1 “LIKE CROSSING HELL ON A ROTTEN RAIL—DANGEROUS”: THE CIVIL WAR DIARY OF HOOSIER SAMUEL P. HERRINGTON Edited by Ralph D. Gray Bloomington 2014 2 Sergeant Samuel P. Herrington Indianapolis Star, April 7, 1912 3 CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTERS 1. Off to Missouri (August-December 1861) 17 "There was no one rejected." 2. The Pea Ridge Campaign (January-March 15, 1862) 61 "Lord but how we made things hum." 3. Missouri Interlude (March 16-June 1862) 87 "There is a great many sick [and] wounded." 4. Moving Along the Mississippi (July-December 1862) 111 "We will never have so much fun if we stay ten years in the service." 5. The Approach to Vicksburg (January-May 18, 1863) 149 "We have quite an army here." 6. Vicksburg and Jackson (May 19-July 26, 1863) 177 ". they are almost Starved and cant hold out much longer." 7. To Texas, via Indiana and Louisiana (July 27-December 1863) 201 "The sand blows very badly & everything we eat is full of sand." 8. Guard Duty along the Gulf (January-May 28, 1864 241 "A poor soldier obeys orders that is all." 9. To the Shenandoah and Home (May 29-September 1864) 277 "I was at the old John Brown Fortress where he made his stand for Liberty and Justice." 4 The picture can't be displayed. 5 INTRODUCTION Indiana played a significant role in the Civil War. Its contributions of men and material, surpassed by no other northern state on a percentage basis, were of enormous importance in the total war effort. At the same time, Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana provided dynamic leadership in the Union cause. He was a persistent and effective recruiter of soldiers, and he managed to look after the welfare of his Indiana boys throughout the periods of their service, particularly during times of injury and illness. Morton was also a frequent advisor to President Lincoln making recommendations of military strategy and national policy as well as specific suggestions concerning everything from war aims to political activity. If he at times exaggerated the influence of Confederate sympathizers ("Copperheads") within Indiana, in order to further his own political goals, a moot point, he also enjoyed the undying loyalty of the Indiana soldier during and after the war.1 According to the figures compiled by the Indiana adjutant general, W. H. H. Terrell, more than 200,000 Hoosiers, organized into 129 infantry regiments, 13 cavalry regiments, 26 light artillery companies, and various other units, served in the Union army. Mostly young, native-born, poorly educated, and devoutly loyal to the Union, some 25,000 of these men made the ultimate sacrifice. Altogether the Indiana soldier participated in 318 battles, from the first comparatively small engagements in western Virginia in June 1861 through the last official battle of the Civil War--at Palmetto Ranche, Texas--in May 1865. They were in all the major campaigns and battles, from Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Atlanta, and Petersburg in the East to Pea Ridge, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and the trans-Mississippi campaigns in the West, but by far the largest number of Indiana units served in the Western areas.2 6 Despite the outpouring of books and articles on the Civil War from the 1860s forward, comparatively little has been written about the war from the standpoint of the ordinary foot soldier. There are a number of regimental histories, usually written by participants in the great conflict about their own units, but these tend to be highly laudatory--to officers, soldiers, and country--and often skip or gloss over the more mundane aspects of soldiering. Bell Wiley, in his magisterial accounts of the common soldier in the Civil War, began to reverse the trend of military studies away from grand strategy, general officers, and battlefield tactics to the ordinary man in the ranks, but more along this line remains to be done.3 A contribution to the type of focus Wiley promoted is made by the hitherto virtually untapped and unpublished diary of Samuel P. Herrington. Herrington (1839-1914) was a marginally educated young carriage trimmer apprentice when, at age 22, he enlisted in the 8th Indiana Infantry Regiment. He joined the unit upon its reconstitution in August 1861 (when the original 90-day enlistments of its personnel expired), and he served with it, as corporal and then sergeant of Company D, through Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Following the "veteranization" of the regiment in January 1864, when approximately seventy-five percent of the soldiers--but not Herrington--reenlisted for another three years, he was assigned to the 69th Indiana. He spent his final eight months in the army on duty in Texas, Louisiana, and, following an eventful voyage through the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic coast to the Chesapeake and eventual deployment under General Sheridan, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Herrington kept a diary during his three years of military service, making almost daily entries in one of a series of small notebooks he carried with him. 7 Apparently intended as a document for his mother, whether or not he survived the war, Herrington was nevertheless remarkably candid and thorough in his descriptions of people, places visited, and his day-to-day activities. He had very little to say about developments in other theaters of war, or about the political situation, but his accounts of his travels, the routine of camp life, the resourcefulness of his unit, particularly Herrington himself, in supplementing their often meager food supplies, and many other aspects of army life during the Civil War are extraordinary. In 1909, following a renewed flush of excitement and pride in his career as a Union soldier occasioned by a reunion of Civil War veterans at Vicksburg, the site of "our hardest struggles," he laboriously copied--in ink--the penciled comments of his much traveled diaries. Although he promised that the transcription was to be an "exact coppy" in all respects, there are some problems with it. Herrington was, after all, seventy years old at the time, and he occasionally erred in transcribing the day of the week or the proper date for an entry. More significantly, on some occasions he tended to summarize some of the entries (just as he had done, of course, a few times during the war when battles or illness required it), and this resulted in a few duplications in the entries and the repetition of especially noteworthy events. The editor has removed the obvious duplicate entries and stories, but possibly some remain. It is also possible that, since the copy of the diary from which I worked was the transcription, Herrington was able to supply the names of the officers (with exact, or nearly exact, spellings) and provide a bit more context to his daily entries than he did in the 1860s, but for the most part the record is clearly contemporaneous with the events being described and adds a valuable new dimension to what the life of a 8 "common" (but uncommonly curious and, evidently, friendly and attractive) soldier was like. The most remarkable feature of the diary is the light it sheds on the comparative freedom of the citizen soldier of the 1860s to participate or not in company and regimental activities when not engaged in campaigns against the enemy. To an extraordinary extent, Herrington and his companions were able to meet and interact with citizens of the areas in which they were stationed. This was particularly true early in the war, in Missouri and Arkansas, where the Indiana man experienced such varied things as a pitched battle with would-be assassins of himself and a companion as they were trying to rejoin their company, repeated visits and meals with the Sloan family (which included, perhaps not incidentally, three daughters) of Otterville, Missouri, and a budding romance with a young, unnamed damsel of Helena, Arkansas. The latter occurred while Herrington was detailed to "hospital" duty--the hospital being the county courthouse--in Helena following the bloody battle of Pea Ridge. Herrington passed through Helena twice subsequent to his brief romance, but learned that his "intended" had moved to Iowa. His only comment was "Such is life," and he quickly rebounded from this disappointment as he did from countless other tragedies and horrors of the war years. Samuel P. Herrington was born on August 27, 1839, near Dublin, in Wayne County, Indiana. The county, located on the eastern edge of the state, became one of the centers of Quaker influence in the United States. Large numbers of emigrants from the uplands of North Carolina had settled in Wayne County. The National Road runs through the county, which could also be reached easily by watercraft from the Ohio River and then a short overland journey along a pioneer 9 trace. Earlham College, an outstanding Quaker institution, was established in Richmond, the seat of Wayne County, in 1847. It was to this region that Samuel's father, Miles Herrington of North Carolina, had come sometime prior to 1830. In 1833, at the age of 26, he married Martha Pritchard, and the couple had three children, the eldest of whom (Miles Herrington, Jr.) died in infancy. Isaac H. Herrington (1837-1918), two years older than Samuel, was the diarist`s only full brother. His father, Miles, Sr., died when young Samuel was only one year old. After eight years of widowhood, Martha Pritchard Herrington married Aquilla Barrett, whose three children came from this union--Clinton (b. 1849), Charles (b. 1851), and Martha (b. 1853)--before Aquilla's death in 1856. Thus, Sam Herrington had a brother, a step-brother and a step-sister, two half-brothers and a half-sister at the time of his enlistment in the Union army in 1861.