Samuel J. Kirkwood: He Mobilized Iowa For The Civil War

When Samuel J. Kirkwood became governor of Iowa in 1860, the country was already sliding toward civil war. He acted fast, calling for volunteers, forming new regiments, and getting those men ready to serve the Union.

On April 16, 1861, Washington ordered Iowa to send a regiment for immediate service. Kirkwood didn’t have time to ease into the war; he began organizing at once.

The United States didn’t have a large army. That meant the states had to do much of the work. Iowa had willing men, but supplies were scarce. Guns and ammunition were the biggest problem. Even when volunteers poured in, the state couldn’t outfit them properly.

Kirkwood’s job became a constant scramble for equipment. At first, he wasn’t sure he could raise a full regiment. When volunteers flooded in by the thousands, the number of men ready to serve was larger than the state could quickly arm and outfit.

That created a fresh crisis. Kirkwood and other leading Iowans took unusual steps to get the state moving. They pledged personal property to borrow money for supplies, because waiting meant wasting time the Union didn’t have.

27th Iowa Infantry in the Minnesota Sioux Uprising

Attack on the Lower Agency in Minnesota Sioux Uprising

In August 1862, violence swept across Minnesota in what became known as the “Minnesota Sioux Uprising.” It hit fast and close. Along the Minnesota River valley, families fled farms and small towns with little warning.

New Ulm was attacked on August 19, and panic spread across southern Minnesota. Fort Ridgely was assaulted on August 20 and again on August 22. Settlers crowded into towns or ran east, leaving wide stretches of countryside empty.

On September 6, the War Department created the Department of the Northwest and placed Major General John Pope in command, with headquarters at St. Paul. Pope’s orders were clear: restore order and end the violence. His first problem was also clear. He needed troops.

The Civil War made that difficult. Regular army units were tied down in the South and East. Pope had to pull help from nearby states, even if the men were brand new. Iowa responded with the 27th Iowa Volunteer Infantry.

Rearguard Action At Jenkins' Ferry

Iowa soldiers covering the retreat at Jenkins Ferry

Jenkins’ Ferry wasn’t a battle anyone went looking for. It happened because the Union army was tired, short on food, soaked to the bone, and trying to get out of southern Arkansas without being destroyed.

The trouble started weeks earlier with the Camden Expedition. The plan looked good on paper. A Union force would move south from Little Rock, link up with other columns tied to the Red River Campaign, and tighten the squeeze on Confederate Arkansas. In reality, it was a gamble. Supplies were thin. Roads barely deserved the name, as spring rain turned everything into mud and muck.

Iowa regiments made up a big part of the force. They knew what campaigning in the Trans-Mississippi looked like, and they knew it was usually miserable. This one got bad faster than expected.

Iowa Soldiers at Iuka and Corinth

General William Rosecrans

The fights at Iuka and Corinth tested Union troops in very different ways. Iuka was a confused collision in the woods. It came late in the day and never settled into a clean line. Units bent, folded, and drifted under pressure. Corinth followed two weeks later and felt nothing like it. It was a direct assault on a fortified railroad town. Success depended on whether men could hold ground while being hit again and again.

Iowa regiments ended up in the hardest places because the campaign pushed experienced units toward weak points. When the line thinned, they were sent there. When artillery needed cover, they were placed beside it. When ground had to be held no matter the cost, they were already close.

Iuka sits in northeastern Mississippi where roads and rail lines cross. The town was nothing more than a dot on the map. What mattered was control. Confederate General Sterling Price moved in during September, hoping to regain ground and threaten Union supply routes. Union commanders tried to trap him before he could slip away. A column under William S. Rosecrans marched in from the southwest. Another under Edward Ord moved in from the northwest.

On paper, the movement seemed simple enough. Two columns would close in and crush Price’s force. In the field, everything broke down. Roads narrowed into muddy paths. Wagons jammed. Units lost their bearings. Ravines cut across the landscape and split formations without warning. The woods were thick and uneven. Sound didn’t travel the way it should have. When fighting started, part of the Union force never heard it and stayed out of the battle, forcing Rosecrans’ column to take the full weight of the attack alone.

Second Iowa Infantry At Bull Run

Fighting at Bull Run

Most Iowa soldiers fought the Civil War in the West. Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga shaped Iowa’s war. But one Iowa regiment got its start closer to Washington than most Iowans would ever get.

When the war broke out in April 1861, Iowa moved fast. Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood called for volunteers. The Second Iowa gathered at Keokuk in May, where drilling started before uniforms and equipment fully arrived. Some men trained in work clothes. Discipline came quickly. So did confidence. The Gate City reported that the camp at Keokuk was “crowded daily with citizens watching the men drill.” The regiment showed “an uncommon seriousness for troops so newly raised.”

 

By early summer, the Second Iowa was sent east, attached to the Army of the Potomac. For many of the men, it was their first time away from home. The camps around Washington were crowded and noisy. Politicians, reporters, and spectators drifted in and out. Everything the army did seemed to be watched. The New York Tribune described western regiments arriving near Washington as “plain in dress but earnest in bearing,” a contrast not lost on eastern observers.

Crocker's Iowa Brigade: General Marcellus Monroe Crocker

Marcellus Monroe Crocker

Marcellus Monroe Crocker was living in Des Moines when Fort Sumter fell, practicing law and coughing his way through tuberculosis. He was thin, already sick, and had every excuse to sit the war out. Few would have questioned it. Instead, he went to work.

Within weeks he was moving through central Iowa raising volunteers. The Iowa State Register said he took up the task “without flourish or delay,” traveling town to town despite failing health, speaking plainly about what lay ahead and promising nothing except hard service. Those efforts produced the 13th Iowa Infantry. When the regiment elected its officers, the men chose Crocker as colonel, “because he knew what he was doing and didn’t pretend otherwise.”

The 13th Iowa entered service in the fall of 1861 and headed south almost immediately. Training was brief. Rifles and gear were uneven. Crocker made up for it by drilling the men hard. He pushed order and repetition until movement became instinct. An officer said he “taught us to move as if confusion were a thing we could not afford.”

The lesson paid off at Shiloh. On the morning of April 6, 1862, the 13th Iowa was rushed into line as Confederate forces crashed into Grant’s army. The battlefield dissolved into smoke and noise. Units overlapped. Officers vanished. Orders arrived late or not at all. The Dubuque Herald called it “a fog of powder and panic, where men fought what they could see and guessed at the rest.”

The 6th Iowa Infantry And The War That Wouldn’t End

The 6th Iowa Infantry found itself stalled in the mud and muck

The 6th Iowa Infantry, organized in the summer of 1861, was drawn largely from Johnson, Linn, Cedar, Scott, and Muscatine counties. The recruits ranged from teenagers to men in their forties, many of whom enlisted alongside relatives or longtime neighbors.

The regiment mustered in at Camp Ellsworth in Keokuk, where weapons and uniforms were scarce to nonexistent. The Keokuk Gate City worried Iowa’s first regiments were being sent forward faster than the state could properly equip and train them.

 

Private Ezra L. Brown of Company D echoed that sentiment in a letter home. “We march and halt,” he said, “until our legs do not care which comes next.” What made it harder was the officers were no help. Many of them were learning their duties alongside the enlisted men.

Colonel Milo Smith: He Led From the Front

Milo Smith was living in Iowa when the call for volunteers went out in 1862. That summer he helped raise the 26th Iowa Infantry, a regiment drawn largely from eastern Iowa counties along the Mississippi River. The men elected Smith colonel, a decision Iowa papers treated as practical rather than sentimental. The Clinton Herald said he was “steady and methodical in the discharge of duty, attentive alike to discipline and the welfare of his command.” But that might not have been the complete story. A soldier’s letter in The Morning Democrat said the officers of the 26th were all “well liked, especially our Colonel, Milo Smith, who goes around among the men like a father.”

 

The 26th Iowa was mustered into federal service in September 1862 and sent south almost immediately. The regiment traveled downriver into Arkansas as part of Union efforts to secure the Mississippi River system and suppress Confederate positions along its tributaries.

 

The regiment’s first major engagement came in January 1863 at Fort Hindman, commonly known as Arkansas Post. The Confederate fort guarded the Arkansas River and posed a continuing threat to Union supply traffic on the Mississippi. Union commanders determined to remove it, assembling a combined force of infantry and gunboats for the attack.

Iowa's John Murray Corse: He Stayed On The Field After Part Of His Jaw Was Shot Off

John Murray Corse helped raise the 6th Iowa Infantry and was elected major because the men thought he’d stand firm when the shooting started.

At Shiloh, in April 1862, the 6th Iowa was dumped into a fight that made no sense and stayed that way for two days. Corse was shot in the leg early and stayed on the field anyway. The Davenport Democratsaid he “refused to leave his command while the engagement continued.” In his official report, Corse said the combat was “severe beyond any former experience,” which is about as emotional as he got on paper.

Promotion followed. Corse became a colonel, then a brigadier general, commanding a brigade thick with Iowa regiments—the 6th, 7th, 19th, and 20th. He drilled them hard, and expected order and discipline. The Muscatine Journal said he was  “exacting to the point of severity.” None of that bothered Corse. His men didn’t have to like him. They just had to move when told.

In 1864, he rode with Sherman in the March to the sea. In October, Confederate General John Bell Hood tried to rip out Sherman’s supply line at Allatoona Pass. Corse’s brigade was in the way. Hood demanded surrender. Corse declined. In his report, he said he informed the enemy he was prepared for the assault.

Iowa Soldiers in Sherman's Atlanta Campaign

The Fifteenth Iowa marching south from Chattanooga

General William T. Sherman told his commanders the Atlanta campaign would be “continuous,” a contest of endurance rather than brilliance. “We must wear out the enemy,” he said, “by persistent fighting.” Sherman said the army would advance “step by step, feeling for the enemy and pressing him whenever found.” The Davenport Democrat warned readers this would be “not a dash, but a grind,” while the Burlington Hawk-Eye called it “war stripped of romance and fought by inches.”

The Iowa regiments were deeply woven into Sherman’s armies. The Second, Seventh, Eighth, Eleventh, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Twentieth, Twenty-fourth, Twenty-sixth, Thirty-first, Thirty-second, and Thirty-third Iowa Infantry marched south with the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio. Many were veterans, hardened by Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. Sherman said the western regiments had “learned to endure what would break others,” and Iowa officers understood this campaign would test that endurance daily. Private James H. Pierce of Company D, Twentieth Iowa, wrote home during the opening march that “we are feeling the enemy every day. There is no rest. We march, halt, throw up works, and fight, and then do it again.”

 

Colonel William W. Belknap of the Fifteenth Iowa said the work ahead would be “constant skirmishing, heavy labor with the spade, and frequent loss without decisive action.” The Dubuque Herald seized on the line, telling readers it was “a truer picture of the campaign than any glowing headline,” warning Iowa families the war had entered its most exhausting phase.

Forty-Seven Days Under Fire: The 26th Iowa Infantry at Vicksburg

Union troops fighting in the trenches outside of Vicksburg

The 26th Iowa Infantry was officially mustered into federal service in September 1862. Its companies came primarily from Clinton, Jackson, Dubuque, Scott, and surrounding eastern Iowa counties. Muster rolls show an average age in the mid-twenties, with a noticeable number of teenagers and men in their thirties who left families behind. An Iowa editor said the regiment appeared made up of “men more accustomed to tools than to arms,” who carried themselves with seriousness rather than excitement.

 

Training at Camp McClellan in Davenport was hurried. The papers said the state was sending men south faster than they could be fully prepared. The Davenport Democrat warned readers the new regiments would “learn the war by meeting it,” not by drilling safely behind the lines.

Jacob G. Lauman, Iowa's Forgotten General

General James G. Lauman

Jacob G. Lauman was born in Maryland, but Iowa shaped him. He settled in Burlington years before the war, working in construction and business, known locally as steady and exacting. When the first calls for volunteers echoed across the state in 1861, Lauman stepped forward quickly. The Burlington Hawk-Eye said he joined “with no flourish and no delay, as one who understands that duty does not require applause.”

He helped raise the 7th Iowa Infantry and was elected its colonel. That mattered. In those early regiments, men chose leaders they trusted to keep their heads when smoke and fear took over. A private said, “We wanted a man who would stand still when the air was full of lead. Lauman did.”

 

The 7th Iowa went south early and learned the war in fragments—quick marches, sharp fights, confusion that never quite matched the maps. At Belmont, Missouri, in November 1861, the regiment saw its first actual combat. Confederate fire cracked through the thick woods along the Mississippi. Men lost sight of the officers within seconds. Smoke turned the trees into shadows.

 

A soldier in the 7th said, “We fought in a fog of powder and noise, firing at shapes that moved and sometimes at nothing at all.” Lauman stayed mounted longer than most officers dared, riding between companies and shouting orders that barely carried. The Dubuque Times said Colonel Lauman “exposed himself freely and seemed indifferent to danger so long as his men held.”

Hawkeye Soldiers in the Trenches at Vicksburg

Union gunboats at Vicksburg

The Mississippi rolled past Vicksburg in a brown, patient curve, carrying supplies, rumors, and the quiet certainty that whoever held this bend held the West. Vicksburg sat high on its bluffs, ringed with earthworks and guns, daring the Union army to try. An Iowa soldier said it looked “like a city nailed to the sky.” Another felt as though “the river itself had taken sides.”

Iowa troops had been circling Vicksburg for months before they ever fired a serious shot at it.

 

The winter of 1862–63 had been one long frustration. Grant tried canals, bayous, and backwater marches. Men waded through swamps waist-deep, slept in mud, and ate rations that tasted of mold and dirt. A private in the Twenty-second Iowa said they were “marching in circles through water and mosquitoes,” while another thought the campaign felt like “a lesson in how not to get anywhere.”

Iowa Soldiers on Lookout Mountain

Collecting the wounded after the Battle of Lookout Mountain

Lookout Mountain rose straight out of the Tennessee River valley, a wall of rock and timber that loomed over Chattanooga like a warning. Clouds wrapped its upper slopes so often that soldiers joked it belonged more to the sky than the earth. An Iowa private wrote home saying it looked “like a giant standing with his head in the weather and his feet in the war.”

By November 1863, Iowa troops had been staring up at it for weeks.

 

After Chickamauga, the Union army was trapped in Chattanooga, half-starved and half-defeated. Confederate guns crowned Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, closing the valley like a vise. Rations were thin. Shoes were thinner. A soldier in the Fifth Iowa Battery said men were living on “cracker dust and hope.” Another said the army felt “held down by hunger and hills.”

Iowa Soldiers on Missionary Ridge

Battle of Missionary Ridge

Missionary Ridge looked impossible before it looked inevitable 

From the Union camps around Chattanooga, the ridge rose like a wall—steep, wooded, and crowned with Confederate rifle pits and artillery. An Iowa soldier said it looked “as if the rebels had piled the hill on purpose to keep us out.” Another said it was “a place no sane man would charge unless driven there by fate or fury.”

 

Iowa troops had already seen both.

 

By November 1863, Iowa regiments were scattered through the Army of the Cumberland and parts of Sherman’s force north of town. Men from the Second, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Eleventh, and Fifteenth Iowa Infantry were present in the Chattanooga campaign, worn down by months of marching, short rations, and the long siege that had nearly starved the army into surrender.

When Iowa Marched South With Sherman

General Sherman's troops cut a path of destruction in
their march to the sea

Sherman’s army marched out of Atlanta like a fire breaking loose.

The rails were twisted into knots. Warehouses burned. Smoke hung over the city for days. When the columns finally moved east in November 1864, they carried sixty days’ rations, little hope of supply from behind, and orders that shocked the country. William Tecumseh Sherman was cutting himself loose and living off Georgia.

 

Iowa men were deep in it from the start. They marched in the heart of Sherman’s army, not on the edges. Iowa regiments filled the ranks of the XV and XVII Corps, the hard-used western infantry Sherman trusted most. These were the same men who had fought at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Atlanta. Now they were being asked to march hundreds of miles through enemy country and make the Confederacy feel the war.

 

The Fifteenth Iowa Infantry, part of the XV Corps under Major General John A. Logan, stepped off with the rest. The Eleventh, Thirteenth, Sixteenth, Thirty-first, and Thirty-second Iowa followed in long blue lines. Sherman said his western troops “had learned that war was not an affair of posts, but of movement,” and Iowa regiments were exactly the men he meant.

Iowa Soldiers At Fort Donelson

Storming of Fort Donelson, Grant leading the charge
(colorized print, circa 1865)

Fort Donelson was cold misery before it was history. Snow lay deep in the woods. Ice crusted the roads. Men slept on frozen ground with no tents, no fires, and rations that came late or not at all. An Iowa soldier said the army looked “more like a band of refugees than conquerors,” wrapped in blankets stiff with frost. Another said the cold “cut like a knife and stayed with you.”

The Davenport Democrat warned readers the expedition was “no holiday march. The army was moving into “the teeth of winter and the teeth of the enemy at once.” The Burlington Hawk-Eye told its readers Iowa men were going south “not to parade, but to endure,” adding that the war was already “shedding its illusions.”

 

Then the shooting started.

 

Fort Donelson sat above the Cumberland River in northern Tennessee, a rough triangle of earthworks, rifle pits, and heavy guns meant to block Union movement south. Confederate commanders John B. Floyd, Gideon Pillow, and Simon Bolivar Buckner believed it could hold. The fort had numbers, artillery, and ground that favored defense.

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.”

James Tuttle: The Iowa General Who Held The Line

General James Madison Tuttle

James Madison Tuttle didn’t look like a soldier. He had the look of someone used to counting ledgers and weighing grain, not ordering men forward into rifle fire.

Before the war, he was a businessman in Keokuk, Iowa. Steamboats, trade, the river. A life built on schedules and contracts. When the war broke out in 1861, Tuttle was forty-one years old. Older than most volunteers. Too old, some thought, to start a war career from scratch.

 

The Keokuk Gate City said he was “not a man of noise or flourish, but one whose habits of order and decision commend him to command.” It was meant as reassurance. Iowa was sending fathers, clerks, and farm boys to war. They wanted officers who looked like men who’d bring them home.

 

Tuttle helped raise the 2nd Iowa Infantry and was elected its colonel. In 1861, officers weren’t handed down from Washington. Men chose whom they trusted. The 2nd Iowa chose Tuttle. The Gate City noted the regiment had selected “a commander of cool judgment, whose influence over the men is quiet but complete.”

 

They learned what that meant at Fort Donelson in February 1862.

 

The Union army pushed into Tennessee under Ulysses S. Grant, crashing into Confederate forts that guarded the rivers. Donelson was cold, muddy, and confused. Attacks stalled. Lines bent. Confederate generals tried to break out and escape.

Iowa Troops at Shiloh, April 1862

Steamboats at Pittsburg Landing

Iowa regiments were camped near Pittsburg Landing when the Confederate army came out of the woods at dawn and slammed into the Union camps with a violence few soldiers had ever imagined.

One Iowa correspondent said the attack came “like a thunderclap out of a clear sky,” adding that men were driven from their tents “before they had time to seize their arms.” A reporter for the Chicago Tribune was blunter: “The enemy fell upon us with a fury that astonished even seasoned troops.”

 

Shiloh wasn’t supposed to happen like that.

 

Union commander Ulysses S. Grant believed his army was secure while it gathered for an advance deeper into Tennessee. The camps were spread out. Men cooked breakfast. Some were still half asleep when musket fire cracked through the trees.

 

Grant would later admit, “I did not expect an attack so soon,” a statement repeated widely in Iowa papers in the weeks that followed.