MEDICAL CORPS OF ARMY OF POTOMAC IN CAMP UNDER SURGEON JONATHAN LETTERMAN
THE end of 1862, in the Civil War, found the army in the East in camp at Falmouth, Virginia, after severe reverses. In the Southwest a vigorous campaign was being waged by the heroes of Iuka and Corinth, Mississippi. Grant was in supreme command of the Federal corps in northern Mississippi. A movement was in operation against Vicksburg. Sherman was attempting to get into the rear of the city by the Chickasaw Bayou road which ran from the Yazoo battlefield to the Walnut Hills, six miles above the city. His column of thirty thousand men was defeated and driven back with dreadful slaughter on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth of December. Rosecranz was established at Nashville, while Bragg was putting his men into winter huts at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The Federal troops enjoyed Christmas in camp and on the following morning, in a cold rain, the Army of the Cumberland advanced to Stone River where it enters the Cumberland River just above Nashville. At sunrise on the last day of 1862, Rosecranz's army met Bragg's forces with a deafening roar of artillery and musketry that fairly caused the earth to tremble. The fighting on both sides was of a determined character. The fields were literally covered with dead and dying men. Victory was claimed by both the Federals and the Confederates. Photographs are here shown of Chickasaw Bayou and the deadly Poison Spring on the battlefield; also an excellent portrait of the medical corps of the Army of the Potomac, in camp under charge of Dr. Jonathan Letterman, a prominent battlefield surgeon.
EVERY AMERICAN citizen pledges his "life, fortune and sacred honor" to the truth that "all men are created free and equal," and that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain "unalienable rights." It was fidelity to this oath, as sacred as life itself, that led the American people to rush "to arms" to defend it.
The mobilization of a volunteer army, of freemen born and bred in the arts of peace, never was known until the new Republic of the Western Hemisphere championed the cause of Liberty and common manhood. Battle-trained monarchies declared that it could not be maintained; that the hundreds of thousands of men who were offering their services to their country could never stand the severe exposures and deprivations of warfare. The tongues of the Nations knew not what they were talking. These men were fighters, not by training or nature, but by an honest impulse of the heart they were patriots. It was not love of adventure that urged the strongest men of the North to leave home and family and shoulder a musket under the Stars and Stripes; nor was it a brutal love of combat that marshalled the best manhood of the South to the flag of the Confederacy. It was an impulse that no people had ever before felt. It was a sense of justice that was early kindled in the American Heart with the first tidings of the Declaration of Independence.
MAJOR-GENERAL AMBROSE EVERETT BURNSIDE ON HIS HORSE ON THE BATTLEFIELD IN 1863
One day during the interval between the defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and the siege at Knoxville, Tennessee, General Burnside was mounted on his favorite charger, viewing his army maneuvers in the distance, when one of the Brady cameras was brought into focus and, with the General's permission, the negative was secured—General Burnside valued this photograph highly
While the anguish of the Civil War was brooding over the Nation, mountain and valley, plain and forest, farm and factory—from ocean to ocean—offered its strongest manhood in defense of the country. New York, the largest state in the Western World, sent the greatest number of men to the line of battle—448,850; then came Pennsylvania with 337,936; Ohio with 313,180, and Illinois with 259,092. Indiana came to the front with 196,363; Massachusetts with 146,730, and Missouri brought 109,111.