“Father, I’d like mighty well to be a drummer boy. Can’t I go into the Union army?”
“Tut! my boy, what nonsense! You are not ten years old,” was the father’s reply; and he thought no more about it. When he disappeared, he had no thought that he had gone into the service. That afternoon Johnnie took charge of his sister Lizzie, seven years old, and his little brother Lewis, five years old, and took them to the Sunday-school room, and left them there.
As Johnnie did not return, the father and step-mother were greatly distressed, fearing he had gone to the canal and gone in for a swim, for he was an expert swimmer, and had been drowned. They searched far and near to find him, and had the water drawn from the head of the canal that they might find his body, but all in vain. Several weeks past before they heard from him, and then they got word through a woman living at Mount Vernon, who had been a neighbor to them at Newark, that Johnnie had been there, and that she had sent him home in care of the conductor.
It seems that Johnnie moved on the sympathies of the conductor, who took him on to Columbus, where he joined the Twenty-fourth Ohio Regiment; but ascertaining that an uncle was in that regiment, he left it and joined the Twenty-second Michigan.
He was an expert drummer; and being a bright, cheerful little fellow, he soon won his way into the confidence and affection of officers and men.
He was in many battles; at Shiloh, Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Nashville, and Kenesaw, and in other engagements in which the Army of the Cumberland took part.
When he entered the army, being too young to be mustered in, he went with the regiment, the Twenty-second Michigan, as a volunteer, until the battle of Shiloh.
When he was beating the long roll at the battle of Shiloh, a piece of shell struck his drum and sent it flying in fragments. He was after that called “Johnnie Shiloh.”
He was afterwards mustered in, and served also as a marker, and with his little musket so served on the battle-field of Chattanooga. At the close of that bloody day, the brigade in which he was, being partly surrounded by rebels, was retreating, when he, being unable to fall back as fast as the rest of the line, was singled out by a rebel colonel who rode up to him with the summons, “Scoundrel, halt! Surrender, you —— little Yankee!”
Johnnie halted, and brought his gun into position as though he was about to surrender, thus throwing the colonel off his guard. In another moment the gun was cocked, fired, and the colonel fell dead from his horse.