With Fire and Sword

With Fire and Sword
Samuel Byers

With Fire and Sword

PREFACE

In war some persons seek adventures; others have them in spite of themselves. It happened that the writer of this book belonged to a regiment that seemed to be always in the midst of great experiences. It was, in fact, one of the few regiments that absolutely fought themselves out of existence. It was mustered in a thousand strong; it lost seven hundred and seventy-seven men by death, wounds, and disease. The fragment that was left over was transferred to a cavalry command. When the writer finally escaped from prison, after many months of confinement and many thrilling adventures both in prison and in the army of the enemy, he was mustered out as a "supernumerary officer." His command had ceased to exist. He was literally the last man of the regiment. Of the eighty of his regiment who had been taken to prison with him all but sixteen were dead. Of the nine captured from his own company all were dead but one.

While with his command he had served as a private soldier, as sergeant, and as adjutant. On escaping from prison he was for a time on General Sherman's staff and was selected to run down the Cape Fear River and carry the great news of Sherman's successes to the people of the North.

He kept a diary every day in the four years of war and adventure. The substance of the facts related here is from its pages; occasionally they are copied just as they are there set down. The book is not a history of great army movements, it is simply a true tale of the thrilling experiences of a subordinate soldier in the midst of great events.

CHAPTER I

My enlistment in the Union Army – The "Bushwhackers" of Missouri – The Quantrells and the James Brothers – Cutting a man's head off – My first adventure in the war – Capturing a guerrilla

I am writing down these sketches of adventures of mine from a daily journal or diary kept by me throughout the four years of the Civil War. Its pages are crumpled and old and yellow, but I can read them still.

Fate so arranged it that I was the very first one to enlist in my regiment, and it all came about through a confusion of names. A patriotic mass-meeting was held in the court-house of the village where I lived. Everybody was there, and everybody was excited, for the war tocsin was sounding all over the country. A new regiment had been ordered by the governor, and no town was so quick in responding to the call as the village of Newton. We would be the very first. Drums were beating at the mass-meeting, fifes screaming, people shouting. There was a little pause in the patriotic noise, and then someone called out, "Myers to the platform!" "Myers! Myers! Myers!" echoed a hundred other voices. Mr. Myers never stirred, as he was no public speaker. I sat beside him near the aisle. Again the voices shouted "Myers! Myers!" Myers turned to me, laughed, and said, "They are calling you, Byers," and fairly pushed me out into the aisle. A handful of the audience seeing Myers would not respond, did then call my own name, and both names were cried together. Some of the audience becoming confused called loudly for me. "Go on," said Myers, half-rising and pushing me toward the platform.

I was young, – just twenty-two, – ambitious, had just been admitted to the bar, and now was all on fire with the newly awakened patriotism. I went up to the platform and stood by the big drum. The American flag, the flag that had been fired on by the South, was hanging above my head. In a few minutes I was full of the mental champagne that comes from a cheering multitude. I was burning with excitement, with patriotism, enthusiasm, pride, and my enthusiasm lent power to the words I uttered. I don't know why nor how, but I was moving my audience. The war was not begun to put down slavery, but what in the beginning had been an incident I felt in the end would become a cause.

The year before I had been for many months on a plantation in Mississippi, and there with my own eyes had seen the horrors of slavery. I had seen human beings flogged; men and women bleeding from an overseer's lash. Now in my excitement I pictured it all. I recalled everything. "And the war, they tell us," I cried, "is to perpetuate this curse!" In ten minutes after my stormy words one hundred youths and men, myself the first, had stepped up to the paper lying on the big drum and had put down our names for the war.

We all mustered on the village green. Alas, not half of them were ever to see that village green again! No foreboding came to me, the enthusiastic youth about to be a soldier, of the "dangers by flood and field," the adventures, the thrilling scenes, the battles, the prisons, the escapes, that were awaiting me.

Now we were all enthusiasm to be taken quickly to the front, to the "seat of war." We could bide no delay. Once our men were on the very point of mobbing and "egging" our great, good Governor Kirkwood, because for a moment he thought he would be compelled to place us in a later regiment. However, we were immediately started in wagons for the nearest railroad, fifty miles away.

At the town of Burlington, on the 15th of July, 1861, we were mustered into the service as Company B of the Fifth Iowa Infantry. Our colonel, W. H. Worthington, was a military martinet from some soldier school in Kentucky. His sympathies were with his native South. Why he was leading a Northern regiment was a constant mystery to his men.

The regiment spent scant time in Burlington, for in a little while we were whisked down the Mississippi River in a steamer to St. Louis, and soon joined the army of Frémont, organizing at Jefferson City to march against General Price, who was flying toward Springfield with the booty he had gained in his capture of Mulligan and his men at Boonville. Now all began to look like war. Missouri was neither North nor South; she was simply hell, for her people were cutting one another's throats, and neighboring farmers killed each other and burned each other's homes. The loyal feared to shut their eyes in sleep; the disloyal did not know if a roof would be above their heads in the morning. Brothers of the same family were in opposing armies, and the State was overrun by Southern guerrillas and murderers. The Quantrells, the James Brothers, and other irregular and roaming bands of villains rode everywhere, waylaying, bushwhacking, and murdering.

We followed General Price's army to the Ozark Mountains, marching day and night – the nights made hideous by the burning of homes on the track of both the armies, while unburied corpses lay at the roadside. We marched half the nights and all the days and just as we got close enough to fight, the Washington politicians caused Frémont to be removed from his command. Frémont had been ahead of his time. He had freed some slaves, and the dough-faced politicians were not yet ready for action of that character.

The campaign had been to no purpose. Some of our regiment, indignant at the removal of their general, had to be guarded to prevent mutiny and disorder. Now we turned about and made the long march back to the Missouri River. Half that cold winter was spent near Syracuse, in guarding the Pacific Railway. We lived in wedge tents, and spite of the cold and snow and storm, our squads by turn tramped for miles up and down the railroad in the darkness every night. What terrible tales, too, we had in our little tents that winter, of the deeds of Quantrell's men. It did not seem possible that the South could set loose a lot of murderers to hang on the skirts of our army, to "bushwhack" an honorable foe, burn villages, destroy farms, and drive whole counties into conditions as frightful as war was in the Middle Ages. Only savage Indians fought that way. Yet Quantrell's band of murderers was said to be on the payroll of the Confederate States. Here and there, however, his guerrilla outlaws met with awful punishment, and horrible incidents became the order of the day and night.

I recall now how a prize was once offered by one of our commanders for the head of a certain man among those desperate murderers, a desperado with a band of men that knew no mercy. His troop of riders had ambuscaded almost scores of our soldiers, and innocent farmers who did not happen to like his ways were strung up to trees as unceremoniously as one would drown a kitten. The offered prize of a thousand dollars stimulated certain of our men in taking chances with this beast of the Confederacy, and a corporal of our cavalry learned of the desperado's occasional visits at night to his home, only a dozen miles away from where we were camped. Several nights he secretly watched from a thicket near the cabin for the bandit's return. Once in the darkness he heard a horse's hoofs, and then a man dismounted and entered at the door. The evening was chilly, and a bright fire in the open fireplace of the cabin shone out as the man entered.

The corporal, who had disguised himself in an old gray overcoat, knocked for entrance, and pretended to be a sick Confederate going on a furlough to his home not far away. He was cautiously admitted and given a seat by the open fire. He had no arms, and to the bandit and his wife his story of sickness and a furlough seemed probable enough. The two men and the one woman sat in front of the fireplace talking for an hour. The corporal, with the guerrilla sitting within a few feet of him, thought of the prize, and of his comrades murdered by this man. But what could he do? Suddenly the thought came, "I must kill or be killed." Outside there was only darkness and silence; inside the cabin, the low voices of these three people and the flickering fire.

The corporal glanced about him. There was no gun to be seen that he could seize. The guerrilla's big revolver hung at his belt. While sitting thus, a bit of burning wood rolled out onto the hearth. The guerrilla stooped over to put it in its place. Instantly the corporal saw his chance and, springing for the iron poker at the fireside, dealt the guerrilla a blow on the head that stretched him dead on the cabin floor. In an instant his big jackknife was out of his pocket and in the presence of the screaming wife the brute severed the man's head from his body. Then he left the cabin, mounted his horse in the thicket, and in the darkness carried his ghostly trophy into camp. It is a horrible ride to think of, that dozen miles, with the bleeding head of a murdered man on the saddle bow.

So the awful things went on all that winter in Missouri. As for myself, I was tramping about as a corporal, helping in a small way to keep the great railroad free from marauders and in possession of the Union army.

I don't know how it happened, but one morning our colonel, who had always treated me with extreme gruffness, though he well knew I did my duties with patriotic zeal, sent for me to come to his tent. I was a little alarmed, not knowing what was about to happen to me. The colonel called me by name as I entered, saluting him cap in hand, and for once he actually smiled.

"Corporal," he said dryly, as if suddenly regretting his smile, "I have noticed that you always did the duty assigned you with promptness. I need a quartermaster sergeant. You are the man."

I was almost paralyzed with astonishment and pleasure. I stood stock still, without a word of gratitude. At last, recovering myself, I explained that I had enlisted expecting to fight, and not to fill some easy position with the trains.

"If I could only be allowed to find a substitute," I ventured to say, "in case of a fight, so I might share the danger with my comrades, I would like the promotion."

Again the colonel tried to smile. "You probably will change your mind; you will find excitement enough," he remarked, dismissing me.

I was hardly installed in my new post when to my surprise I was ordered by the colonel to take a good horse and ride twelve miles across the lone prairies and carry a message to a command at the village of Tipton. Instantly my mind was excited with the hopes of an adventure. I don't know, even now, just why I was selected for the venturesome undertaking. I knew there was scarcely a road and not a house in the whole distance. I knew, too, the whole country was full of murderous guerrillas. But nevertheless I was full of elation. This was the kind of a thing I had hoped for when I enlisted.

Light flakes of snow were falling when, with exultant spirits, I started from the camp. The trip outward proved uneventful, for nothing happened to me on my way. As I was returning, however, at a point halfway across the prairie I was surprised to see a man in gray, probably a guerrilla, ride out of a long slough or hollow to my left and gallop into the road directly ahead of me. He was in complete gray uniform, wore a saber, and had revolvers at his saddle bow. The man glanced back at me, and I saw him reaching for his pistols. "Here comes my first fight in the war," I thought instantly, "out here alone on the prairie." Save my one half-loaded revolver, strapped to my waist, I was unarmed. The stranger, without firing, galloped faster. I, too, galloped faster, the distance between us remaining about the same. Each of us now had a pistol in his hand, but it looked as if each were afraid to commence the duel. If the stranger checked his horse to give him breath, I checked mine. If he galloped again, I, too, put spurs to my animal. Imagining that other guerrillas must be lurking quite near, I was not over-anxious to bring on the engagement, and I suppose the armed man felt much the same way, for he could not have thought that I was in such a place absolutely alone. So neither fired. We just looked at each other and galloped. Finally we approached a little wood, and in a twinkling he turned into a path and was out of sight. I did not care to follow him to his hiding-place just then, and quickly galloped to our camp a few miles off.

Before midnight that night I, with a dozen of my regiment, surrounded the little wood and a cabin secreted in its center. Approaching, we looked into the windows, and, sure enough, there, roasting his feet in front of an open fire, sat my rider of the day. When three of us suddenly entered the house and demanded his surrender he sprang for a rifle that stood like a poker by the fireside, aimed it at me, and shouted "Never! Surrender yourself." A bayonet that instant against his breast brought him to terms, however. There followed a little farewell scene between him and his wife, who poured bottles of wrath on the heads of the "bluecoats," and our captive – my captive – was hurried to the guardhouse at the camp. It had been a perfectly bloodless encounter, but next morning it turned out that I had by chance captured one of the most dangerous guerrillas in Missouri.

CHAPTER II

We leave Missouri and go South – The prisoners of Donelson – The taking of New Madrid – "Kindly bury this unfortunate officer" – Quaker guns at Shiloh – The killing of the colonel

It was a trifling incident, this capture, compared with the dreadful things I have referred to as going on in Missouri that memorable first year of the Civil War. A great volume would not contain the record of them all. The first dead men I saw while in the army were eight Missouri farmers murdered by guerrillas and left lying in the hot sun and dust at the roadside. The sight moved me as no great battle ever did afterward.

One half of the male population of Missouri was trying to kill the other half. They were not opponents from different far-off sections fighting, but near neighbors, and nothing seemed too awful or too cruel for them to do. How I pitied the women and children who lived in the State in those awful days!

General Sherman's designation of war as "hell" found more confirmation in the dreadful raids, outrages, and murders by Quantrell's guerrillas in Missouri than in the bloodiest battles of the four years' conflict.

Now for months my regiment, with others, had chased up and down, and all over that unhappy old State of Missouri, trying to capture and punish these bands of murderers. On the old steamboat War Eagle, too, we paddled for weeks along the "Muddy Missouri" River, landing every here and there to have a little brush with guerrillas who had fired on our boat from the banks or from secret recesses in the woods. It was rare that we could catch them or have a real fight. Their kind of war meant ambuscades and murder.

At last an end came to this dreadful guerrilla-chasing business in Missouri so far as we were concerned, anyway. We were to stop running after Price's ubiquitous army too. We were no longer to be the victims of ambuscades and night riding murderers.

The glad news came to my regiment that we were to be transferred to the South, where the real war was.

One morning we left the cold and snow, where we had lived and shivered in thin tents all the winter, left the thankless duty of patrolling railroads in the storm at midnight, and marched in the direction of St. Louis. A long, cold, miserable march it was too, hurrying in the daytime and freezing in our bivouacs in the snow and woods at night. Many a man we left to sicken and die at some farmhouse by the roadside. Our destination was New Madrid, where we were to be a part of Pope's army in the siege and capture of that town.

As we were about to embark on boats at St. Louis we beheld in the snow and storm many steamers anchored out in the pitiless waters of the Mississippi River. These vessels were loaded with shivering thousands in gray and brown uniforms, the prisoners whom General Grant had captured at the battle of Fort Donelson. There were twelve or fifteen thousand of them. Seeing this host of prisoners made us feel that at last the Union army had a general, although we had scarcely heard of U. S. Grant before. This army of prisoners taken in battle was his introduction to the world.

Shortly we were before New Madrid, and the siege conducted by General Pope commenced. The town was defended by strong forts and many cannon, but its speedy capture by us helped to open up the Mississippi River. It was a new experience to us, to have cannonballs come rolling right into our camp occasionally. Yet few men were injured by them. We were in more danger when a fool officer one day took our brigade of infantry down through a cornfield to assault a gunboat that lay in a creek close by.

The Rebel commander had expected us, and had his grape shot and his hot water hose, and such things all ready for us. We went out of that cornfield faster than we went in. This was real war, the thing my regiment had been so longing for, in place of chasing murderers and guerrillas in Missouri.

We entered New Madrid one morning before daylight. The enemy had left in awful haste. I recall finding a dead Rebel officer, lying on a table in his tent, in full uniform. He had been killed by one of our shells. A candle burned beside him, and his cold hands closed on a pencil note that said, "Kindly bury this unfortunate officer." His breakfast waited on a table in the tent, showing how unexpected was his taking off.

Our victory was a great one for the nation, and it put two stars on the shoulder straps of General Pope. It made him, too, commander of the Eastern army.

A comrade in Company A of my regiment had been wounded a few days before and had died in the enemy's hands. I now found his grave. At its head stood a board with this curious inscription: "This man says he was a private in the Fifth Iowa Regiment. He was killed while trying to attend to other people's business."

Our command was now hurried to the Shiloh battlefield, of course too late to be of any use. But we took part in the long, wonderful, and ridiculous siege of Corinth, under Halleck, when our great army was held back by red tape, martinets, and the fear of a lot of wooden guns that sat on top of the enemy's breastworks, while that enemy, with all his men, and with all his guns, and bag and baggage, was escaping to the south. Our deeds were no credit to anybody, though here and there we had a little fight.

One incident of great importance, however, happened to my regiment here. It was the death of our colonel. One night when he was going the rounds of the picket lines out in the woods he was shot dead by one of our own men. The sentinel who did the killing declared that Rebels had been slipping up to his post all night, and when he would hail with "Who goes there?" they would fire at him and run into the darkness. He resolved to stand behind a tree the next time and fire without hailing. By some accident Colonel Worthington and his adjutant were approaching this sentinel from the direction of the enemy. Suddenly the sentinel held his gun around the tree and fired. The bullet struck the colonel in the forehead, killing him instantly. As he fell from his horse the adjutant sprang to the ground and cried, "Who shot the officer of the day?" "I fired," exclaimed the sentinel, and he then told of his experiences of the night. He was arrested, tried, and acquitted. Yet there were many among us who believed that the colonel had been intentionally murdered. He was one of the most competent colonels in the army, but among his soldiers he was fearfully unpopular. He was, however, a splendid disciplinarian, but this was something the volunteers did not want. In their minds the colonel had been only a petty tyrant, and not even wholly loyal. With a different disposition he certainly would have been a distinguished soldier. He was one of the most military-looking men in the whole army, but friends he had none. More than once his life had been threatened by soldiers who regarded themselves as having been treated badly by him.

His body was brought into camp the next morning and lay in his tent in state. He was given a military funeral, and the horse that was bearing him when he was killed was led behind his coffin.

After his death numbers of the men of the regiment were indignant, when they found among his papers warrants and commissions intended by the governor for them, commissions that had never been delivered. Their promotions had never come about. Now they knew why.

Worthington was succeeded by Colonel C. L. Matthies, one of the bravest, best, and most loved commanders of our army. Later Matthies was made a general, and at the close of the war died of wounds received in battle.