Colonel John W. Rankin 17th Iowa Infantry Civil War

 

(Colorized image from Iowa Colonels and Regiments by A. A. Stuart. 1865)

John W. Rankin helped raise the 17th Iowa Infantry in 1862 and went in as one of its field officers. They got little time to settle in. By fall, they were in Mississippi. At Iuka in September, the fighting came quick in broken ground. Lines blurred. Men fired at shapes more than targets.

A few weeks later came Corinth. October 4 hit hard. Confederate attacks drove into the line and shook it. The 17th Iowa took heavy losses. Parts of the regiment gave ground. Some were captured. Still, enough held for the army to recover and push back. Rankin was there at Corinth, where the fighting broke and reformed under pressure… and at Champion’s Hill, where Grant later wrote the battle was “stubbornly contested at every point.”

In 1863, they moved with Grant into Mississippi. Jackson fell after a quick fight. Then came Champion Hill on May 16. That was the one that decided things. The ground was rough. The fight didn’t move cleanly. Units went in, stalled, shifted, and went in again. The 17th stayed in it as the line bent and pushed forward.

After that came the Big Black River and then Vicksburg. The work changed there. No charges. Just digging, holding, and waiting under fire. They spent weeks in the trenches. Heat, dirt, sickness. Rankin stayed with the regiment through it, part of the long grind that ended when Vicksburg finally gave up in July 1863.

5th Iowa Infantry In The Civil War

Colonel Samuel Rice

The 5th Iowa Infantry formed at Burlington in July 1861. Most of the men had never seen combat. Within a year, they would. Early on, the regiment was led by Colonel Samuel A. Rice, a Burlington lawyer who brought order to a green command. By the fall of 1862, they were in Mississippi with Rosecrans, facing Confederate forces at Iuka and Corinth.

At Iuka, the fight came fast and close. Thick timber broke the lines. Units lost contact. Reports from the field describe heavy fire and confusion. Grant later wrote that “the enemy made a stubborn resistance.” The 5th Iowa held its ground and took its first hard losses.

Corinth followed weeks later. On October 4, Confederate attacks hit the Union line hard. The 5th Iowa went forward in the counterattack. They helped drive the enemy back. In the advance, they captured the colors of the 40th Mississippi and took prisoners. Rosecrans reported that the Union forces “drove the enemy from every position.” Rice had the regiment in hand during the fight, keeping it steady as the line bent and then pushed forward.

In 1863, the regiment moved with Grant into Mississippi. At Raymond, the fight stretched across fields and woods. The Confederates held at first, then gave way under pressure. Grant again noted the resistance, calling it “stubborn.” Two days later, the army took Jackson after a quick fight.

Soldier Letter From 4th Iowa Cavalry At Fort Scott

This letter from an unnnamed captain of the 4th Iowa Cavalry dated Fort Scott, October 26, 1864, was published in the Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye on November 12, 1864.

Dawn attack at Trading Post on the Marais Des Cygnes River

Yesterday was a glorious day for the gallant Second Division. We encamped the night we left you three miles north of New Santa Fe. Moved next morning at 6 a.m. and marched 20 miles, coming up with Price’s army at a little Trading Post on the Marais Des Cygnes River where we halted at 11 p.m. The next morning at daybreak, Sanborn’s Brigade M. S. M. in front, supported by the 4th Iowa Cavalry drove the enemy from a strong position on the bluff north of the river, routed them from their camp on the south side of the river, capturing one piece of cannon and followed them out on the prairie closely.

Two miles from Mound City and fourteen from Trading Post, Marmaduke’s division made a stand. Phillips’ First Brigade M. S. M. came up on the right and formed first. Then our command came up on the left and formed a column of regiments, the 10th Minnesota in advance, the 4th Iowa next, and the 3rd Iowa in the rear of our 21st Brigade.

Civil War Letter From 6th Iowa Infantry 1863

This letter from the 6th Iowa Infantry at Oak Ridge, Miss., dated August 24, 1863, was printed in the Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye on September 12, 1863.

6th Iowa Infantry on a scouting expedition

Having just returned from a sojourn at Paducah, Ky., made in consequence of a wound received at Black River on the 6th of July, I thought an account of a few things noticed on the trip down the river might not prove uninteresting to your readers. 

 

And first, allow me to say that the hospitals at Paducah are just what they ought to be. Those who have friends there may rest assured that everything possible is being done to make them comfortable, and if they do not recover, it will not be because they are beyond the reach of medical skill and the equally important attention of the kindest and best nurses. 

Civil War Soldier's Letter From 2nd Iowa Cavalry

 On May 8, 1863, The Muscatine Journal printed this letter from an unnamed member of the 2nd Iowa Cavalry.

2nd Iowa Cavalry setting off on a scouting expedition

April 17, we, the 2nd Cavalry, started out on a scout, in company with the Sixth and Seventh Illinois Cavalry, having five pieces of two pounders. We all went south together as far south as Houston, which is south and east of Grenada. Here our regiment was sent off on the Columbus Road. When within about 20 miles of Columbus (on the Ohio and Mobile railroad), we were attacked by parts of three rebel regiments, 900 strong. We had about 500 men, but soon made the rebels fly, with no loss whatever on our side. We wounded 12 of the rebels, that we know of.

About an hour before this fight, 27 of our men were sent out on a byroad, leading into a swamp, to get a lot of horses and mules, known to be secreted there. They got some 60 head, and mounting a lot of darkies on them, started to rejoin the regiment. Soon, however, they found out that they were cut off by the rebels and endeavored to reach us by another route. After riding on this tack eight or ten miles, they found themselves between a heavy rebel column and their advanced guard. They now took off through the woods, on no road at all, but in executing this maneuver four men who were in the rear were taken prisoner. The rest got back to the regiment about 11 o’clock at night. The four men taken were from Atalissa. Their names are: Chas. Cope, C. Eves, B. F. Barkalow, and Barclay J. Embree.

Colonel Earl D. Thomas Fort Des Moines 1906

Colonel Earl D. Thomas, commander of the Eleventh Cavalry at Fort Des Moines, took command several cavalry units in Cuba in 1906.

Thomas began his military service as a private in the Eighth Illinois, rising to sergeant-major during the Civil War. He graduated from West Point in 1869 and was assigned to the Fifth Cavalry where he took part in many of the Indian Wars. He fought in the Indian campaigns in the Republican River Country, the Apache Campaign of 1872-1874, at Four Peaks, Salt River Canyon, Music Mountain, and many more campaigns in the West.

Thomas was on frontier duty in Kansas and Nebraska from 1878 to 1885, led a surveying expedition in 1879, and fought in the Western Indian Wars from 1885 to 1898. 

When the Spanish American War broke out, he helped outfit Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, then served as an inspector general of volunteers. In 1899, he became an associate judge in a provincial court in Cuba. He returned to the United States in 1900 and served on the frontier for several more years.

Thomas was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1904 and took command of the Eleventh Cavalry at Fort Des Moines in April of that year. When he headed to Cuba in 1906, two-thirds of the 851 men at Fort Des Moines went with him.

Iowa Military Units at Camp Dodge

The Des Moines Register (October 7, 1917) published these pictures of Iowa soldiers at Camp Dodge, training for overseas duty in World War I. It's an interesting look at army life.

Sioux City men of Company A training at Camp Dodge.

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.

Battleship Iowa in the Spanish American War

Battleship Iowa at sea

By the time the Spanish–American War broke out in 1898, the Iowa was one of the most powerful warships afloat. Four 12-inch guns. Thick armor. A deep, steady hull built to fight, not parade. She represented a country that had finally decided it intended to be taken seriously at sea.

The New York Times called her “a floating fortress, built less for ceremony than for punishment,” while Harper’s Weekly said the ship looked “as if she had been designed to endure blows rather than admire them.”

Much of the ship’s personality came from her captain. Charles Edgar Clark.

He believed in drills, discipline, and doing things correctly even when no one was watching. Sailors described him as calm, blunt, and unmovable once his mind was made up. Lieutenant John M. Ellicott, one of the ship’s junior officers, said Clark “spoke little, expected much, and wasted no time convincing anyone twice.”

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.”