Yankee Artillerymen: Through the Civil War With Eli Lilly's Indiana Battery (review)

Abstract

90CIVIL WAR HISTORY Yankee Artillerymen: Through the Civil War With Eli Lillys Indiana Battery. By John W. Rowell. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Pp. xvi, 320. $11.95.) In Yankee Artillerymen John Rowell has produced another good book in the same style as his earlier Yankee Cavalrymen. This new work follows the fortunes of the Eighteenth Indiana Light Artillery Battery (Eli Lilly's battery) from its recruitment during the summer of 1862 until the end of the Civil War. It is based upon the journals, letters, and other documents of seventeen soldiers who were members of the unit and who are, according to Rowell, "the real authors of Yankee Artillerymen. . . ." These sources are supplemented with officers' reports and correspondence from The War of the Rebellion as well as contemporary newspaper accounts and manuscripts pertaining to the battery's activities. Marching some 6,000 miles and traveling another 1,000 miles by railroad the battery took part in General William S. Rosecran's Tullahoma campaign, next shelled the Confederate stronghold of Chattanooga, and then at the battle of Chickamauga it helped to stop the initial Confederate flanking movement. After fighting a winter campaign in East Tennessee, the battery played an active role in General William T. Sherman's Atlanta Campaign of 1864. The outfit concluded the war as a part of General James H. Wilson 's great mounted force that swept through Alabama and western Georgia in the spring of 1865. Rowell believes the Eighteenth may have been "the crack battery of Indiana." Unquestionably it was distinctive and was allowed , by special order, to use an extra team for its guns and caissons . And, for awhile, it was the only ten-gun battery in the Army of the Cumberland. Also, it became a part of the First Cavalry Division, an outstanding force which developed the ability of attacking and driving infantry from their earthworks, a previously unthinkable feat for cavalry. The outstanding collection of original material on which this book is based tells the story of war as seen by the participants. They were engaged in the great adventure of their lives and they describe the sickness, camp life, and death, the battles, the heroes and the cowards, such as the man whom one observer said was "so awful afraid of being killed that he came very near dying." And some of them describe their service with exceptional quality because the most prolific writers had attended Wabash College or Indiana Asbury University. These were better observers and writers than the usual Civil War soldiers. Yankee Artillerymen should be welcomed by both local history buffs and those who yearn to know the war as it was experienced by the men in the ranks. John Rowell has done an excellent job of BOOK REVIEWS91 bringing his sources together in a readable manner and supplying the necessary commentary and explanation to unify the whole. It might also be noted that the University of Tennessee Press did a first class job in producing the book. James L. McDonough David Lipscomb College Rebels on Lake Erie: The Piracy, The Conspiracy, Prison Life. By Charles E. Frohman. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio Historical Society. 1965. Second printing, 1975. Pp. vi, 159.) In Sandusky Bay in the western waters of Lake Erie, between the city of Sandusky and the Marblehead Peninsula, lies Johnson's Island . About a mile in length and half that in width, the island served as site of one of the principal military prisons of the Civil War. Between April, 1862 and September 1865, it housed an aggregate population of nearly 9,000 prisoners, with a high enrollment of 3,209 reported on December 31, 1864. Throughout this time it was used almost entirely as a prison for southern officers, including a number of colonels, brigadiers, and major generals, a sufficient number to staff an army and navy of 80,000 men. In the last years of the Civil War, the depletion of southern manpower resources combined with Confederate military reverses to produce a number of plots (and rumors of plots) to free the prisoners on Johnson's Island that they might be restored to positions of leadership in Southern forces. The "Northwest Conspiracy," seeking to...