11
Henry Kilburn, 12th Battery, Ohio Light Artillery
September 1862 to March 1863
Henry Kilburn arrived for duty with the 12th Ohio Battery sometime around September 10, 1862, just as the army was reorganizing after the Second Bull Run defeat. The Battery became part of the Division Artillery for Steinwehr’s Division, XI Corps (Sigel). As I said earlier, Franz Sigel is usually considered a disappointment by historians (although I have to say I don’t really see why – what I’ve seen of him makes him seem about as competent as most of the other other generals). He was a leading figure in the failed German revolt against Prussia in 1848 and fled to the United States. A leader of the American German community, he was appointed by Lincoln in a political move to gain their support for the war. He did get a large number of German immigrants to enlist, and they were intensely loyal to him, but he was never really successful in battle. Sigel started the war in Missouri, moved to the Department of Shenandoah in June 1862, commanded a corps under Pope and now under McClellan.
The XI Corps was left behind for the defense of the capital when McClellan moved most of his army toward Antietam. The "Defences of Washington" were begun immediately after the start of the war – Fort Ramsay at Upton’s Hill, where Herbert Kilburn spent some time, was one of the original three fortifications. By late 1862 there were 160 forts and batteries built on both sides of the Potomac and surrounding the city. Over 900 guns were permanently mounted. The fortifications were all connected by 37 miles of trenches and protected roads. The city of Washington during the war was the most heavily fortified spot in the Western hemisphere.
Henry Kilburn remained at Washington with the 12th Battery from the middle of September to the middle of December. Nothing much happened during that time; as far as we know they just stayed in camps or garrisoned the forts. Their field guns – Wiard steel rifled cannons – had been fired so much that they could not be used any more, and were abandoned after Bull Run. The battery may have manned some of the permanent guns around the city, but we don’t know for certain.
Elsewhere in the war, the Army of the Potomac (with Herbert Kilburn) was engaged at South Mountain and Antietam in September; there was a large Sioux uprising which endangered much of Minnesota; and Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Grant was campaigning in western Tennessee and northern Mississippi, preparing for his move down the Mississippi River; of some interest to us here is that William S. Rosecrans, the original commander of the 23rd Ohio, is now under Grant in Mississippi. Rosecrans performed well at the Battles of Iuka and Corinth in September and October, and on October 30 he was given command of the Department of Cumberland in Tennessee.
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Following the Battle of Antietam, McClellan allowed Lee to escape back into Virginia and then, as usual, dragged his feet in forming the pursuit. Lincoln gave him a few more weeks to get moving, but finally had enough of his reluctance and fired him in November. General Burnside, although he himself protested that he was not capable of handling so large a group, was given command of the Army of the Potomac on November 9, 1862.
There was no immediate effect on the XI Corps; they remained in garrison around Washington while Burnside started moving the rest of the army down the Rappahannock River to Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Burnside formed his army into three "Grand Divisions" of two corps each – the same as McClellan’s "Wings." The First Grand Division, consisting of II and IX Corps, reached Fredericksbug on November 17, and the rest of the army went into camp behind them. They were on the east side of the river, north and east of Fredericksburg. Burnside’s plan was to cross the river on pontoon bridges, then march south to find Lee. The only problem was, they didn’t have any pontoon bridges.
Burnside asked for the pontoon bridges to be sent down to him from Washington – but he never said that he needed them in a hurry. The people sending them had no idea that they were important, and treated it like a routine supply request. They took their time in packing the bridges, and then sent them by oxcart, the slowest possible way. They could have been floated downstream and reached Burnside by November 18; he didn’t get them until the 25th. Once again, the delay was fatal: there were no Confederates at all on the other side of river when the army first got there, and Burnside could have crossed with no problems. But by the time he got his pontoon bridges, Lee had his entire army moved into the hills surrounding the town. And once again, as at Antietam, the delay was completely unnecessary; they didn’t need the pontoon bridges at all. When the bridges arrived, the engineer units waded across the river to set them up – the whole army could have walked across at any time! What should have been a safe and easy crossing turned into a major battle, and another major defeat for the Union army.
It took nearly two weeks to set up the crossing, but by December 11 they got their bridges across the river and advanced toward Fredericksburg. The Confederates were driven out of the town, and the Union troops began widescale looting and destruction of private homes. This was the first major occurrence of looting in the war, which began to be a problem at this time. It indicated a basic change in attitude, an unforeseen effect of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Up to this point the army had been fighting "to preserve the Union;" now they were fighting "against slavery," and in their minds this was extended to "against slave owners" and from there, "against the South." They had been trying to defeat the Confederate army and bring the South back; now the South itself had become The Enemy, and there was a general feeling among the troops that it was all right to take anything they could get from the land of the enemy.
Burnside had more trouble than he had expected in crossing the river, and now faced a difficult attack on the hills surrounding the town. He sent back to Washington and ordered the XI Corps to come join the rest of the army. Henry Kilburn in the 12th Battery left Washington on December 12. The battery was now equipped with Rodman guns; we don’t know if they had these the whole time in Washington, or just now as they went back into the field. As far as I can tell, the new guns would never be fired. The move to Fredericksburg took four days, so they missed the large battle there on the 13th.
Like McClellan, Burnside wasted an entire day (December 12) in indecision, moving units around to different positions, while Lee was able to bring the rest of his army in. The Confederates occupied a perfect defensive position on Marye’s Heights: a continuous line of steep hills with fortified trenches. There was no chance of taking them, and Burnside should never have tried. But he did, on December 13, sending one division after another to be cut to pieces. They had to cross a hundred yards of flat, open ground, while the Confederates sat behind their barricades and shot them. Burnside continued to send in more troops, making six major attacks throughout the day; not one of them even came close to the Confederate lines. Neither side renewed the battle the next day. On December 15 Burnside pulled his army back across the river and went into winter camp. Henry Kilburn in the XI Corps arrived on the 16th.
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The Army of the Potomac, about 120,000 men, camped for the winter in the countryside around Falmouth, Virginia. The winter of 1862/1863 was the worst of the war for disease. Hundreds of men died of fevers, dysentery, pneumonia and other diseases. Living conditions and poor sanitation were partly responsible, but the resistance of the men was also weakened by depression. The whole army felt demoralized and beaten. The XI Corps was probably not as affected as the rest of the army, since they had not been through Antietam or the disaster at Fredericksburg, but Reid’s history of Ohio units mentions that many of the men in the 12th Battery were sick that winter.
The XI Corps, arriving after everyone else, was camped a little apart from the others. In addition, because they had a lot of German units, the entire Corps was known as "The Dutchmen" or "The Germans" by the rest of the army and were treated somewhat as outcasts. Made up of men from Ohio, Missouri, western New York and Pennsylvania, they were brought into Virginia by Pope and were never welcomed by the rest of the army, which was mostly from the Northeast.
During the summer both armies camped in canvas tents; each man carried a piece, and buttoned his sheet to others to make a tent for two or more men. In the more permanent winter camps, they built small four-man houses. Henry almost certainly spent the winter in one of these. They built walls of pine logs about 3 feet high in a 6 X 12 foot rectangle. The men then took their four pieces of canvas and made a tent on the top of the log walls, giving them a 6-foot ceiling in the center of the house. They sealed up the ends of the tent with boards or blankets. A small fireplace and chimney were built out of mud and sticks next to the doorway, and another blanket used to cover the door. The most elaborate beds, if they bothered, consisted of wooden frames filled with straw. Most just slept on a pile of straw on the dirt floor.
The men were prepared to spend the winter quietly in their camp, recovering from the defeat at Fredericksburg. But Burnside was not through yet. He formed a new plan, to march his army upstream in the middle of winter and cross at Banks Ford near Falmouth. That would bring him around the back of the Confederate lines.
So the army set out on January 20, 1863. The XI Corps and 12th Ohio Battery were a part of this expedition. The march did not seem bad at first, but in the afternoon a steady downpour of rain began. It continued all through the night; the temperature dropped and it changed to ice-rain, and continued pouring all through the next morning. The dirt roads they were using were a soft clay-sand mix. As the soil became saturated and the army continued to march, the entire area turned into a bottomless, sticky mire, and this campaign has become known as the "Mud March."
As the 21st wore on, the guns and heavier supply wagons slowly began to sink deeper. By 10:00 a.m. every wagon and every cannon in the army was sunk below the axles and could not be moved. The men, too, sank down to their knees at every step. The 12th Ohio Battery numbered around a hundred men and six cannons. The only way they could move was to tie ropes around one gun and have all 100 men pull it up and forward – and meanwhile the other five would be sinking deeper. The rain continued, and soon it took up to 300 men, themselves sinking as in quicksand, to pull one cannon. As soon as they stopped to rest, the cannon would sink completely out of sight. One by one they lost every gun they had – they are still buried there today.
Horses sank in halfway up their bodies and were left there, where they died. Men were dying of exhaustion, unable to pull their legs out of the mud. Hundreds of men gave up and wandered off into the woods; many went home and never came back. All this was happening alongside the river, and all through that day the rebels on the other side were shouting advice, offering to come over and help, and putting up signs to show them the way. The rain continued all that day and all through the night again. The men couldn’t go to sleep, or they would drown. The supply wagons were all lost in the mud and they couldn’t get any fires lit, so they had nothing to eat except raw salt pork and coffee beans.
On January 22, the rain continued without a break for the third day, and Burnside gave up at noon. They had come only a few miles in two days; it took them three more days to make their way back to the camps. Many men died of exhaustion on the march; many others died of exposure and pneumonia after they got back. They had lost most of their horses, and nearly all of their food, guns and ammunition. The end result of this march was the same as if they had lost another large battle.
The army got back to their camp on January 24. General Burnside was fired on the 25th, and on January 26 General Joseph T. Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac.
In the end, Hooker would turn out not much better than his predecessors. But he was very good at organizing and managing, which was exactly what they needed at the moment. The army had nearly fallen apart in the short time Burnside had commanded it. Morale was at its lowest point since the start of the war, and many of the troops were deserting. It was not very difficult just to walk out of camp and head north, and once a man got home no one really bothered with trying to find him and send him back. The demoralized state also helped the spread of diseases, as did the complete lack of hygiene in the camp. The supply system also broke down: large warehouses were full of fresh vegetables for the army, but no one bothered to request them and no one bothered to send them. The fresh food sat and rotted, while the men in camp lived on rancid salt pork and hard-tack biscuits. Hooker changed all this, probably the single greatest thing he did in the war.
One of the most important things Hooker did for the army was to start some simple health practices – he forced the men to take a bath and change their underwear once a week, dig their latrines away from their houses, and open up their houses to air out every few weeks – it makes one wonder how Henry had been living at this time. Hooker also appointed some officers to investigate the supply system and start the food moving from the warehouses to the men in the field. He made each unit appoint permanent cooks, and got them real pots and pans – before this time, each man cooked for himself every day in tin cans or whatever else he could find. Finally, Hooker started a practice of letting a few men from each unit go home for a few weeks at a time. (We don’t know if Henry ever got home on one of these leaves. The only records we have are the two-month roll calls, and he could have gone and returned without showing up on those.) All of these changes improved morale and greatly cut down the losses from disease and desertion.
Desertion and looting were still serious problems, however, and led to some further changes which directly affected Henry. Shortly after he took command, Hooker reorganized the Army of the Potomac. The 12th Ohio Battery was placed in the Headquarters Section of the Army, as part of the "Provost Guard." The Battery was now part of Patrick’s Brigade (Col Rogers), directly under the Provost Marshall (General Patrick). I am guessing that the reason they were placed in this brigade was that they had lost all their cannons in the Mud March, and could therefore do nothing as an artillery unit at this time. In fact we will see that for the rest of the war, the 12th Battery will be assigned to duties such as this, or as garrison in forts with permanent guns; they never got their own field guns replaced.
The Provost Guard was concerned with guarding civilian and military property against looters, watching roads and train stations to catch deserters, suppressing drinking houses and brothels, acting as police in the camps, maintaining discipline and traffic control on marches, guarding prisoners and carrying out punishments. Henry Kilburn remained in the Provost Guard for the rest of the winter, camped at Falmouth, Virginia. Both sides settled in quietly from January to April on opposite sides of the river. The only occurrence of interest to us is that General Sigel demanded a larger command and was put in charge of the Department of West Virginia; General Howard took over the XI Corps.
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