Alft. The survivors would spend the rest of the war amid the starvation and disease of Southern prison camps.
Eight men from Elgin alone were killed that day, more than the city would lose at Iwo Jima over two months in 1945 during World War II. But the Illinoisans’ stand bought time for massive Union reinforcements to arrive. The next day Grant counterattacked, forcing the rebels to retreat.
After Shiloh
Gough says the bloodbath at Shiloh converted Co. A’s former Fourth of July marchers from boys to men. “The tone of their letters changes. They stop referring to themselves as the Continentals. And more and more men who weren’t from Elgin joined the company.”
Co. A, and most Illinois units, went on to participate in the Battle of Lookout Mountain, Tenn., and in Gen. William Sherman’s infamous scorched-earth “March to the Sea” through Georgia. On Oct. 5, 1864, Co. A used its new repeating guns to fight off a force six times its number in the Battle of Altoona. The war’s final year found them marching through the Carolinas as Confederate resistance collapsed.
Alft wrote that the most Elgin fatalities during the war came in the 127th Regiment. There were 15 who died during the siege of Vicksburg, Miss., alone. But only three died from wounds, the other 12 from sickness.
Lincoln eventually introduced conscription. But the Elgin area was so pro-North and anti-slavery that no man from the area had to be drafted, according to Gough. The Fox Valley always filled its quota for new cannon fodder with volunteers alone.
NEXT SUNDAY
Today’s Fox Valley remembers the war
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