The Grand Army of the Republic

Monday, July 28, 2014

GAR Grave Marker

Anyone who has walked among the graves in an old cemetery may have come across the brass star medallion of the GAR—the Grand Army of the Republic—on a soldier’s final resting place.  The Grand Army of the Republic represented a brotherhood that was formed in battle that remained a fraternal brotherhood after the Civil War.  The organization left a lasting effect still felt today.

   

When Union soldiers, like Michael McDonald, came home to Ahnapee, they didn’t forget the camaraderie shared with their fellow soldiers during the hardships of the war.  After they mustered out, they often banded together.  In the spring of 1866, Michael captained the first regularly organized militia company perfected in Kewaunee County.  Comprised of veterans of the Civil War, it numbered about 60 men.  Their uniforms consisted of bright red flannel shirts with black trousers and the company, according to one story, "made quite a natty appearance … upon the streets for drill."  Veterans, who were bonded like brothers by their Civil War experiences held reunions for many years after the war.  They also banded together to join local GAR posts.

1885 Soldiers' Re-Union of Kewaunee, Door,
Manitowoc, and Brown County Union Civil War Veterans
Michael McDonald is in center front with cane
(from the Record-Herald newspaper )

The Grand Army of the Republic organization was founded in Decatur, Illinois on April 6, 1866, a year after the close of the war.  Wisconsin posts were among the first to be formed.  Honorably discharged Union veterans of the Army, Navy, Marine Corp, or the Revenue Cutter Service who served between April 12, 1861 and April 9, 1865 were eligible for membership.

The GAR was formed at three levels:  National, Department (state), and Post (local).  The organization’s objectives were “fraternity, charity, and loyalty”.  The brotherhood of comrades fulfilled the goal of fraternity.  They held annual Encampments which were multi-day events including formal dinners and memorial activities.  Events involved camping out, singing war songs, and telling soldiers’ stories.  Perhaps these events also provided psychological benefits with soldiers helping each other heal after the war.  Charity came in the form of founding soldiers’ homes including the Wisconsin Veterans Home at King, doing relief work, and driving veterans’ pension legislation.  Ultimately, a strong Republican political block was formed in the GAR.  It carried significant voting clout.

GAR Membership Badge

The posts used rituals and induction ceremonies that were similar to those of the Freemasonry (Masons) including the secret white and black ball voting system.  In the case of the GAR, more than one black ball was required to deny membership—for a prospective member to be “blackballed”.  The same rituals were later adopted by the successor organization, the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, which was formed in 1881 for which there were hereditary qualifications for membership.  Others interested in joining the SUVCW, who were not related to a Union Civil War veteran, could apply to become an Associate Member.

The GAR was a men’s organization but, in 1897, it did admit one woman.  Sarah Emma Edmonds had served in the 2^nd Michigan Infantry from May 1861 until April 1863 disguised as a man named Franklin Thompson.  Edmonds was only a GAR member for a brief time however as she died the same year.

Posts were named for deceased persons and existed throughout Wisconsin and the U.S.  The John M. Reed Post #155 was formed in Kewaunee.  In Ahnapee, J. Anderegg Post #242 was named after Joseph Anderegg, an early settler, a carpenter, and the first clerk of Wolf.  Anderegg was a well-respected local businessman.  In Manitowoc, the H. M. Walker Post #18 was formed; in Sturgeon Bay there was another, the H. S. Schulyer Post #226.

Yours Very Truly, George W. Wing
Grand Army of the Republic

 At the height of its popularity, by 1890, nearly 500,000 Union Civil War veterans were members of the GAR.  The final Encampment was held in Indianapolis in 1949.  The GAR dissolved when the last member, Albert Woolson, died in 1956 at age 109 but successor groups including the Sons of Union Veterans, Auxiliary to the Sons, Woman’s Relief Corps, Daughters of Union Veterans, and Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic carry on the traditions of the GAR.  More information about these organizations is available online at suvcw.org.

    

Among the lasting acts of the GAR was General Order #11.  It called for a Decoration Day—a day of remembrance to be held each May 30.  It was the origin of Memorial Day. 

After the War

Monday, March 7, 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.

Michael McDonald mustered out on October 9, 1865 at Mobile, Alabama. 

Upon his return to Ahnapee, (now Algoma, Wisconsin), his home, Michael captained the first regularly organized militia company ever perfected in the county.  It was organized in the spring of 1866.  Comprised of late veterans of the Civil War, it numbered some 60 men.  Their uniforms consisted of bright red flannel shirts with black trousers and the company, according to "Pioneer Story" written and printed by George Wing in the Algoma Record Herald in 1914, "made quite a natty appearance when it appeared upon the streets for drill."

Veterans, who were bonded like brothers by their Civil War experiences, held reunions for many years after the war. 

Michael McDonald (center) and his brother John (right)

In the summer of 1866, at 21, Michael married Ella Louise Elliott, the 17 year-old daughter of George W. and the late Juliana Elliott on July 23 in Ahnapee. 

The Civil War had taken a toll on Ella's family as well.  All of her four brothers: David, 26; Charles, 20 (of the Iron Brigade); Park, 17; and Irving, 16, served in the Civil War.  Only two returned.  Park was killed on the battlefield at Chaplin Hills, Kentucky on October 8, 1862.  Charles was wounded but recovered and went on to be a prominent newspaperman in Pennsylvania.  Irving was in Washington, D.C. and shouted with the others as President Abraham Lincoln and his wife passed on the way to Ford's theater and wept with the rest of the soldiers as they passed his bier where the body of the martyred president lay.  A month later Irving, in the 32nd Wisconsin, took part in the Grand Review.  A printer, Irving was also in the newspaper business and published the Algoma Record from 1908 to 1918.  He was the oldest surviving Civil War veteran of Kewaunee County and perhaps the oldest Mason (member of the Masonic order) in years of membership at the time of his death in 1941.  (Read Irving Elliott's letters home from the war here.)  David never came home.  Some claimed that David deserted over a disagreement with his superiors.  He may have died--as so many soldiers did--from illness.  I've never found a definitive explanation for David's disappearance.      

Charles Elliott of the Iron Brigade (from THE OWL)

(The amazing story of Park Elliott is told in my September, 2000, volume 3, issue 9 of Family Times, "Ancestor Anthology--Park Benjamin Elliott:  A Boy Lost Too Soon.")

After the war, Michael, barely 21, bought the Sherman House and became a hotel proprietor, then sailed upon the lake on the "Bessie Boalt" and fished for a few years with his brother John (the one-armed ship captain who lost his arm in the Civil War) and bought and attempted to clear a farm near Brummer's Mills.  Then Michael conducted a store in the village and, finally, studied law and opened a law office with Judge Parker.  He was a police justice of Ahnapee and deputy sheriff of Kewaunee County and active in politics.  He established and edited the Algoma Press and finally, broken in health, almost totally blind, and so deaf that he could only hear with the greatest effort, and stricken with paralysis, he gradually dropped out of the life of the town.  He died at the National Soldier's Home in Milwaukee on May 20, 1914 at age 69.
       

Michael McDonald

The End.

The Grand Review

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. 

At the close of the war, a Grand Review of the Armies procession was held in Washington D.C. to honor the troops with the soldiers parading before dignitaries including President Andrew Johnson (Abraham Lincoln was assassinated the month before).  Here is Michael McDonald's personal account of that day, May 24, 1865.

The Grand Review (photo from Wikipedia site)

I have a distinction that I desire to lay claim to at this time.  I was the last man to pass the reviewing stand on the day of the historic Grand Review at Washington at the close of the war.  It happened this way.  Company E was the only company in its regiment to make the through trip with Sherman (William Tecumseh Sherman) on his memorable march, and it had been attached to the 1st Missouri Engineers in charge of the pontoon train.  At the Grand Review, the pontoon corps brought up the rear of Sherman's army--the engineers marching ahead and the wagons following.  The 1st Missouri Engineers was a good regiment but it had never been in battle, while Company E had memories of Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, Atlanta, and a score of lesser engagements, and so, in our soldier pride, we refused to march with our Missouri command, detaching ourselves from the regiment and falling behind the wagons.  There were only 30 or 40 of us but on that day we were the veteran 14th Wisconsin Infantry, and I was the last man in the company ranks.


                                                              Michael McDonald

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The Final Days

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.

Captured by the Confederate soldiers, Michael McDonald was sent to the Salisbury Prison.

...woke up the next morning to find ourselves at Salisbury--Salisbury notorious for its rebel prison pen!...


But only a day or two before our arrival, Kilpatrick had been through there with his Union troopers and had burned the prison stockade.  We were marched out to the prison grounds, a dead line established, and guards stationed around us.  We were the last guests at this celebrated southern hostelry upon ground that ought to be sacred in American history; where thousands of our brave fellows had suffered death by starvation.  Heretofore we had shared rations with our guards, but now we were placed upon the regular Salisbury diet--a pint of corn meal per day!  The lack of water was the cause of our greatest suffering.  Plenty of good water could be had just outside the prison grounds, but although the agonized cry of "water! water!" went up from three or four hundred parched throats hourly, it was not brought to us nor were we permitted to go for it,  and were obliged to content ourselves with what could be found in the stagnant pools within the grounds.  A young lady living in the vacinity subsequently told me that distressed by the cries of the suffering prisoners, she had repeatedly sent her colored servants with supplies to relieve their thirst, but that the guards invariably refused them admission. 


Luckily our days of imprisonment were to be few.  The southern confederacy was falling to pieces around us.  Day by day we observed that our guards treated us with increasing consideration, respect and deference.  And then the joyful hour came when they stacked their guns and shouted across the dead line, "Johnson's army has surrendered!  We are the prisoners and you are free!"


Perhaps we didn't cheer!

(Shirley's note:  Perhaps this was not "Johnson's army, but Confederate General Joseph Johnston's army that surrendered?  General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865.  News, however, didn't travel fast.  According to war department documents, Michael McDonald was taken prisoner near Raleigh, North Carolina four days later, on April 13, and returned to duty April 30, 1865.)

Given our liberty, we wandered around the houses of the neighborhood in search of something to eat, and were generally treated kindly.


Transportation was finally furnished us to Raleigh by rail and we bade Salisbury and its hateful memories anything but a fond adieu.  As our train passed by a camp of confederate soldiers we could not resist the temptation of cheering.  Exasperated by our elation, some of the men in camp seized their guns and poured a volley into our crowded car, seriously wounding two of our number.  It was the last time I was under fire from the guns of the Southern Confederacy in four years' service.


Arriving in Raleigh, Pete and I found that Company E was encamped four miles out from the city and we set out to make the distance afoot.  Both were weak from our prison diet and it took us many hours to make the journey, but by dint of frequent rests and helping each other along we finally came within sight of the camp and our ears were greeted with the shout, "Here comes Mike and Pete!" and the boys came streaming out to meet us.  We had to fight them off and keep them at a distance, while we called for water and clean clothes.  We were literally alive with vermin.  But a bath in a neighboring creek, wholesome (food and clean) clothing and the services of Sloggy, the company barber, soon made us presentable.  And it was thus that the bummers of Company E got back to camp.

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Reminiscences of a Bummer

Sunday, March 6, 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.

His own words continue with his explanation of the realities of the war.  Among his responsibilities was helping to provide for the troops when they were cut off from the supply base.  Please keep in mind what was acceptable language in the 1800s and the dire needs of the soldiers when you read this account.  Here is Michael's story--his "Reminiscenses of a Bummer."
 
From Atlanta down to the sea and northward, my comrade Joe Deffoe and myself had been detailed as the official foragers of Company E.  We were two of that necessary and much talked about, somewhat unique branch of the military establishment of the civil war known in history as "Sherman's Bummers."


The great army cut loose from its base of supplies at Atlanta and marched into the vital parts of the Confederacy, depending upon the country it passed through for its daily food.  It was our business to get this food for Company E and it has never been charged that the supply failed.  Our duties were hazardous and always exciting.  The retreating rebels were but a few miles in advance of us.  It was our daily business to mount our horses and start out in the morning to visit the neighboring farm houses, keep along in the advance of the army and return into camp at night with our plunder.  Skirmishes between the bummers and the enemy were of daily occurrence and our risk of being captured great, but we enjoyed the exciting experience.  The race among the bummers to first reach a plantation caused them to take many chances.  We usually found no one at home but the women and the colored folks, the provisions hid, and the darkeys willing to give away the hiding place under threat or promise to take them along with us.


One day's experience will suffice for many.  My associate bummer and myself rode up to a planation house, dismounted, make a careful search of the house, barns and outbuildings but found nothing eatable.  Finally we caught a colored boy and a conversation like this followed:


"Sam, where are those hams?"


"Fo' de Lo'd, massa, I, douno."


"Yes you do, you black rascal.  Tell us where those hams are."


"But my massa don' shore kill dis here darkey if he ebber tell about dem 'yar hams."


"But we'll kill you if you don't.  See here, Sam; tell us and we'll take you along up north."


"Shore, massa, wont yo' do dis boy no ha'm and tak him norf wid yo's?"


We solemnly promise.  Sam finds a shovel and leads the way to the smoke-house.  The floor is removed and a few feet beneath the surface half a wagon-load or more of ham and bacon are found securely buried. 


"Now, massa, I'm gwine ter show yo' wher' dat ches' am buried."


And with visions of buried treasure, we follow Sam out into the fields and stand by while he unearths a large wooden chest, which, upon investigation, we find contains a few silk dresses and other female finery, an old fashioned white stove-pipe hat and an antiquated swallow-tail dress coat. 


That night the foragers of Company E drove into camp upon a wagon loaded with hams, bacon, cornmeal, poultry, vegetables and other luxuries of the season.  The wagon was drawn by a mule and the mule was driven by Sam.  The writer was attired in the swallow-tailed coat and white plug-hat, and Joe, his fellow bummer, in an equally fantastic costume. 


We fulfilled our promise to Sam.  He came North as the servant of Major Worden, commanding our battallion of the 14th Wisconsin. 


But one night the bummers of Company E failed to return to camp...

My next blog will describe the story of his capture and imprisonment.

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Predominating Impressions

Thursday, March 3, 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. 

In another of the amazing stories, Michael McDonald shared a second "Predominating Impression."  In his own words...

...It was at the crossing of the Saluda River; the day before Sherman’s army captured the city of Columbia.

All the way from Atlanta down to the sea and on the march northward, I had been the boatman of the pontoon train of the 15th and 17th Army Corps. Our Company had been temporarily attached to the 1st Missouri Engineers, and captain Henry, knowing of my experience as a boatman on Lake Michigan, had recommended me for this somewhat hazardous position.


It was my particular business to run the first line across the unfordable rivers we came to with a light skiff. With this line the heavy pontoons were placed in position. Thus it happened that during the entire march, I was the first man to cross the rivers we came to. With rear guard of the retreating enemy lurking in the bushes of the opposite bank to oppose a crossing, you can well imagine that my duties were no sinecure, and were not considered conductive to long life.


Sherman’s army had arrived in front of Columbia, and, as usual, the bridges had been burned to prevent us from crossing the river, or rather, rivers, for the Saluda empties into the Broad opposite the city, and it was necessary for our army to cross both streams.


The enemy were stationed in a thicket a short distance back from the high bluffs of the opposite shore, prepared to resist the crossing. The scene was somewhat spectacular. Our army lined the river bank and Logan, the “Black Eagle,” was there in person to superintend operations. The prospect of being the central figure for the next few minutes in what appeared certain to be a tragedy had no particular charm for me at the time.


To a surety, the rebels under cover on the other shore would make every effort to kill the boatman and prevent the line from being run. I had been in several unhealthy localities before during the great rebellion, but I think now, after mature reflection, that I shook hands with Death at the Saluda River.


But under the eye of Logan and in the face of the army, it required more courage to flunk than it did to cross the river.


My skiff was carried down the steep banks on the shoulders of the men and before it touched the water it had been perforated by two rebel bullets. I made my preparations carefully, jumped into my frail craft, took the oars and pushed into the stream. My friends and fellow countryman, have you ever been upon the water in a summer hail-storm? If you have, you can comprehend what happened around me for the next two or three minutes, or until I could get under the shelter of the opposite bank. That I survived the fusilade is one of the incomprehensible mysteries of life. Logan ordered up a battery and drove off the enemy.


The line was fastened upon the hostile shore, the pontoons were laid and the army crossed over. That night I ran another line across Broad River, and early the following morning Sherman’s army marched into Columbia.


My boat was perforated by several bullets. The boatman came off without a scratch, but he has a powerful impression that the late Southern Confederacy meant to do him some harm on that particular occasion.

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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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Michael McDonald's Civil War Experience

Michael McDonald photo taken in Vicksburg, 1863

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.     

The year was 1861.  Barely 16 years-old, "Mike" McDonald tramped down the beach from his Algoma home to Manitowoc to get a chance to enlist with Sloggy, Bill Fagg, the Perry boys and others in the "Manitowoc and Wolf River Rifles."  On October 8, 1861, he enlisted as a private in Company E, 14th Wisconsin Infantry.  Four long years later, he mustered out at the close of the war, October 9, 1865.

Michael McDonald served valiantly in Company E at Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, Atlanta, and all the way down to the sea with Sherman.  One of the most successful of "Sherman’s bummers," he told tales of keeping the commissary of Company E well supplied with the delicacies of "Dixie."  He also shared harrowing stories of illnesses and near death experiences including the time, in the closing days of the war, when he was made a prisoner and confined in the Salisbury prison pen.

Join me as I share his Civil War experiences.

Michael McDonald's Civil War Discharge

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