17th Wisconsin Infantry

Legion Para

Captain
Retired Moderator
Joined
Jul 12, 2015
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS2200

17th Wisconsin Infantry

The 17th Wisconsin Infantry was organized at Camp Randall in Madison and mustered into service on March 15, 1862. The regiment left Wisconsin for St. Louis, Missouri, on March 23 and then went to Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, on April 10-14.

During its service it moved through Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, the Carolinas, Washington D.C., and Kentucky. The regiment participated in the battles of Corinth, Port Gibson, Champion Hill, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Jonesboro, as well as the sieges of Vicksburg, Atlanta, and Savannah and Sherman's March to the Sea.

The regiment moved to Louisville, Kentucky, at the war's end and there mustered out on July 14, 1865. It lost 269 men during service. Forty-one enlisted men were killed and 228 enlisted men died from disease.

 
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I wrote this about them for the local historical society:
Out of Bear Creek, near Clintonville, several men were in the 17th Wisconsin Infantry, Company K. Welcome Hyde, the famous resident of Clintonville, was for a short time a captain of this group. I collected the information on the men I wanted to profile and set to work learning about their experiences. The thing about the civil war history is that nobody gives it to you on a silver platter. Although there are literally hundreds of books on topics varying from small to large tactical analyses, not every little thing is covered. There was no book on the subject I wanted to study. Sure, I could read wonderful books on how it was for the average soldier. But I wanted to know how it was for OUR Clintonville and Bear Creek area boys and men.

This led me to a whole series of books and research that I could explain at length but for the sake of brevity, I will not. I learned that there were at least five accounts of what happened to the 17th from the mouths (well, hands) of the participants. I did a cursory search and found that the Wisconsin Historical Society had scanned an entire diary for years of the war by Orin Jameson. Apparently, he had died at a battle on Kennesaw Mountain. I decided to read it and take notes to see what the 17th lived through. I started in and immediately decided that Orin was a bore. His handwriting was awful and was in pencil. It was light, hard to read and misspelled. He started every single entry with the weather. “It is a sultry hot day today with a little rain in the evening.” I never thought anyone could have so much to say about the weather. But it made perfect sense as I read more on the subject at the same time – camp life between battles was dull. It was hard to find topics to even write to home about. Many men resorted to describing how they built breastworks, dug rifle pits, built winter shanties, or how picket guard duty worked.

Orin was absolutely reliable in his journaling. Every single day he had an entry. No matter how dull, he reported the drills and the more interesting events – arguments among the men, going to the theater in Vicksburg, and illness among the troops. Even the day he received the news his young daughter had died of illness, he wrote. In a rare show of pure emotion, this patriotic young man who believed so much in the Union wrote that he regretted ever joining the army. He called it a foolish mistake, and missed his wife Ruthie even more than before. He became deeply depressed on some marches and had to drag himself along. He tried to keep a stiff upper lip and abide the long, painful marches and sickness-inducing food, weather, and conditions. He was so relatable, speaking plainly and using terms we would use today. It did not seem like I was reading such an old diary, but listening to an uncle or cousin tell a story.

Orin wrote more about what the men lived through, such as lying in the open weather with no tents for months, rolled in their rubber blankets – sleeping through torrential rain when they must. The long roll at dawn summoning them from their few hours of sleep – time to move again. Time to lie on their rifles and watch for the rebels to attack. Every sentence conveyed, simply and clearly, the experience the 17th had down to the food they foraged and roads they took. I could track miles of traveling by the 17th simply by following Orin’s diary as he listed each campsite and what town it was near. In time, I added funny anecdotes from the newspapers of the time and letters written by other soldiers to this story. The men definitely had their fun, including a slapstick time when the Germans got a good laugh at an English soldier who tried to get unbroken German mules to take a harness. They helped him, but enjoyed the ribbing they gave the teamster thereafter.

Orin had a best friend, James, also in the 17th. James’ diary was not online, but he had one as well – likely copying his friend in the pastime. I trekked to the Madison Historical Society Library Archives and rushed to photograph every page of the diary before the archive closed. I have to admit I was stunned when the archivist handed me the original 150-year-old diary. Not copies, the actual thing. The splotches in it could have been coffee, or blood. The man who wrote this brought it with him every day of the war. It was amazing to me that I could touch such a thing – that it was not lost to time, decay, or destruction. I brought the photos home to look at after I finished Orin’s diary. It was 1864 and he had just turned 23, but it wasn’t a happy birthday as he missed his family. Shortly thereafter, only days, there it was. The entry started with “A hot morning.” After hundreds of entries in his journal, on August 7, 1864, that was all he wrote. It could not be right, it wasn’t like him to only write a sentence. I had forgotten he died in the war.

I continued to the next page. There, someone in a very different hand, who did not identify himself, described how he had brought a letter to Orin from a family friend. Orin read the letter for about 20 minutes when a sharp shooter shot him in the chest. He died at 9:40 A.M. at age 23. The writer says he buried him as best he could and put a board at his head with his name on it. The diary ended and I felt that yearning when a story ends but you want it to keep going. I think it was perfect that he ended the entry the day he died with the weather. It was what a farmer might do, and Orin was a farmer and the son of a farmer.

Like that, he was gone. This voice who told me reliably about every day and made it all seem so normal. I picked up his friend James’ diary, and was greatly pleased to see that he too started every day with the weather report. James adored Orin, and it was obvious from how he described what they did together each day, and how much fun he said they had in each other’s company. For a while, it was like still having Orin’s account, as the two of them were together all the time and experienced many of the same events. James was even more down to earth than Orin and his diary was even harder to read. His spelling and penmanship left much to be desired. But he was immensely likeable. When he talked about Orin’s death, he started the entry with the weather. “It was raining.” Fitting, in my opinion. Then he talked about burying Orin after being with him when he died. The next days after his death I really wondered how James could go on. A friend he spent all of his time with in a tedious, usually boring, or otherwise dangerous and terrifying environment was gone. The man he cooked with, foraged with, bathed down at the river with, marched with, and slept in the same area as for years… was gone. One day there, the next day gone. James struggled, but he made it through, although he stayed mostly by himself for the rest of the war. He survived, went home, and lived a long, full life. But I know he never forgot Orin. Neither have I.

I read every single thing I could about their experience. I combined the diaries and stories in a long outline, and now I am writing a book. I want to capture their days and tell a story of Wisconsin men, both volunteers and draftees, who went to war and saw the country in ways they never had imagined. Wisconsin men who felt, with astonishment, the warmth of Louisiana in February and gawked at the fruit ripening in March. Men who spent their days growing up helping or supporting their families, walked past the gigantic mansions of the Southern planters. Their tremendous gardens, fountains, and wealth beyond imagining. The African Americans living in abject poverty and servitude, who appreciated “Lincoln’s soldiers.” How the men went from ignorant comments about African Americans to describing the “Colored Units” as “As fine a soldier as I have ever seen.” I was rather proud of the Wisconsin boys and their relatively open-minded approach to the day’s racial problems. All of this was, in varying degrees, new to these men.

It has been over 150 years. The landscape has changed, towns are gone, and entire cities have sprung from the ashes. All of these changes, endings, and beginnings keep on, but some voices of the past are still here. Some are worth listening to and have something relevant and meaningful to say to those who will listen. Maybe one day those voices will be our own.
 
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