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In a gray metallic window van we'd packed everything imaginable for the trip: barbecue grill, tent, sleeping bags, coolers, three cases of Civil War reenactment gear (a major baggage train in itself), bicycles--we would never ride--Scott had knowingly brought along one with a flat tire. In bucket seats, on a beautiful warm sunny morning, we rolled east along highway 40 toward Lebanon. Wilder's brigade had visited the town on many occasions in 1863, though they would have been approaching from the direction of Murfreesboro to the south. At the off ramp we exited onto highway 231 turning north on what I presumed was once the Murfreesboro Pike, the very road Wilder's men had traveled on the final leg into town. (I would later be informed that the modern day main road into Lebanon, the one we were on, was actually several hundred yards east of the old pike.) In 1863 Lebanon would have been long on alert when Union men were nearing. One could imagine rebel soldiers mounting horses and galloping east out of town as the scouts of the blue brigade advanced. My relative, John Hargrave, may well have been in the vanguard on some of the early raids, riding into Lebanon with comrades and friends from Thorntown; young men like Arias Cravens, James Mount, and Wesley Pike. (In the Spring of 1863, after eight months of service, these men had certainly realized that the adventure they'd enlisted for was not quite what they'd imagined.) The horses and mules John and his friends rode into Lebanon on had been taken from farms nearby. Citizens of the town may well have recognized some of the stock that they rode, and knew who it belonged to. For our part, here in the present, Scott and I would enter Lebanon virtually undetected. We looked like any other Nashville area commuters. With Kentucky plates on the van no town rebel would give us a second thought. Approaching Lebanon from the south, the country was open, a pleasant mixture of industry and pasture. Periodicaly we passed the usual fast food franchises and discount motels. A century and a quarter earlier much of the land had been covered in cedar thickets. Central Tennessee once contained one of the largest concentrations of virgin, Red Cedar forest in the country. There had been groves with trees three feet in diameter rising seventy and ninety feet in the air. The town of Lebanon was named for those trees, after the Biblical "Cedars of Lebanon." Following the Civil War Confederate soldiers had returned home to Lebanon and Wilson County to reclaim their lives. Men labored where they could, many returning to their stripped and decimated farms. Other men cut the still plentiful cedar trees. The loggers were stout hardy men, like J. B. Baird, a Confederate soldier who'd been captured during the battle of Stones River, then spent two years in the squalor of a Federal prison camp in the north. And there was his brother, Dan Baird; he'd ridden with Nathan Bedford Forrest. These citizen soldiers, and many others, came home from the war and tried to get on with their lives; to rebuild and forget. Logging around Lebanon began in the early eighteen hundreds. Before the war it was slow work. Felled trees were laboriously dragged to the nearest river, formed into rafts, then floated downstream to a limited number of destinations. After the war the process accelerated. If four years of conflict had left the south mostly impoverished, the North swaggered conspicuously, stuffed almost obscenely with money and capitol. In the North, with the end of hostilities, a long pent up demand for goods and raw materials was unleashed. Entrepreneurs came south in search of fortunes. New rail lines were quickly laid. Lumber was now easily transported north, east, west, everywhere. For thirty years after the war the cedars around Lebanon, in Wilson County, were cut. The rich red timber, so resistant to decay, would be used in fence posts and rails, in barns, corncribs and telegraph poles. Specialty products were crafted also. Beautiful cedar chests were shipped to St. Louis. Cedar paneling from Lebanon went north to adorn the meeting halls of the affluent; in Chicago to the Palmer House's famous "Cedar Room," and on to New York too. By the end of the century the virgin cedars in Tennessee were mostly gone, though that wasn't the end of the conquest. The pencil factories came next--assembly line sweatshop productions turning out thousands upon thousands of uniform, nondescript cedar pencil slats. For a time these factories churned, and men scoured the countryside, searching for and now dismantling the cedar fence posts and rails, barn sidings, corncribs--even digging up old cedar tree stumps--anything they could find containing the now rather scarce wood. By the early 1930s, with changing markets and a mostly exhausted wood supply, the pencil factories were gone too. In 1999 most of what remained of the cedar groves of Wilson County, could be found at the Cedars of Lebanon State Park, a beautiful second growth preserve located six miles south of Lebanon. It was small by comparison to what had reportedly once been. Scott and I had originally planned to spend our first night of the trip at the park after a brief stop in Lebanon. By Thursday, morning we'd intended to be on the way toward Liberty and Snow Hill, other towns where Wilder's men had patrolled and skirmished with Rebel cavalry. But the flight delays and misplaced luggage had delayed our work. We'd fallen nearly a day behind schedule. Lebanon would now need to be an even briefer stop than originally planned. Magee's regimental history made reference to Lebanon on numerous occasions. Most of the horses and mules the brigade procured in the spring of 63, more than 2,000, were confiscated from farms in and around the town. This was the heart of enemy territory in Tennessee. Certainly, they hadn't all been rebels in Lebanon. Sam Houston, president of the Texas Republic, and first governor of that state, had once lived there. He'd practiced law in town for a number of years then, like many others moved further west. When the Civil War began Governor Houston had refused to take Texas into the Confederacy. He was promptly removed from office. The Civil War would bring thousands of Union and Confederate troops through central Tennessee in a constant agonizing friction of raids and ambushes, burned homes and stolen property. Suspicions and paranoia ran high. Across Wilson County the war would decimate the towns and its people. In March of 1863 Wilder's men had become the latest of a long procession of unwelcome Yankee visitors. These Illinois and Indiana soldiers held no illusions as to their standing with the local populous. Magee would write in the regimental history "We were a terror to the natives...as widely known as the command of Morgan. It was our business to scout for supplies...to destroy supplies when we could not take them...we were dreaded and hated, and liable to cruel treatment if captured..." Then he added, almost as a boast, "...but they got very few of us, while we got many of them." Benjamin Magee's old regimental history told considerably more than that. There was one story in particular that I remembered. It was the disturbing account of two soldiers of the 72nd Indiana, William Montgomery and John Vance, who were captured by Rebels just north of Lebanon on April 3, 1863. The two young men spent the night of their capture in Lebanon. The next morning they were marched from town, tied to a tree, and each shot in the head four times. Montgomery died; incredibly Vance survived. An old Negro helped Vance to the Murfreesboro Pike where the Union cavalry picked him up. Back in the Union camps he would recover and tell his comrades of the horrible ordeal. For the atrocity against Montgomery and Vance, the Seventy-Second Indiana would take its revenge. Eight pages later in Magee's narration reference was made to the retaliation of Wilder's men. According to Magee, a tavern keeper of Lebanon was hung on April 26th. In referring to the hanging, Magee quoted from the diary of John Davis a private of John Hargrave's company D. The brief but chilling passage read as follows: "Here a detail was made to hunt the body of Montgomery who was captured and shot by the rebels on the 3rd of April. While Vance and Montgomery were being led through Lebanon a certain tavern-keeper shouted out, "hang the d__d sons of b__s, I'll find the rope." The detail did not find the body, but proposed to hang the tavern-keeper to make him tell where it was, and it is presumed they did their duty." This story shocked and fascinated me for a number of reasons. There was of course Vance's incredible survival. He'd been shot, four times in the head. The last ball had entered his left ear and exited at his left eye, popping his eyeball from the socket. Yet, somehow he was able to return to the Union lines. Another intrigue of the story was the uncertainty of the circumstances that led to the shooting. Magee's regimental history referred to the two man captured as videttes, a term used to describe soldiers on advance patrol, out beyond the picket lines. This would indicate that the two men were performing some assigned duty. However, I would find in another book, Richard Baumgartner's more recent work on Wilder's Brigade, a copy of a letter Colonel Wilder had written to his wife shortly after the early April raid. In that letter, in addition to listing the accomplishments of the raid, Wilder said that the brigade had lost two "stragglers". Wilder was certainly referring to Montgomery and Vance as the stragglers, in the letter sent to his wife. The brigade colonel apparently had a somewhat different interpretation of the circumstances surrounding the capture of the two men--the implication being that they may have been operating in some unauthorized capacity. That certainly wasn't the way Magee presented the situation. Were Montgomery and Vance really on a random foraging expedition when taken, perhaps plundering some outlying farmhouse? Did frustrated and angry locals shoot the two men as common thieves? Why the discrepancy between Magee's narrative and Wilder's letter? The facts of the situation were certainly no longer to be discovered, and perhaps they didn't really matter. In a sense the relevance of the story, so many years later, was its illustrative nature: In Wilson County, human passions were aflame and behavior out of control, hardly a surprise in war, yet always unpleasant to admit to so close to home. I was somewhat amazed that Magee had been willing to tell the portion of the story involving the hanging of the tavern keeper. While he maintained a certain degree of ambiguity in the narration (perhaps plausible deniability), Magee essentially admitted that members of his regiment had hung an innocent citizen, a man whose only crime appeared to have been making inflammatory remarks to the two soldiers as they were taken through town after their capture. Why had Magee written of the random retaliation at all? It was one thing for him to remember such an act of revenge; quite another to be willing to tell of it in his book. Even when presented in its best light, which one had to believe Magee would have been trying to do, it wasn't an attractive revelation. Did this old incident still trouble Magee many years after the war when his book was published? Was it a sort of public confession? On the other hand, one could also speculate that it was a rather careless boast. Yet, if it was not just the one thing or the other, then perhaps it was primarily a soldier's continuing struggle to come to terms with the insanities and brutalities of a war that was yet very vivid and real to the surviving combatants. The questions the story raised were intriguing. I wondered if anyone in Lebanon might shed light on the matter, or knew anything of the incident at all. I wasn't sure whether I should ask, though, even after 136 years? |
I woke that first morning in Nashville to find Scott rummaging through my luggage. He had apparently forgotten his deodorant and decided to borrow mine, roll on, which didn't seem to bother him in the least as he liberally applied it, then tucked the stick back into my bag. (And after three days of this I would finally tell him "That's OK, you keep it, I'll get another one.") There were things about Scott, somewhat unpleasant, annoying things that I tended to forget in our intervals apart. I was now remembering. We didn't search for the Civil War in Nashville. From what I understood, that past had been mostly forgotten and made over. Nashville was a city now marketed to a different and less controversial history; country music. The Grand Old Opry had become the image and focal point for the city. We had a full schedule anyway, and a late start that morning sent us immediately east away from the city without time for regrets. Yet, Nashville was immensely significant as a Civil War place. It was the first southern capital to fall into Union hands. It became a central base of supply and operations for all the Union operations in the west. And in 1864 wasn't it here that Confederate General John Bell Hood destroyed the remnants of a once formidable army, his own? Following the defeat, and grisly slaughter of Hood's troops at Franklin, Tennessee, hadn't he sullenly slogged on to Nashville, laying siege to a city with troops inside heavily outnumbering his own? When the federals finally came out from behind their works Hood was annihilated. What had he been thinking? After Nashville the once great Confederate Army of Tennessee simply ceased to exist. And it was also in Nashville, two years earlier, that Union General William S. Rosecrans consolidated his troops, collected supplies, and the day after Christmas 1862 marched south and met Bragg's Confederates in a bloody three day battle called Stone's River. John Wesley Hargrave and the 72nd Indiana, by then part of Colonel John Wilder's new brigade, missed the battle of Stones River. They'd been sent north to guard the rail lines between Louisville and Nashville, chasing on foot, unsuccessfully, the raiding Confederate cavalry of the dashing John Hunt Morgan. The ineffective expedition of sending infantry after cavalry would frustrate Wilder to no end; so much so, that one evening Wilder had even tried mounting his men on the brigade's pack mules. The soldiers who witnessed that experiment would never forget the spectacle that followed. Watching the developing fiasco, at the little crossroads town of Bear Wallow, Kentucky, would prove better entertainment than a three-ring circus. As fast as the reluctant men could mount the surprised hybrids, they were thrown immediately clear. The uncooperative and then angry mules jumped, kicked and brayed, climbing over and under each others backs, or lowering their heads and charging the frightened soldiers who scrambled for cover where it could be found. Other men were being dragged through the mud, screaming and cursing, holding tight to the manes and tails of Asses they'd temporarily caught hold of. A growing gallery of amused soldiers cheered and roared with every buck of the back, each sprawl in the mud, laughing so hard they fell from the fence rails or held their aching sides. Colonel Wilder was certainly not amused when he turned away from the spectacle and stalked back to his tent. Several days after the first of the New Year, Morgan's Rebels recrossed the Cumberland River and Wilder's brigade dejectedly hopped the trains for Nashville. From there, in ankle deep mud, they escorted a supply train south along the pike to Murfreesboro, arriving at Stones River a week after the desperate battle that had claimed 25,000 casualties. The mule fiasco at Bear Wallow hadn't discouraged Colonel Wilder. In fact, it had started him thinking, and since the impromptu rodeo event he'd been pondering an idea, forming a plan. As a result of his planning and pondering, in March of 1863 Wilder's men began a most unusual conversion: They began a transformation from foot soldiers into something called "mounted infantry." It was to be a new branch of the service--infantry soldiers who would ride horses, but still fight on foot. The objective was to move quickly, like cavalry, perhaps catching the likes of John Hunt Morgan. Then they would engage him, or any other enemy, on the ground using infantry tactics. Wilder had presented the idea to General Rosecrans in late January. He'd even offered the suggestion that the brigade could secure its own mounts with no expense or trouble to the government. Rather than waiting months for Washington to approve and supply the needed horses, why not relieve the surrounding Rebel population of this valuable property? Rosecrans liked the idea immensely and by early March the brigade was regularly traveling away from Murfreesboro, visiting towns and farms throughout central Tennessee, spiriting away horses and mules of every description. The change of environment and routine was a godsend for Wilder's miserable men. The Union army's camp at Murfreesboro was an appalling place. Following the battle of Stones River thousands of bodies had been buried quickly, everywhere, barely below the surface of the hard frozen ground. And the Union Army had remained there, on that battlefield, amidst the hastily dug graves and thousands of still unburied rotting horse and mule carcasses. It was not uncommon for the arms and legs of decomposing bodies to spring from the earth as wagons and horses rode over shallow unmarked graves. At times corpse torsos would sit suddenly upright out of the earth as if resurrected and preparing to rejoin lost units. Heavy winter and early spring rains mingled mud, decomposing corpses, and the tons of human waste an army creates, into a great plain of sickening carrion. Camped amidst all this filth, on hickory flat swamps, John Hargrave's regiment would lose more men to disease that winter than from all other causes during the war. Wilder's soldiers were glad for the excursions away from the misery along Stones River. I felt something in common with those men, I suppose. My modern day trip was an escape too. I was only fleeing my job; a vocation that had become a somewhat mind numbing, charade. The once thriving California office I'd established and managed, a satellite facility for a Chicago based firm, had been lethargically winding down for a number of years. Whether attributable to corporate design or ineptitude I was never fully certain, though, from my admittedly jaded perspective, the latter seemed more and more likely. At times I still railed against the drift of events, the meander of my working life, firing off memos, reports and proposals for changes I knew would never come about. There was a manila folder I kept in a desk drawer. It was labeled "The Monkey House." There I faithfully filed the memos and correspondence periodically coming from the main office. Day by day my responsibilities and control diminished, eventually to a point where I knew I'd become mostly a warehouse caretaker with the most varied and memorable workday of the year being the annual one day visit of my boss from Chicago. He was a good-natured fellow, my boss, when he visited me, and it was difficult not to like him, or at least be amused by him. At the same he seemed a large part of the problem. There was this ponderous, methodical approach he applied to everything he did; a somewhat unimaginative manufacturing and production guy, perhaps not by choice, more by years of repetition and helpless habit. At sixty-one he seemed caught in a place he didn't want to be. It didn't help that the computer age was mostly science fiction to him. Bringing the first desktop computers into my office had seemed a complete waste to him, so they'd been rented, on my credit card. In the end, of course, momentum overwhelmed his objections. The world was headed in a particular direction, with or without his approval. He gave up that battle. In a way, I admired his defiance, his courage to ignore reality. There was something heroic there, even if unrealistic. He remained steadfast and true in his own actions, plodding on, each month laboriously writing out his redundant and useless summary reports, on lined yellow legal notepads. It was his statement, his stand against a seemingly crazy world that he no longer cared to keep up with. It was all wearing him out. In recent years he'd started making sarcastic reference to himself as "the big fat man," a self-deprecation that made me uneasy. Certainly I had noticed his physical dimensions expanding the last few years, quite geometrically, like a pastry rising in the oven. Yet, it wasn't his increasing girth that gave me pause to reflect; it was the voice inflection that offered such a caustic, helpless, self-description. There was weary resignation in his tone that implied a condition of resented inevitability--not just in terms of his increasing circumference, but in relation to the world in general. His once favorably anticipated visits to my office had become rather depressing events. I'd sit listening to his stories of corporate office life, of the endless meetings and related drudgery of production planning sessions. Eventually, after relating to adnauseam the nuts and bolts and politics of manufacturing, he'd launch into long dissertations concerning his growing health concerns, describing procedures that included his rectal and colon exams. In agonizing detail he'd relate to me the invasive inch by inch progress of probes, up his anus, and beyond, until I'd be wincing and squirming in my seat with every word. And he'd end the graphic descriptions by rolling his body forward in the chair, as if ready to convey some great secret, and he'd say, "You know, that's what's ahead for you too!" I had certainly speculated that his recent visits might all be part of some elaborate corporate office scheme, a sort of Chinese water torture intended to drive me, a now overpaid caretaker of sorts, away (or insane). To an extent it was working. For several days after his departure I'd worry whether I wasn't on his same path. Was I to end my working days a likable but tired operations manager, counting the days to retirement, from my windowless manufacturing plant cubicle--amongst the clang and chop of steel cutting and bending machines--and once a year managing a business trip where some captive underling listened to stories of corporate intrigue and the grim business of trips to the proctologist? Even after he was gone and I'd mostly forgotten the grueling narrations, I felt a sort of stealthy mental malaise taking hold of me. It was the enveloping disease of complacency, which seemed to glue me in my seat where I'd stare vacantly for hours out my office windows. I was forty-two years old. What was I doing, here? What was I doing with my life? For nearly a year planning the Civil War trip had been my one great cerebral salvation. It had provided a working objective, a point of focus. It exercised my mind and directed my thoughts, created a therapeutic mental balm of sorts. Still, there was a looming frequent gloom; for the thought was always there, when I dared to allow the consideration, that when the trip was over and done, "what then?" |
On July 17, 1862, John Hargrave joined the 72nd Indiana Volunteer Infantry. His regiment would eventually become part of Wilder's famous Lightning Brigade. With some 2,000 other men he would eventually have a horse to ride, just as cavalry, yet would fight battles mostly on foot, like infantry. He was one of the first soldiers ever armed with a repeating rifle, called a Spencer, capable of firing at seven times the rate of the standard issue muzzle loading musket. John would serve for three years and once estimated that he'd come under fire on 240 seperate occasions. He was never wounded. Decades later, John's eldest son would say of his father that "he'd never known any man more impervious to fear and panic." These were some of the facts, information I would gather along the way in my search for this forgotten soldier. Initially, I'd known only his name which appeared in the muster rolls at the back of an old Civil War regimental history book. Over the years my curiosity about this man's Civil War life would become immense and I would begin to ask, over and over again, who was John Wesley Hargrave? As answers to that question slowly emerged, for me, another quandary just as perplexing and significant would arise: Why did it matter to me who John Wesley Hargrave was? I wasn't John's biological descendant. My family connection to this soldier would come by a chance of marriage two generations later. John's grandson, Albion Fellows Hargrave would marry my grandfather's sister, Ione Safstrom. Really, I could make no claims of genuine family lineage. And yet, for twenty-five years I'd known this man's name, and had felt an attachment to him, and for the past two years it had become something more than that. In my search for the facts of John's Civil War story I would become consumed, seemingly propelled along involuntarily, trying to uncover his obscure, mostly forgotten Civil War experience. As a boy I'd been well acquainted with John Hargrave's grandson. He was my granduncle Albion, and he and my aunt Ione lived in a magnificent home they'd built in the open country of Winthrop Harbor, sixty miles north of Chicago, forty miles beyond the suburban community of Glenview where I grew up. On Christmas day of each year, at the Hargrave home, our large, wonderful, extended family gathered; my grandfather and five of his siblings, their spouses and grown children, and their children's children. There were years when thirty or more of us congregated there for the holiday celebration. The Hargrave home, "Aunt Ione's," as we always called it, was pure magic. I never forgot the drive there on Christmas day. After turning off the interstate onto Rosecrans Road (a name with a Civil War connection that eluded me in those early years) we headed east, passing fields of long brown grass bent beneath blankets of fresh white snow; and winter bare oaks, grouped in hollows or lining ice encrusted brooks. And deer might be standing by, watching us pass, as if we were the curiosity. Occasionally there'd be some remote turnoffs, a paved street seemingly headed nowhere--perhaps constructed for a housing boom that fortunately hadn't then materialized. And when we were close to the Hargrave house, on the low bluffs behind Lake Michigan's western shore, you could still find split rail fences snaking their way along winding gravel roads. On Christmas day, driving to Ione's, I took in all these wonders as I anticipated the pleasures of the day ahead, at that house, with its blending aromas of roast turkey, cooling pies, of Swedish Limpa bread and potato sausage. And also there, at that house, would be all of the familiar faces and voices, each one distinct and unforgettable, my relatives, all of them, a seemingly endless lineage of aunts and uncles and cousins. For me there was never a more perfect day. If ever there was magic and wonder in my life, and there was then (in abundance), if a Norman Rockwell world truly existed, somewhere, and it seemed to, all these things were grounded and centered at the Hargrave home in Winthrop Harbor. Early on Aunt Ione had become aware of the fascination I had with the Civil War. As my boyish years gave way to adolescence, rebellion in me manifested itself in the peculiar guise of a Civil War soldier. There were those awkward, early, teenage years of searching for my identity. I'd arrived at the Hargrave home gatherings in a dirty blue shirt with sergeant's stripes and a Civil War kepi. And there were summer visits too, when I'd sit on the lawn in the long cool grass beneath a tall oak tree, reading Bruce Catton and Stephen Crane. And around me would echo the perfect familiar sounds of our traditional extended family communion. Year followed year, all of this wonder repeating and proceeding with such calm and familiar inevitability that I was unaware how precious and unusual the gatherings were. Unconcerned then with the fragile impermanence of the moments I could sit reading, and often, I dreamed of being elsewhere--in the Civil War, on the adventure of my life. It was in junior high school that my father and I turned my bedroom into a sort of Civil War, western era bunkhouse. It was a genuine curiosity, complete with exposed nail, knotty pine paneling, rough wood ceiling beams, jail bars on the windows, and kerosene lanterns converted to electric lights. The beds were mattresses placed in massive wood boxes we'd made, one box above the other, in bunk fashion, hinged to the wall along one long side, hanging from chains at the other. With tremendous effort the beds could be folded up against the wall and secured with pegs when not in use--though the top proved so heavy and unwieldy that we finally installed in the wall a boat winch and cable to raise the monstrosity. The room was a period masterpiece, or so it seemed to me, and I never tired of showing it off. (There weren't many teenagers who could boast of a Civil War room complete with a bed winch.) Whenever my aunt Ione visited us in Glenview, she would take the required tour of the creation. I was about fourteen when she gave me the old copy of the Seventy-second Indiana's regimental history, a book that had once belonged to John. My aunt was a widow by this time, preparing to move from that magic home which held so many memories for us all. The state of Illinois had annexed her property, designating it as an addition to the Illinois Beach State Park. Ione must have come across the book while packing up her life. "I thought you would be interested in this," was all that was said as she handed over the family relic. I thanked her, not sure exactly what I had received. And it would be another twenty-five years before I'd sit down and read the amazing story, the epic tale that now propelled me on my journeys. Benjamin F. Magee was a member of the Seventy-Second Indiana regiment. He was a sergeant in company I and became the regimental historian after the war. What compelled Magee to undertake such a task one could hardly guess, but there it was, a 600 page published account of their deeds, dated 1882. The first and perhaps only volumes had probably been handed out to each of the surviving members of the regiment at their annual reunion in Lafayette, Indiana. When I inherited the manuscript, some ninety years later, its pages were barely clutched in a worn, dark green cover, the binding and spine broken, pages yellowing. It had that distinct musty smell, the mysterious, haunting, aroma of old things set aside and forgotten for a long time. Benjamin Magee's narrative sat on a top shelf in my Civil War bedroom for ten years. Occasionally I'd take it down and search through the muster rolls in the back until I found the name, John W. Hargrave. The name was listed with nearly a hundred other men of company D. There was a peculiar thrill to finding his name. The Civil War, all of it, was of mythic proportion to me, and to hold a tangible link to larger than life events was incredible. Most of the men of company D, were listed as being from a place called Thorntown, Indiana. They were by far the most homogeneous unit in the regiment. Listed in the rolls, John's last name had been misspelled. An "s" had been added so that it read Hargraves. Someone, probably John, had penciled out the s in my copy of the book. I could just imagine his probable irritation the first time he searched for his own name in the book and found it misspelled--to remain printed that way through eternity. The old book entered upon its hundredth year traveling with me from Illinois to California on the back deck of a yellow Mustang which had a grinding second gear . I was twenty-four then, a year out of college, a young man moving west, starting a new job, beginning a new life adventure, an idealistic romantic going west. I was in that most peculiar and wonderful interval of life where one enjoyed the privileges of adulthood yet faced few of the responsibilities. On the west coast, the old book went on a shelf again where it would sit for another fifteen years. Living in Ventura, California the Civil War drifted mostly from my thoughts. Through the end of my brash, vain, bachelor days, the last half of my twenties, the book was forgotten. Through marriage and the first mysteries of children, in my thirties, it endured unnoticed. The story of the 72nd Indiana abided, patiently, as my once new life and career became familiar routine, as the first permanent lines appeared on my face and my hair grayed. And then one day I looked in the mirror and found a forty-year-old man no longer able to ignore his motion through time. And it was that year, for some reason, that the Civil War came alive again, and the worn green book caught my eye once more. I took it down, located John's name in the muster rolls at the back. Then I turned to the front and started to read, and couldn't put it down. |
It became my impression that the prospect of life as an Indiana farmer hadn't particularly appealed to John Wesley Hargrave. In 1861, at the beginning of the war, he left the family home in Crawfordsville to join the Union army. He was only sixteen then, and being under age, his father, a farmer and sometimes-nomadic Methodist preacher, had him sent home. A year later, when Lincoln called again for volunteers, John was back at the recruiter's office in Thorntown, Indiana. By then he was only a month away from his eighteenth birthday, and the father must have resigned himself to the boy's determination; to the inevitability of John's involvement in the war. |
PART FOUR: LEBANON 1 THE GREAT ESCAPE |
OFF TO THE CIVIL WAR THE SEARCH FOR JOHN WESLEY HARGRAVE OF WILDER'S LIGHTNING BRIGADE (A Mid-life Crisis Adventure and Travel Essay) |
On July 17, 1862, John Hargrave joined the 72nd Indiana Volunteer Infantry. His regiment would eventually become part of Wilder's famous Lightning Brigade. With some 2,000 other men he would eventually have a horse to ride, just as cavalry, yet would fight battles mostly on foot, like infantry. He was one of the first soldiers ever armed with a repeating rifle, called a Spencer, capable of firing at seven times the rate of the standard issue muzzle loading musket. John would serve for three years and once estimated that he'd come under fire on 240 seperate occasions. He was never wounded. Decades later, John's eldest son would say of his father that "he'd never known any man more impervious to fear and panic." These were some of the facts, information I would gather along the way in my search for this forgotten soldier. Initially, I'd known only his name which appeared in the muster rolls at the back of an old Civil War regimental history book. Over the years my curiosity about this man's Civil War life would become immense and I would begin to ask, over and over again, who was John Wesley Hargrave? As answers to that question slowly emerged, for me, another quandary just as perplexing and significant would arise: Why did it matter to me who John Wesley Hargrave was? I wasn't John's biological descendant. My family connection to this soldier would come by a chance of marriage two generations later. John's grandson, Albion Fellows Hargrave would marry my grandfather's sister, Ione Safstrom. Really, I could make no claims of genuine family lineage. And yet, for twenty-five years I'd known this man's name, and had felt an attachment to him, and for the past two years it had become something more than that. In my search for the facts of John's Civil War story I would become consumed, seemingly propelled along involuntarily, trying to uncover his obscure, mostly forgotten Civil War experience. As a boy I'd been well acquainted with John Hargrave's grandson. He was my granduncle Albion, and he and my aunt Ione lived in a magnificent home they'd built in the open country of Winthrop Harbor, sixty miles north of Chicago, forty miles beyond the suburban community of Glenview where I grew up. On Christmas day of each year, at the Hargrave home, our large, wonderful, extended family gathered; my grandfather and five of his siblings, their spouses and grown children, and their children's children. There were years when thirty or more of us congregated there for the holiday celebration. The Hargrave home, "Aunt Ione's," as we always called it, was pure magic. I never forgot the drive there on Christmas day. After turning off the interstate onto Rosecrans Road (a name with a Civil War connection that eluded me in those early years) we headed east, passing fields of long brown grass bent beneath blankets of fresh white snow; and winter bare oaks, grouped in hollows or lining ice encrusted brooks. And deer might be standing by, watching us pass, as if we were the curiosity. Occasionally there'd be some remote turnoffs, a paved street seemingly headed nowhere--perhaps constructed for a housing boom that fortunately hadn't then materialized. And when we were close to the Hargrave house, on the low bluffs behind Lake Michigan's western shore, you could still find split rail fences snaking their way along winding gravel roads. On Christmas day, driving to Ione's, I took in all these wonders as I anticipated the pleasures of the day ahead, at that house, with its blending aromas of roast turkey, cooling pies, of Swedish Limpa bread and potato sausage. And also there, at that house, would be all of the familiar faces and voices, each one distinct and unforgettable, my relatives, all of them, a seemingly endless lineage of aunts and uncles and cousins. For me there was never a more perfect day. If ever there was magic and wonder in my life, and there was then (in abundance), if a Norman Rockwell world truly existed, somewhere, and it seemed to, all these things were grounded and centered at the Hargrave home in Winthrop Harbor. Early on Aunt Ione had become aware of the fascination I had with the Civil War. As my boyish years gave way to adolescence, rebellion in me manifested itself in the peculiar guise of a Civil War soldier. There were those awkward, early, teenage years of searching for my identity. I'd arrived at the Hargrave home gatherings in a dirty blue shirt with sergeant's stripes and a Civil War kepi. And there were summer visits too, when I'd sit on the lawn in the long cool grass beneath a tall oak tree, reading Bruce Catton and Stephen Crane. And around me would echo the perfect familiar sounds of our traditional extended family communion. Year followed year, all of this wonder repeating and proceeding with such calm and familiar inevitability that I was unaware how precious and unusual the gatherings were. Unconcerned then with the fragile impermanence of the moments I could sit reading, and often, I dreamed of being elsewhere--in the Civil War, on the adventure of my life. It was in junior high school that my father and I turned my bedroom into a sort of Civil War, western era bunkhouse. It was a genuine curiosity, complete with exposed nail, knotty pine paneling, rough wood ceiling beams, jail bars on the windows, and kerosene lanterns converted to electric lights. The beds were mattresses placed in massive wood boxes we'd made, one box above the other, in bunk fashion, hinged to the wall along one long side, hanging from chains at the other. With tremendous effort the beds could be folded up against the wall and secured with pegs when not in use--though the top proved so heavy and unwieldy that we finally installed in the wall a boat winch and cable to raise the monstrosity. The room was a period masterpiece, or so it seemed to me, and I never tired of showing it off. (There weren't many teenagers who could boast of a Civil War room complete with a bed winch.) Whenever my aunt Ione visited us in Glenview, she would take the required tour of the creation. I was about fourteen when she gave me the old copy of the Seventy-second Indiana's regimental history, a book that had once belonged to John. My aunt was a widow by this time, preparing to move from that magic home which held so many memories for us all. The state of Illinois had annexed her property, designating it as an addition to the Illinois Beach State Park. Ione must have come across the book while packing up her life. "I thought you would be interested in this," was all that was said as she handed over the family relic. I thanked her, not sure exactly what I had received. And it would be another twenty-five years before I'd sit down and read the amazing story, the epic tale that now propelled me on my journeys. Benjamin F. Magee was a member of the Seventy-Second Indiana regiment. He was a sergeant in company I and became the regimental historian after the war. What compelled Magee to undertake such a task one could hardly guess, but there it was, a 600 page published account of their deeds, dated 1882. The first and perhaps only volumes had probably been handed out to each of the surviving members of the regiment at their annual reunion in Lafayette, Indiana. When I inherited the manuscript, some ninety years later, its pages were barely clutched in a worn, dark green cover, the binding and spine broken, pages yellowing. It had that distinct musty smell, the mysterious, haunting, aroma of old things set aside and forgotten for a long time. Benjamin Magee's narrative sat on a top shelf in my Civil War bedroom for ten years. Occasionally I'd take it down and search through the muster rolls in the back until I found the name, John W. Hargrave. The name was listed with nearly a hundred other men of company D. There was a peculiar thrill to finding his name. The Civil War, all of it, was of mythic proportion to me, and to hold a tangible link to larger than life events was incredible. Most of the men of company D, were listed as being from a place called Thorntown, Indiana. They were by far the most homogeneous unit in the regiment. Listed in the rolls, John's last name had been misspelled. An "s" had been added so that it read Hargraves. Someone, probably John, had penciled out the s in my copy of the book. I could just imagine his probable irritation the first time he searched for his own name in the book and found it misspelled--to remain printed that way through eternity. The old book entered upon its hundredth year traveling with me from Illinois to California on the back deck of a yellow Mustang which had a grinding second gear . I was twenty-four then, a year out of college, a young man moving west, starting a new job, beginning a new life adventure, an idealistic romantic going west. I was in that most peculiar and wonderful interval of life where one enjoyed the privileges of adulthood yet faced few of the responsibilities. On the west coast, the old book went on a shelf again where it would sit for another fifteen years. Living in Ventura, California the Civil War drifted mostly from my thoughts. Through the end of my brash, vain, bachelor days, the last half of my twenties, the book was forgotten. Through marriage and the first mysteries of children, in my thirties, it endured unnoticed. The story of the 72nd Indiana abided, patiently, as my once new life and career became familiar routine, as the first permanent lines appeared on my face and my hair grayed. And then one day I looked in the mirror and found a forty-year-old man no longer able to ignore his motion through time. And it was that year, for some reason, that the Civil War came alive again, and the worn green book caught my eye once more. I took it down, located John's name in the muster rolls at the back. Then I turned to the front and started to read, and couldn't put it down. |
I woke that first morning in Nashville to find Scott rummaging through my luggage. He had apparently forgotten his deodorant and decided to borrow mine, roll on, which didn't seem to bother him in the least as he liberally applied it, then tucked the stick back into my bag. (And after three days of this I would finally tell him "That's OK, you keep it, I'll get another one.") There were things about Scott, somewhat unpleasant, annoying things that I tended to forget in our intervals apart. I was now remembering. We didn't search for the Civil War in Nashville. From what I understood, that past had been mostly forgotten and made over. Nashville was a city now marketed to a different and less controversial history; country music. The Grand Old Opry had become the image and focal point for the city. We had a full schedule anyway, and a late start that morning sent us immediately east away from the city without time for regrets. Yet, Nashville was immensely significant as a Civil War place. It was the first southern capital to fall into Union hands. It became a central base of supply and operations for all the Union operations in the west. And in 1864 wasn't it here that Confederate General John Bell Hood destroyed the remnants of a once formidable army, his own? Following the defeat, and grisly slaughter of Hood's troops at Franklin, Tennessee, hadn't he sullenly slogged on to Nashville, laying siege to a city with troops inside heavily outnumbering his own? When the federals finally came out from behind their works Hood was annihilated. What had he been thinking? After Nashville the once great Confederate Army of Tennessee simply ceased to exist. And it was also in Nashville, two years earlier, that Union General William S. Rosecrans consolidated his troops, collected supplies, and the day after Christmas 1862 marched south and met Bragg's Confederates in a bloody three day battle called Stone's River. John Wesley Hargrave and the 72nd Indiana, by then part of Colonel John Wilder's new brigade, missed the battle of Stones River. They'd been sent north to guard the rail lines between Louisville and Nashville, chasing on foot, unsuccessfully, the raiding Confederate cavalry of the dashing John Hunt Morgan. The ineffective expedition of sending infantry after cavalry would frustrate Wilder to no end; so much so, that one evening Wilder had even tried mounting his men on the brigade's pack mules. The soldiers who witnessed that experiment would never forget the spectacle that followed. Watching the developing fiasco, at the little crossroads town of Bear Wallow, Kentucky, would prove better entertainment than a three-ring circus. As fast as the reluctant men could mount the surprised hybrids, they were thrown immediately clear. The uncooperative and then angry mules jumped, kicked and brayed, climbing over and under each others backs, or lowering their heads and charging the frightened soldiers who scrambled for cover where it could be found. Other men were being dragged through the mud, screaming and cursing, holding tight to the manes and tails of Asses they'd temporarily caught hold of. A growing gallery of amused soldiers cheered and roared with every buck of the back, each sprawl in the mud, laughing so hard they fell from the fence rails or held their aching sides. Colonel Wilder was certainly not amused when he turned away from the spectacle and stalked back to his tent. Several days after the first of the New Year, Morgan's Rebels recrossed the Cumberland River and Wilder's brigade dejectedly hopped the trains for Nashville. From there, in ankle deep mud, they escorted a supply train south along the pike to Murfreesboro, arriving at Stones River a week after the desperate battle that had claimed 25,000 casualties. The mule fiasco at Bear Wallow hadn't discouraged Colonel Wilder. In fact, it had started him thinking, and since the impromptu rodeo event he'd been pondering an idea, forming a plan. As a result of his planning and pondering, in March of 1863 Wilder's men began a most unusual conversion: They began a transformation from foot soldiers into something called "mounted infantry." It was to be a new branch of the service--infantry soldiers who would ride horses, but still fight on foot. The objective was to move quickly, like cavalry, perhaps catching the likes of John Hunt Morgan. Then they would engage him, or any other enemy, on the ground using infantry tactics. Wilder had presented the idea to General Rosecrans in late January. He'd even offered the suggestion that the brigade could secure its own mounts with no expense or trouble to the government. Rather than waiting months for Washington to approve and supply the needed horses, why not relieve the surrounding Rebel population of this valuable property? Rosecrans liked the idea immensely and by early March the brigade was regularly traveling away from Murfreesboro, visiting towns and farms throughout central Tennessee, spiriting away horses and mules of every description. The change of environment and routine was a godsend for Wilder's miserable men. The Union army's camp at Murfreesboro was an appalling place. Following the battle of Stones River thousands of bodies had been buried quickly, everywhere, barely below the surface of the hard frozen ground. And the Union Army had remained there, on that battlefield, amidst the hastily dug graves and thousands of still unburied rotting horse and mule carcasses. It was not uncommon for the arms and legs of decomposing bodies to spring from the earth as wagons and horses rode over shallow unmarked graves. At times corpse torsos would sit suddenly upright out of the earth as if resurrected and preparing to rejoin lost units. Heavy winter and early spring rains mingled mud, decomposing corpses, and the tons of human waste an army creates, into a great plain of sickening carrion. Camped amidst all this filth, on hickory flat swamps, John Hargrave's regiment would lose more men to disease that winter than from all other causes during the war. Wilder's soldiers were glad for the excursions away from the misery along Stones River. I felt something in common with those men, I suppose. My modern day trip was an escape too. I was only fleeing my job; a vocation that had become a somewhat mind numbing, charade. The once thriving California office I'd established and managed, a satellite facility for a Chicago based firm, had been lethargically winding down for a number of years. Whether attributable to corporate design or ineptitude I was never fully certain, though, from my admittedly jaded perspective, the latter seemed more and more likely. At times I still railed against the drift of events, the meander of my working life, firing off memos, reports and proposals for changes I knew would never come about. There was a manila folder I kept in a desk drawer. It was labeled "The Monkey House." There I faithfully filed the memos and correspondence periodically coming from the main office. Day by day my responsibilities and control diminished, eventually to a point where I knew I'd become mostly a warehouse caretaker with the most varied and memorable workday of the year being the annual one day visit of my boss from Chicago. He was a good-natured fellow, my boss, when he visited me, and it was difficult not to like him, or at least be amused by him. At the same he seemed a large part of the problem. There was this ponderous, methodical approach he applied to everything he did; a somewhat unimaginative manufacturing and production guy, perhaps not by choice, more by years of repetition and helpless habit. At sixty-one he seemed caught in a place he didn't want to be. It didn't help that the computer age was mostly science fiction to him. Bringing the first desktop computers into my office had seemed a complete waste to him, so they'd been rented, on my credit card. In the end, of course, momentum overwhelmed his objections. The world was headed in a particular direction, with or without his approval. He gave up that battle. In a way, I admired his defiance, his courage to ignore reality. There was something heroic there, even if unrealistic. He remained steadfast and true in his own actions, plodding on, each month laboriously writing out his redundant and useless summary reports, on lined yellow legal notepads. It was his statement, his stand against a seemingly crazy world that he no longer cared to keep up with. It was all wearing him out. In recent years he'd started making sarcastic reference to himself as "the big fat man," a self-deprecation that made me uneasy. Certainly I had noticed his physical dimensions expanding the last few years, quite geometrically, like a pastry rising in the oven. Yet, it wasn't his increasing girth that gave me pause to reflect; it was the voice inflection that offered such a caustic, helpless, self-description. There was weary resignation in his tone that implied a condition of resented inevitability--not just in terms of his increasing circumference, but in relation to the world in general. His once favorably anticipated visits to my office had become rather depressing events. I'd sit listening to his stories of corporate office life, of the endless meetings and related drudgery of production planning sessions. Eventually, after relating to adnauseam the nuts and bolts and politics of manufacturing, he'd launch into long dissertations concerning his growing health concerns, describing procedures that included his rectal and colon exams. In agonizing detail he'd relate to me the invasive inch by inch progress of probes, up his anus, and beyond, until I'd be wincing and squirming in my seat with every word. And he'd end the graphic descriptions by rolling his body forward in the chair, as if ready to convey some great secret, and he'd say, "You know, that's what's ahead for you too!" I had certainly speculated that his recent visits might all be part of some elaborate corporate office scheme, a sort of Chinese water torture intended to drive me, a now overpaid caretaker of sorts, away (or insane). To an extent it was working. For several days after his departure I'd worry whether I wasn't on his same path. Was I to end my working days a likable but tired operations manager, counting the days to retirement, from my windowless manufacturing plant cubicle--amongst the clang and chop of steel cutting and bending machines--and once a year managing a business trip where some captive underling listened to stories of corporate intrigue and the grim business of trips to the proctologist? Even after he was gone and I'd mostly forgotten the grueling narrations, I felt a sort of stealthy mental malaise taking hold of me. It was the enveloping disease of complacency, which seemed to glue me in my seat where I'd stare vacantly for hours out my office windows. I was forty-two years old. What was I doing, here? What was I doing with my life? For nearly a year planning the Civil War trip had been my one great cerebral salvation. It had provided a working objective, a point of focus. It exercised my mind and directed my thoughts, created a therapeutic mental balm of sorts. Still, there was a looming frequent gloom; for the thought was always there, when I dared to allow the consideration, that when the trip was over and done, "what then?" |
In a gray metallic window van we'd packed everything imaginable for the trip: barbecue grill, tent, sleeping bags, coolers, three cases of Civil War reenactment gear (a major baggage train in itself), bicycles--we would never ride--Scott had knowingly brought along one with a flat tire. In bucket seats, on a beautiful warm sunny morning, we rolled east along highway 40 toward Lebanon. Wilder's brigade had visited the town on many occasions in 1863, though they would have been approaching from the direction of Murfreesboro to the south. At the off ramp we exited onto highway 231 turning north on what I presumed was once the Murfreesboro Pike, the very road Wilder's men had traveled on the final leg into town. (I would later be informed that the modern day main road into Lebanon, the one we were on, was actually several hundred yards east of the old pike.) In 1863 Lebanon would have been long on alert when Union men were nearing. One could imagine rebel soldiers mounting horses and galloping east out of town as the scouts of the blue brigade advanced. My relative, John Hargrave, may well have been in the vanguard on some of the early raids, riding into Lebanon with comrades and friends from Thorntown; young men like Arias Cravens, James Mount, and Wesley Pike. (In the Spring of 1863, after eight months of service, these men had certainly realized that the adventure they'd enlisted for was not quite what they'd imagined.) The horses and mules John and his friends rode into Lebanon on had been taken from farms nearby. Citizens of the town may well have recognized some of the stock that they rode, and knew who it belonged to. For our part, here in the present, Scott and I would enter Lebanon virtually undetected. We looked like any other Nashville area commuters. With Kentucky plates on the van no town rebel would give us a second thought. Approaching Lebanon from the south, the country was open, a pleasant mixture of industry and pasture. Periodicaly we passed the usual fast food franchises and discount motels. A century and a quarter earlier much of the land had been covered in cedar thickets. Central Tennessee once contained one of the largest concentrations of virgin, Red Cedar forest in the country. There had been groves with trees three feet in diameter rising seventy and ninety feet in the air. The town of Lebanon was named for those trees, after the Biblical "Cedars of Lebanon." Following the Civil War Confederate soldiers had returned home to Lebanon and Wilson County to reclaim their lives. Men labored where they could, many returning to their stripped and decimated farms. Other men cut the still plentiful cedar trees. The loggers were stout hardy men, like J. B. Baird, a Confederate soldier who'd been captured during the battle of Stones River, then spent two years in the squalor of a Federal prison camp in the north. And there was his brother, Dan Baird; he'd ridden with Nathan Bedford Forrest. These citizen soldiers, and many others, came home from the war and tried to get on with their lives; to rebuild and forget. Logging around Lebanon began in the early eighteen hundreds. Before the war it was slow work. Felled trees were laboriously dragged to the nearest river, formed into rafts, then floated downstream to a limited number of destinations. After the war the process accelerated. If four years of conflict had left the south mostly impoverished, the North swaggered conspicuously, stuffed almost obscenely with money and capitol. In the North, with the end of hostilities, a long pent up demand for goods and raw materials was unleashed. Entrepreneurs came south in search of fortunes. New rail lines were quickly laid. Lumber was now easily transported north, east, west, everywhere. For thirty years after the war the cedars around Lebanon, in Wilson County, were cut. The rich red timber, so resistant to decay, would be used in fence posts and rails, in barns, corncribs and telegraph poles. Specialty products were crafted also. Beautiful cedar chests were shipped to St. Louis. Cedar paneling from Lebanon went north to adorn the meeting halls of the affluent; in Chicago to the Palmer House's famous "Cedar Room," and on to New York too. By the end of the century the virgin cedars in Tennessee were mostly gone, though that wasn't the end of the conquest. The pencil factories came next--assembly line sweatshop productions turning out thousands upon thousands of uniform, nondescript cedar pencil slats. For a time these factories churned, and men scoured the countryside, searching for and now dismantling the cedar fence posts and rails, barn sidings, corncribs--even digging up old cedar tree stumps--anything they could find containing the now rather scarce wood. By the early 1930s, with changing markets and a mostly exhausted wood supply, the pencil factories were gone too. In 1999 most of what remained of the cedar groves of Wilson County, could be found at the Cedars of Lebanon State Park, a beautiful second growth preserve located six miles south of Lebanon. It was small by comparison to what had reportedly once been. Scott and I had originally planned to spend our first night of the trip at the park after a brief stop in Lebanon. By Thursday, morning we'd intended to be on the way toward Liberty and Snow Hill, other towns where Wilder's men had patrolled and skirmished with Rebel cavalry. But the flight delays and misplaced luggage had delayed our work. We'd fallen nearly a day behind schedule. Lebanon would now need to be an even briefer stop than originally planned. Magee's regimental history made reference to Lebanon on numerous occasions. Most of the horses and mules the brigade procured in the spring of 63, more than 2,000, were confiscated from farms in and around the town. This was the heart of enemy territory in Tennessee. Certainly, they hadn't all been rebels in Lebanon. Sam Houston, president of the Texas Republic, and first governor of that state, had once lived there. He'd practiced law in town for a number of years then, like many others moved further west. When the Civil War began Governor Houston had refused to take Texas into the Confederacy. He was promptly removed from office. The Civil War would bring thousands of Union and Confederate troops through central Tennessee in a constant agonizing friction of raids and ambushes, burned homes and stolen property. Suspicions and paranoia ran high. Across Wilson County the war would decimate the towns and its people. In March of 1863 Wilder's men had become the latest of a long procession of unwelcome Yankee visitors. These Illinois and Indiana soldiers held no illusions as to their standing with the local populous. Magee would write in the regimental history "We were a terror to the natives...as widely known as the command of Morgan. It was our business to scout for supplies...to destroy supplies when we could not take them...we were dreaded and hated, and liable to cruel treatment if captured..." Then he added, almost as a boast, "...but they got very few of us, while we got many of them." Benjamin Magee's old regimental history told considerably more than that. There was one story in particular that I remembered. It was the disturbing account of two soldiers of the 72nd Indiana, William Montgomery and John Vance, who were captured by Rebels just north of Lebanon on April 3, 1863. The two young men spent the night of their capture in Lebanon. The next morning they were marched from town, tied to a tree, and each shot in the head four times. Montgomery died; incredibly Vance survived. An old Negro helped Vance to the Murfreesboro Pike where the Union cavalry picked him up. Back in the Union camps he would recover and tell his comrades of the horrible ordeal. For the atrocity against Montgomery and Vance, the Seventy-Second Indiana would take its revenge. Eight pages later in Magee's narration reference was made to the retaliation of Wilder's men. According to Magee, a tavern keeper of Lebanon was hung on April 26th. In referring to the hanging, Magee quoted from the diary of John Davis a private of John Hargrave's company D. The brief but chilling passage read as follows: "Here a detail was made to hunt the body of Montgomery who was captured and shot by the rebels on the 3rd of April. While Vance and Montgomery were being led through Lebanon a certain tavern-keeper shouted out, "hang the d__d sons of b__s, I'll find the rope." The detail did not find the body, but proposed to hang the tavern-keeper to make him tell where it was, and it is presumed they did their duty." This story shocked and fascinated me for a number of reasons. There was of course Vance's incredible survival. He'd been shot, four times in the head. The last ball had entered his left ear and exited at his left eye, popping his eyeball from the socket. Yet, somehow he was able to return to the Union lines. Another intrigue of the story was the uncertainty of the circumstances that led to the shooting. Magee's regimental history referred to the two man captured as videttes, a term used to describe soldiers on advance patrol, out beyond the picket lines. This would indicate that the two men were performing some assigned duty. However, I would find in another book, Richard Baumgartner's more recent work on Wilder's Brigade, a copy of a letter Colonel Wilder had written to his wife shortly after the early April raid. In that letter, in addition to listing the accomplishments of the raid, Wilder said that the brigade had lost two "stragglers". Wilder was certainly referring to Montgomery and Vance as the stragglers, in the letter sent to his wife. The brigade colonel apparently had a somewhat different interpretation of the circumstances surrounding the capture of the two men--the implication being that they may have been operating in some unauthorized capacity. That certainly wasn't the way Magee presented the situation. Were Montgomery and Vance really on a random foraging expedition when taken, perhaps plundering some outlying farmhouse? Did frustrated and angry locals shoot the two men as common thieves? Why the discrepancy between Magee's narrative and Wilder's letter? The facts of the situation were certainly no longer to be discovered, and perhaps they didn't really matter. In a sense the relevance of the story, so many years later, was its illustrative nature: In Wilson County, human passions were aflame and behavior out of control, hardly a surprise in war, yet always unpleasant to admit to so close to home. I was somewhat amazed that Magee had been willing to tell the portion of the story involving the hanging of the tavern keeper. While he maintained a certain degree of ambiguity in the narration (perhaps plausible deniability), Magee essentially admitted that members of his regiment had hung an innocent citizen, a man whose only crime appeared to have been making inflammatory remarks to the two soldiers as they were taken through town after their capture. Why had Magee written of the random retaliation at all? It was one thing for him to remember such an act of revenge; quite another to be willing to tell of it in his book. Even when presented in its best light, which one had to believe Magee would have been trying to do, it wasn't an attractive revelation. Did this old incident still trouble Magee many years after the war when his book was published? Was it a sort of public confession? On the other hand, one could also speculate that it was a rather careless boast. Yet, if it was not just the one thing or the other, then perhaps it was primarily a soldier's continuing struggle to come to terms with the insanities and brutalities of a war that was yet very vivid and real to the surviving combatants. The questions the story raised were intriguing. I wondered if anyone in Lebanon might shed light on the matter, or knew anything of the incident at all. I wasn't sure whether I should ask, though, even after 136 years? |
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