In His Own Words

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, I would like to honor my great-great grandfather Michael McDonald in a series of blogs including his written accounts of his Civil War experiences.

Some of my best treasures are the stories written by my ancestors about their pioneer lives.  Among my favorites are those written by Michael McDonald.

Once, when asked “What one incident in your life as a soldier made the greatest impression upon you?” he wrote the following piece for the family newsletter, The OWL.

The low rumble of heavy guns in action came down the river in the early morning from Shiloh—twelve miles away. The battle was on! A thousand boys, fresh from the farms and pineries of Wisconsin, listened with hushed voices to the deep intonations of war!


All the morning long we bent the straining ear to catch the ominous sounds that came from afar and clamored with our officers to be taken to the scene of the combat. Later on in the war we would have used more prudent discretion, but at that time the Fourteenth Wisconsin Infantry had yet to win its title of the "Fourteenth Wisconsin Regulars."


Fresh from the North, a few days before, we were doing guard duty at Savanna. We had no particular business at Shiloh, and possibly might have kept out of the fight, but we argued the matter with our captains, and the captains with the colonel and the colonel with the general. About noon there came an order for us to exchange places with a regiment on its way up the river to the front, and soon afterward, embarked upon a transport, we swung off into the river. At last we were going to the place where there was real war!


It was eleven o’clock at night when we pulled in to Pittsburg Landing. Beuel's army was coming to the rescue. Steamboats were discharging their cargos of human freight; shouts, commands, cries, confusion! In the midst of it all down came a heavy rain-pour that lasted all the long night. We went shore in the darkness and rain, and saw dense masses of men cowering under the river banks. It seemed as if the whole of Grant’s demoralized army was there, but there are still other thousands, up over the banks, out in the darkness of the woods valiantly holding the shattered lines.


We march over and through the skulkers and jeer them for their cowardice as we pass. They shout back at us: "You will all be here to-morrow night!"


We are taken up over the muddy banks out into the woods beyond the landing and halted and there we stood, at "secure arms," in mud ankle-deep, in the darkness and drizzling rain through the long hours of the night.


Who that spent that vigil of the night upon the battlefield of Shiloh will ever forget it! Around and behind us lay Grant’s tired and shattered army. In the dark woods before us were the victorious rebel host, massed, as we fancied in imagination, for a sudden midnight assault. We pictured the dead and wounded in the uncanny and weird shadows of the forest and wondered what the morrow would bring forth for us. The long ranks of the regiment were strangely silent. There had been considerable loud talk on the steamboat that afternoon coming up the river, but now, in the awful presence around us, each man was busy with his own thoughts. I was only a lad of sixteen then, but a thousand memories of home and friends by the far-away blue waters of Lake Michigan hurried across my mental vision. Occasionally during the night, a shell from the federal gunboats howled and shrieked over and through the woods on its way to the rebel lines, and then, again, some excited picket would discharge his gun at some spectral or fantastic shadow in the darkling shades of the bushes. And so the long night wore away; daylight came, and with it, action—a blessed relief to our overstrained nerves.


We were ordered to advance. The first sight of the horrors of war, were two dead men setting up against a tree with their brains oozing out and spattered over its trunk—the work of a cannon ball.


That night we stood around the captured cannon of the famous Crescent battery—our trophy after three desperate charges—and shouted ourselves hoarse. Our ranks were a little thin and one could walk across the open field we had just crossed upon winrows of dead bodies; we had had nothing to eat since noon the day before, but in the delerium of our first victory we recked not—we had passed through the baptism of fire; we were soldiers at last!

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