My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field

by Charles Carleton Coffin

The Fourth Illinois cavalry and three or four companies of cavalry were distributed among the brigades.

Colonel Birges’s sharpshooters were picked men, who had killed many bears, deer, and wolves in the Western woods. They could take unerring aim, and bring down a squirrel from the top of the highest trees. They wore gray uniforms of felt, with close-fitting skull-caps, and buffalo-skin knapsacks, and a powder-horn. They were swift runners. Each man carried a whistle. They had signal-calls for advancing, or retreating, or moving to the right or the left. They glided through the forests like fleet-footed deer, or crept as stealthily as an Indian along the ravines and through the thickets. They were tough, hearty, daring, courageous men. They thought it no great hardship to march all day, and lie down beside a log at night without supper. They wanted no better fun than to creep through the underbrush and pick off the Rebels, whirling in an instant upon their backs after firing a shot, to reload their rifles. Although attached to Lauman’s brigade, they were expected in battle to go where they could do the most service.

As you go up the Cumberland River, and approach the town of Dover, you see a high hill on the west bank. It is crowned with an embankment of earth, which runs all round the top with many angles. At the foot of the hill are two other embankments, fifteen or twenty feet above the water. There are seventeen heavy guns in these works. Two of them throw long bolts of iron, weighing one hundred and twenty-eight pounds, but most of the guns are thirty-two-pounders.

If you go into the batteries and into the fort, and run your eye along the guns, you will see that all of them can be aimed at a gunboat in the river. They all point straight down stream, and a concentrated fire can be poured upon a single boat. The river makes a bend as it approaches the batteries, so that the boats will be exposed on their bows and sides.

A mile above the fort you see the little village of Dover. Beyond the village a creek comes in. It is high water, and the creek is too deep to be forded.

On the south side of the hill, beyond the fort, between the fort and the village, are log-huts, where the Rebel troops have been encamped through the winter. A stream of clear running water comes down from the hills west of the village, where you may fill your canteen.

Going up the hill into the fort, and out to its northwest angle, you see that the fortifications which the Rebels have thrown up consist of three distinct parts,—the fort and the water-batteries, a line of breastworks west of the village, called field-works, and a line of rifle-pits outside of the field-works. You begin at the northwest angle of the fort, face to the southwest, and walk along the field-work which is on the top of a sharp ridge. The embankment is about four feet high. There are a great many angles, with embrasures for cannon. You look west from these embrasures, and see that the ground is much broken. There are hills and hollows, thick brush and tall trees. In some places the trees have been cut down to form an abatis, an obstruction, the limbs lopped off and interlocked.

As you walk on, you come to the Fort Henry and Dover road. Crossing that, instead of walking southwest, you make a gradual turn towards the southeast, and come to another road, which leads from Dover southwest towards Clarksville and Nashville. Crossing that, you come to the creek which empties into the Cumberland just above the town. The distance from the creek back to the fort, along the line of breastworks, is nearly two miles. Going back once more to the northwest angle of the fort, you see that the slope of the hill is very steep outside the works. You go down the slope, planting your feet into the earth to keep from tumbling headlong. When you reach the bottom of the ravine you do not find a level piece of ground, but ascend another ridge. It is not as high as the ridge along which you have travelled to take a view of the works. The slope of this outer ridge runs down to a meadow. The Rebels have cut down the tall trees, and made a line of rifle-pits. The logs are piled one above another, as the backwoodsman builds a log-fence. There is a space five or six inches wide between the upper log and the one below it. They have dug a trench behind, and the dirt is thrown outside.