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.