Baptized At Belmont: Iowa's First Hard Fight

Battle of Belmont

Belmont didn’t look like much on a map. A little Missouri River town facing the big Confederate works at Columbus, Kentucky. A flat stretch of timber and cornfields and muddy riverbank.

Up close, it was Ulysses S. Grant’s first proper fight, and it was Iowa’s first hard lesson in what the war was going to cost.

 

The Iowa troops at Belmont were mostly one outfit: the Seventh Iowa Infantry, a brand-new regiment raised at Burlington. They’d drilled, marched, cursed their blisters, and waited for the thing they’d signed up to do. Grant later admitted that the mood in his command was boiling over. In his Personal Memoirs he said “the officers and men were elated at the prospect of at last having the opportunity… to fight,” and that he “did not see how I could maintain discipline, or retain the confidence of my command, if we should return… without an effort to do something.”

So they went.

 

On November 7, 1861, Grant’s little expedition came downriver and put men ashore above Belmont. The Seventh Iowa was in Colonel Henry Dougherty’s brigade with the 22nd Illinois. Across the water, the Confederate guns at Columbus could see the entire show and reach it with heavy shot. The gunboats Tyler and Lexington worked the river to keep those big batteries busy, but everyone knew what the Mississippi meant that morning: it was the only way home.

 

Colonel Jacob G. Lauman, later a general

The Seventh Iowa’s commander was Colonel Jacob G. Lauman—hard-driving, ambitious, and exactly the type who didn’t want his men standing around behind somebody else’s glory. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel August Wentz of Davenport, was right there with him. Major Elliott W. Rice was there too, and so were the captains who would become the regiment’s spine: James C. Parrott, William R. Gardner, A. J. Harper, and others who were about to learn how quickly “officer” turns into “target.”

 

They pushed inland through broken ground and timber, meeting Confederate skirmishers and then heavier resistance. The fighting didn’t have the tidy look of older wars. It was smoke and shouting and half-seen men firing from the trees. At some point, the Seventh Iowa lost that comfortable sense of a “line” and moved the way new regiments often move—by sound, by instinct, by the tug of officers hauling them forward.

 

Then, the Union troops hit the Confederate camp.

 

There’s always a moment when discipline loosens and men believe it’s already over. The enemy camp is right there—tents, supplies, flags—everything that looks like victory if you’ve never had victory before. Colonel Dougherty said he “heard the cheering of the men as they entered the rebel camp,” and he noted how the “firing of small-arms ceased for a while.” That pause mattered. It was the breath a force takes right before the fight turns.

 

Because it turned.

 

Fresh Confederate troops came over from Columbus and moved through the timber with a goal every soldier understands: cut the enemy off from the boats. Dougherty felt sure “the rebels were crossing immediately into Belmont or above it,” and that the gunboats had to move “almost under some of the rebel guns” to help cover the river.

 

The Seventh Iowa ended up in the worst place a regiment can be in that kind of moment—out front, deep enough to taste success, and then suddenly asked to claw backward through additional pressure.

 

This is where the Seventh Iowa earned its Belmont reputation.

 

Grant told his superiors that “The Seventh Iowa… lost their colonel (Lauman), wounded severely, and lieutenant-colonel (Wentz), killed, and major (Rice), severely wounded.” He listed the dead and wounded by name—Lieutenants Dodge and Gardner among the killed, Captains Gardner, Harper, and Parrott among the wounded—then summed up what he’d seen: “Being on the field myself during the entire engagement, I can answer for the gallantry of officers and men of both these regiments.”

 

Lauman’s report spelled out the cost in human detail. “I might go on in this way and name nearly all my entire command, for they all behaved like heroes.” He singled out men who stayed steady when it mattered, and then he reached down into the mud and blood and pulled up a story that summed it all up. Private Lawrence Trigg, he wrote, had his thigh broken and was left on the field, taken prisoner, his leg amputated. Trigg “died the same day, telling his captors with his dying breath that if he ever recovered to be able to move he would shoulder his musket again in his country’s cause.”

 

That’s not a battlefield speech. That’s a man talking through pain.

 

Not every account came from the top. Captain Benjamin Crabb of Company H later wrote a supplement to the reports, explaining what his skirmishers saw and did. 

 

His company moved forward in a loose line, ran into Confederate skirmishers, and pushed them hard. Then the trap snapped shut. Crabb said they drove the enemy “into the open field of Belmont,” were about “80 yards in their rear,” and were about to pursue when “the rebels… lying behind this ridge, arose and” opened on them. It’s the oldest move in the book—bait and rise—and it still worked.

 

Crabb also captured the gritty, pointless bravery that shows up when men don’t want to leave anything behind. During the retreat, part of his company “drew one of the enemy’s guns across the field” toward the timber, but “finding it impossible to proceed with it farther… we reluctantly abandoned it.” Soon after, Crabb himself was captured.

 

While the infantry fought its way back, another detail shows how close the entire operation came to disaster. Captain John B. Detrich, commanding a detachment that included two companies of the Seventh Iowa, had orders to protect the transports. He watched the fight, tried to read the sound and tempo of the firing, and understood what it meant when the musketry suddenly became “very rapid.” He wrote that from the sound he judged the Union troops had encountered “fresh forces of the enemy, and were fighting their way back through them.”

 

Detrich moved his men into position near the boats. Once the troops started re-embarking, the Confederates pressed to the riverbank and began firing down from the high ground. Detrich’s line about that moment is pure Belmont: the men “spiritedly returned the fire of the rebels from the hurricane deck.” That’s how close it got—new troops, jammed onto a steamer, firing from the decks while the riverbank snapped with musket flashes.

 

In the end, the Union force got away, protected by gunboats and stubbornness. The Confederates held the field, but Grant came out of it more confident—and so did the men who survived it. Grant argued afterward that the fight mattered because it steadied his army. “The confidence inspired in our troops in the engagement,” he said, “will be of incalculable benefit to us in the future.”

 

For Iowa, the “benefit” came wrapped in grief. The Seventh Iowa took a savage hit. The regiment’s leadership was shot up. The casualty lists were long enough to change the way towns talked. Belmont wasn’t Shiloh or Vicksburg, but for Burlington, Davenport, and the little Iowa communities that fed the Seventh, it was the first time the war reached back through the newspaper columns and grabbed people by the throat.

 

Colonel Dougherty—an Illinois officer, writing about the Iowa men beside his own—said: “Iowa may well feel proud of her sons who fought at Belmont.”

 

They could be proud. They could also be angry at how fast it happened, how messy it was, and how victory turned into a sprint for the river.

 

Belmont taught Iowa troops that winning a camp doesn’t mean winning a battle, cheering doesn’t stop bullets, and the river behind you isn’t scenery—it’s survival.

 

The Seventh Iowa went into Belmont as a fresh regiment looking for its first fight. It came out as a regiment people remembered.