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.”

Silent Nights, Gunshots, and Midnight Beliefs: Iowa’s Real Christmas History

Iowa didn’t invent a cute Christmas. It inherited a serious one.

 Before blinking lights and inflatable Santas, Christmas here was shaped by immigrants who brought their old customs intact, farmers who lived by weather and daylight, and towns that treated winter as something to endure rather than decorate. The result was something quiet, loud, watchful, and sometimes unsettling.

 

This isn’t folklore stitched together after the fact. These were actual practices Iowans followed, genuine beliefs they held, and real things newspapers felt compelled to comment on — sometimes approvingly, sometimes with irritation.

 

If you want to understand Christmas in Iowa, drop the soundtrack and listen harder.

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.