Morning to Midnight in the Saddle: Civil War Letters of a Soldier in Wilder's Lightning Brigade

By Editors, Hicks, Inglis and McManus

Seven days before Lees surrender, Lieutenant Otho McManus was killed leading a battle charge in Alabama. During the previous thirty months, the young Midwestern schoolteacher wrote more than a hundred letters. His polished writing reflects his hopes, ambitions, fears, war experience and domestic concerns. The letters describe his capture while rescuing a wounded cousin, a deadly case of friendly fire, opinions of officers and war prospects, and strong feelings about anti-war dissent.

McManus served in the 123rd Illinois Mounted Infantry. This regiment was an integral component of the elite Wilders Lightning Brigade. Wilders Brigade played pivotal roles in battles and campaigns in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. McManus letters include extended accounts of the battles of Chickamauga, Hoovers Gap and Perryville and the Atlanta Campaign, among other campaigns, battles and skirmishes.
The editors have supplemented the letters with a detailed chronology of the regiments movements, with an account of explosive political developments in McManus home country, and with post-war sketches of people mentioned in the letters. The editors have also included statistical analyses of the regiments demographics, mortality and desertion rates. The commentary is based on hundreds of commanders reports from the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, from dozens of pension and compiles service records, from more than a dozen court-martial transcripts, and from other soldiers diaries and letters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469143200

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Copyright © 2012 by McManus, Inglis, Hicks, Editors.

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Contents

Introduction

Otho McManus’ Life and Extended Family

Civil War Background

Sam Snavely and I were taken prisoners

A warm affair I assure you

And O the blackberries

The steadiest, longest and hardest day’s fight

Volleys of shrapnel, grape canister and shell

Our boys were in a charging humor

Steamboats come paddling over corn fields

Aftermath: Beyond the War

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the editors

To the memory of Allie’s niece and namesake, Mary Alice McManus, whose bequest funded this project, and to the memory of Gertrude Smith Inglis, who preserved and first transcribed these letters

Introduction

Otho James McManus was far more than an unheralded fatality of the Civil War’s closing days. In the next hundred-plus letters, you will come to know an extraordinary ordinary man. You will be transported back to stand at his side on numberless Civil War battlefields, campsites, and long marches. You will peer over his shoulder as this young small-town schoolteacher pours out his reflections on the war, his adventures and adversities, his domestic and military concerns, his hopes and expectations. Written over a thirty-month period, his letters exhibit insight, candor, keen wit, and passion. The letters throw light on his and others’ motivation for going to war. They reveal changes in his outlook and temperament during nearly three years in the war’s cauldron.

To many of us, the significance of the Civil War and its events have become lost in a sea of dates, battlefields, and vaguely remembered generals. Through letters like Otho’s, however, we once again connect intimately with the spirit of the time. We can understand and appreciate the dramas unfolding in ordinary lives during the Civil War. Otho’s letters reveal a great depth of character and spirituality, a strong sense of duty and sacrifice. In this way, his writings also act as representatives for millions of soldiers who left little or no written testimony of their motivations, beliefs, and experiences. We are forever in the debt of these brave veterans for their actions, which forever changed our nation. We are doubly fortunate when we encounter such a cache of personal writings that vividly evoke a singular person and also voice the unspoken experiences of countless comrades.

Our writer served in an elite unit of mounted infantry. As a title, Morning to Midnight in the Saddle conveys the unrelenting, hell-for-leather riding that characterized his unit’s daily fare. When the writer noted that [i]t is now fifty-six days since we left Columbia, and we have spent over forty of them in the saddle, many times seeing midnight before quitting the road, he was echoing a familiar theme of his other letters.

With two exceptions, the known letters of Otho McManus are in the possession of the Inglis family, direct descendants of Otho and Sallie McManus. Gertrude Inglis transcribed the earliest forty of these letters. Her son Thomas H. Inglis transcribed the remaining letters. The transcribers have tried to retain Otho’s original punctuation and spelling. Two letters not in the Inglis collection are (a) the December 5, 1862 letter, which is in the National Archives pension record for Samuel Snavely; and (b) the July 16, 1864 letter to Otho’s brother Hiram McManus. This second letter was in the possession of Hiram’s daughter, who showed it to George H. McManus, Sr. He transcribed the letter; the original letter is lost.

Otho’s references to African-Americans are jarring to modern readers, but reflect the common parlance of Otho’s milieu. Claire E. Swedberg, editor of the Civil War diary of John M. King, faced a similar challenge:

The most unpleasant references emerge in the author’s commentary regarding slaves and former slaves, who were referred to by Northerners and Southerners alike at the time as niggers and darkies. Though the titles are considered derogatory today, King’s use of them was not intended to be. It is likely that this Northerner, who had little knowledge of African-Americans before his tour in the South, intended to be the model of tolerance, and believed himself to be of the most liberal views regarding slavery. I therefore ask the reader to try, as I did, to overlook what, by today’s standards, seem to be racist and derogatory references to the African-Americans of that time.¹

Otho doubtless wrote many other letters, as an analysis of the intervals between his surviving letters suggests. Mail trains were frequently harried and destroyed by enemy forces. Otho’s personal effects at his death were immediately retrieved by his brother-in-law. These personal effects would have included letters from Otho’s wife. However, no letters from the wife are extant today. We have only one side of a two-sided conversation between Otho and Sallie.

Besides letters from Otho, this collection contains three letters from Otho’s brother Tom McManus, all to Otho’s wife, and several letters from Otho’s brother-in-law, George Sandoe. The Tom McManus letters are the only known letters from this writer and poignantly echo Otho’s letters. These three letters were transcribed without strict regard to the original spelling, which was often hard to decipher. Sandoe lived and fought in the same regimental company as Otho for thirty months; one of his included letters was written to notify Sallie McManus of Otho’s death. Other Sandoe letters were dispatches to the religious journal Church Advocate. Copies of these letters are in the Bowling Green State University Library collection of newspaper microfilms.

Otho McManus’ Life and Extended Family

What kind of person was the writer of our letters? Otho McManus was a tall, light-haired young schoolteacher when he entered the maelstrom of the Civil War. From his letters we know he was sensitive, well-read, candid, and full of ready wit. He would become a proven leader and hero, forged in the crucible of battle, endless forced marches, and harsh camp environment. Where did he acquire his traits?

One insight into Otho’s pre-war background can be seen in his frequent references to Ma and Pa in the wartime letters. The parents he referred to were not his own, but those of his wife Sarah. Otho still was in contact with his McManus siblings during his military service, but he relied on his wife’s extended family and his own Snavely cousins for his emotional support.

Otho’s own family background

These replacement families were necessitated by the premature death of Otho’s parents, which literally tore his birth family apart. Otho’s parents died in 1854 and 1855, in Muncie, Indiana. Otho was only sixteen years old. Otho’s father, John Hamilton McManus, was an itinerant hatter. He had moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio, and then on to Indiana. Hatters frequently suffered debilitating neurological illness followed by premature death. This progression was caused by their daily toxic exposure to the mercury used in the felting process. The common phrases hatter’s shakes and mad as a hatter refer to this occupational hazard. Otho’s father was only forty-three at his death, and most likely suffered this affliction. Otho’s mother, Lydia McManus, had died the previous year at age forty-five or forty-six.

Otho’s father was destitute when he died. The estate record for John McManus included an inventory of the father’s effects. They were so few that the appraiser had to scrape to include two toothbrushes, at five cents each, and a pair of combs at two cents. John McManus died with total assets of only $145, while his due bills amounted to $303.92. John McManus’ penury had previously led to a lawsuit decided by the Indiana Supreme Court. In December 1854, in Totten v McManus, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that the assets of Lydia McManus were separate from those of her indigent husband, and could not be seized to pay his debt.

When the five McManus children were left orphans and impoverished, they ranged in age from Otho, at sixteen, to his youngest brother, a two-year-old. There were no living grandparents, and Otho’s parents had moved far from their roots. As a result, the orphans were scattered in widely varied directions, each to different foster parents. Otho apparently went to live with his uncle and aunt, John and Eliza McManus Snavely, in Martinsville, Illinois. Hiram, age fourteen, lived with unknown foster parents, but was in Iowa by 1860. Tom, age eleven, lived with the family of Thomas Sumner, a hatter-farmer in Marshall County, Indiana. Rebecca, also called Amelia, age seven, lived with the Charles Neff family, who moved soon afterwards from Indiana to Franklin County, Iowa. John, age two, was entrusted to the Adam Shaffer family in Muncie, Indiana.

Otho apparently lived with the family of his aunt Eliza McManus Snavely. She was his father’s twin sister. The Snavelys had thirteen children, Otho’s first cousins. Three died young and another six differed considerably in age from Otho. The remaining four Snavely siblings would count among the most important relationships in Otho’s remaining life. He mentioned them frequently throughout his letters. Sam and Levi Snavely enlisted in the same regimental company as Otho and were by his side throughout the war. Their sister Leah Snavely was married to Henry Shaffner, another soldier in Otho’s company. Another sister, Eliza Snavely, and her civilian husband, Daniel Miller, are mentioned often and fondly in the letters. A much younger sister, Rhoda Snavely, is mentioned only once in the letters.

John and Eliza McManus Snavely, William and Elizabeth Fasig, and Henry and Sarah Rupp were three Pennsylvania Dutch couples whose intertwined lives and travels were shaped by their religious beliefs. Each young couple had embraced the same fledgling religious denomination, the Church of God, around 1830. As missionaries they moved together from central Pennsylvania to Ohio, and finally to the small town of Martinsville, Illinois. The three couples were founding members of the Bethel Church of God at Martinsville. These couples, along with their twenty-five surviving children, became Otho’s immediate family circle. Each family also included cousins, uncles, aunts, and in-laws, many affiliated with the church. This extended replacement family later contributed Otho’s closest companions in the army. Besides Sam and Levi Snavely, these included John and Christian Fasig, Daniel Winters, George and Henry Shaffner, and George Sandoe. Otho’s letters mention all these relatives frequently.

Sallie Rupp’s family

One member of Otho’s extended replacement family was the Rupps’ fourth daughter, Sarah, commonly called Sallie. Her father and mother had married in 1831 in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, where their oldest child was born. From 1832 until 1847, they had lived in Richland County, Ohio, where six of their eight children were born, including Sallie. In 1847, the Rupps moved to Martinsville, Illinois. Romantic attachments developed between Otho and Sallie. On December 17, 1857, when Otho was nineteen and Sallie eighteen, they wed with a cow for dowry, as Otho later joked. Sallie’s brother-in-law, George Sandoe, performed the wedding.

Several of Sallie Rupp’s brothers and sisters were among Otho’s closest intimates. Otho’s letters frequently mention these in-laws and their spouses. Sallie’s two brothers were the oldest and youngest of the family’s surviving children. Gideon Rupp was a recently married farmer at the outset of the Civil War; his brother Daniel was not yet fourteen years old when Otho died. Sallie’s only unmarried sister was Susanna, still a teen-ager at war’s end. One of Otho’s letters romantically links Susie to Otho’s brother Tom.

Sallie had three married sisters: Mary, Malinda, and Catharine. Mary Rupp had married George Sandoe, a Church of God minister, in 1855. Sandoe would enlist in Company G of the 123rd Illinois Infantry, along with his brother-in-law Otho. Sandoe wrote occasional wartime dispatches for a religious newspaper, the Church Advocate. Because they supplement Otho’s accounts, we have reprinted several with Otho’s own letters. Sallie’s sister Malinda married Philip Shaffner, a saddler, in 1860. Catharine Rupp, called Kittie, married James Robinson, a farmer. All the Rupp siblings and in-laws will be encountered frequently in Otho’s letters.

Sallie’s father, Rev. Henry Rupp, was somewhat of an iconic figure. Henry Rupp, or Pa as Otho referred to him in his letters, preached almost exclusively in German until he was nearly fifty years of age. According to his grandson, Henry Rupp frequently walked from his home to congregations up to seventy-five miles away because his horses could not be spared from the demands of farm work.¹

Otho became a schoolteacher in Martinsville before the war. In their brief married years together, Otho and Sallie McManus had two daughters. The older daughter, Mary Alice, was born in November 1858. She was only six years old when her father was killed. In the letters, she is commonly called Allie. The second daughter, Nettie, was born in May 1860 and died when less than seven months old. In his early married years, Otho traveled extensively. In a May 1861 letter, Otho described his efforts to find work in Bureau County, Illinois. He complained that the schools here are all taken up by women. I think of working on a farm—wages from $14 to 18 dollars a month. In other letters, Otho referred to his lands in Minnesota. Their location and purchase date are unknown.

Otho in the Civil War

In September 1862, Otho McManus was mustered into the 123rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry at nearby Mattoon, Illinois. Less than three weeks after leaving Mattoon, Otho’s ill-trained regiment fought its first battle, at Perryville, Kentucky. Further details of this battle and Otho’s other wartime experiences will be explored in the following chapters, in the narrative sections accompanying his letters.

Once mustered in, Otho was eager for promotion. He first advanced from Sergeant to Orderly Sergeant, confiding to his wife that his new rank cost $250, a big price, but I sold tobacco enough, which we took from secesh, to pay for it. Otho’s larger goal was a lieutenant’s commission. His family’s financial needs fueled Otho’s ambition. His letters speculate candidly and frequently on his chances and on the army politics involved: I suppose they will try to get in headquarter pet. And as they swindled me on the Orderly question once, you need not be alarmed if the same game is repeated. Finally, on August 3, 1864, during the Atlanta Campaign, Otho received the long-sought shoulder straps of a first lieutenant. This promotion required him to re-enlist for a new three-year commitment, which he gladly did.

During the war, Otho saw his wife and young daughter only twice. The first time was a brief visit home soon after the battle of Perryville. The second visit occurred more than two years later, in December 1864, when his family traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, where Otho was stationed. This visit was marred by his daughter’s ill temper when her sweet little face was all swollen with the ugly toothache.

Four months after this visit, on April 2, 1865, Otho was killed while storming the breastworks at Selma. His death occurred just seven days before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. George Sandoe wrote that Otho was leading his company to the works, when within 30 yards of them was killed, and from appearences never knew anything about it. I was on the ground in a few minutes after it occured, and no signs of life were perceivable. Sandoe also wrote that he had Otho’s body with the rest of those that were killed, Deacently Buerried in a new Grave-yard on the East Side of Selman [sic], a very pretty place indeed, with a Rose fence around it.

Otho’s siblings

Although Otho’s siblings were widely scattered and he seldom saw them, he did keep in touch with them, as his letters attest. Two of his brothers also fought in the Civil War. Otho’s brother Hiram McManus enlisted in the 1st Iowa Infantry in April 1861, just days after the Civil War began. At that time, expectations of a short war resulted in ninety-day enlistment durations. Hiram fought in the battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, a Union defeat marked by grossly incompetent leadership, before his enlistment ended in August 1861. Hiram later became vocally opposed to the war, as Otho remarked disapprovingly in the letters.

Otho was particularly close to his second brother. Tom McManus enlisted in the 27th Illinois Infantry in late August 1861. Enlistments were now for three years’ duration. Tom’s regiment and Otho’s were in different divisions and brigades, but fought in many of the same battles. In fact, the two brothers last saw each other during the fierce battle of Chickamauga. Tom was later severely wounded at the battle of Dallas, Georgia. After several months of hospital recuperation, Tom re-enlisted and joined the 151st Indiana Infantry with a second lieutenant’s commission.

Otho’s letters mention his youngest siblings only infrequently. During the war, both were still minors, living at a distance in foster homes in Iowa and Indiana. Otho’s sister Rebecca, nine years his junior, is mentioned in eight or nine letters. John McManus, fifteen years younger than Otho, is mentioned only once in the letters.

Civil War Background

Deep piles of books have been written on every aspect of the Civil War. The paragraphs below will present only a short synopsis of a few facts immediately related to Otho’s experience. Topics are restricted to those that may be less well known to some readers but are salient to any reasonable appreciation of the letters.

Army organization

Terms like company, regiment and brigade permeate Otho’s letters. Their hierarchy is straightforward. In simplest terms, for infantry in the Union army in the Civil War:

Company: 100 men.

Regiment: 10 companies; 1000 men.

Brigade: 3 to 6 regiments (plus an artillery unit); 3,000 to 6,000 men.

Division: 2 to 6 brigades; often around 12,000 men.

Corps: 2 to 4 divisions; often around 36,000 men.

Army: varying number of corps in one geographic area.

The above numbers applied only when a unit was first organized. After battle and disease took their toll, a unit might be down to twenty to forty percent of its original complement.¹ The effective strength of a company, which subtracted the wounded and ill, was frequently much smaller than the company’s nominal size. The size of his company was 90 men to start, but Otho successively recorded as fit for duty: 35 men on November 25, 1862; 25-30 on December 5, 1862; and 21 on February 5, 1863. On April 11, 1864, Otho counted the actual number in his company as 56, including new recruits.

Each regimental company was generally mustered from one or a few counties. Otho’s fellow soldiers in Company G were all mustered from Clark County, Illinois. Thus, soldiers camped, marched, fought, and died alongside their neighbors and relatives. Otho’s company included two of his first cousins and a brother-in-law. When we ask why men were willing to charge repeatedly into withering barrages of enemy gunfire, a key answer is that they were surrounded by lifelong friends, neighbors, and relatives. For respect and enduring good reputation back home, no one was willing to be the first to flinch.

Wilder’s Lightning Brigade

Otho McManus served in a small, elite army unit, Wilder’s Lightning Brigade. Among the more than five hundred Union army brigades in the Civil War, Wilder’s brigade was distinguished by two unusual qualities: (1) they were mounted infantry—they traveled on horseback for greater mobility, but fought on foot; and (2) they bought their own rifles, Spencer seven-shot repeating rifles, which gave them extreme firepower against the nearly universal single-shot rifles that they faced. As Otho wrote appreciatively, the [enemy] would rather capture us and our Spencers than five times our numbers from any other command. Because of these traits, the brigade was frequently deployed under the direct orders of the commanding general of the theater.

The Western theater

General-interest readers are frequently most familiar with the Eastern theater of the Civil War. Battles like Gettysburg, Antietam, and Chancellorsville, and generals like Grant, McClellan, Lee, and Jackson are commonplace names. Less familiar may be the terrain, battles, and generals of Otho McManus’ wartime experience. Otho and his brothers fought in the Western theater. The Western theater of the Civil War is not to be confused with the truly western Trans-Mississippi theater. In the Western theater were fought many less-known but vital battles to control a vital heartland: Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, each of which was closely divided in allegiance. The Western theater also carried the war into the deep South, particularly Georgia and Alabama. Within the Western theater, Otho McManus served first in the Army of the Ohio, longer in its successor, the Army of the Cumberland, and lastly, directly under the Military Division of the Mississippi.²

Battles described in the letters

Of the battles in which Otho fought, only Chickamauga and Perryville rank in the first tier of major Civil War contests. Otho fought in many smaller-scale battles and skirmishes, including those at Hoover’s Gap, Farmington, Dallas, and Selma. The ferocity of smaller actions could rival that of better-known major battles. A fellow-soldier said of their engagement at Noonday Creek that he could think of nothing so terribly awful as this battle, except that Chickamauga approximated it, but was on a smaller scale.³

The Civil War included over two thousand named conflicts of all sizes. Most were skirmishes between small units and are forgotten today except by local historians. Frequently it is impossible to reconstruct the numbers of troops or casualties involved. As Otho confided to his wife in one letter, In the last twenty days we have been in eight skirmishes, and have driven the enemy every time.

As mounted infantry, Otho’s brigade was naturally employed less for pitched battles than for operations that required exceptional mobility, especially patrolling, reconnoitering, raiding, and pursuing enemy raiders. In this latter regard, three great Confederate cavalry generals were frequent targets of the brigade’s movements: John Hunt Morgan, Joseph Wheeler, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Mortality in the Civil War

Two percent of the entire American population died as a direct result of the Civil War. The sheer number killed exceeded the combined American dead of all other wars from the American Revolution through the Korean War.

Besides Otho himself, the Civil War claimed his cousin, Thomas Pearson, and an uncle, George Glasener. Both soldiers died from disease, not battle wounds. Two of every three deaths in the Civil War resulted from illnesses like chronic diarrhea, pneumonia, and typhoid fever.⁴ These diseases were exacerbated by poor hygiene in camps, inadequate medical knowledge, and unhealthy diet. Otho’s regiment had a slightly lower than usual incidence of deaths by disease. The 123rd Illinois lost three officers and eighty-three enlisted men killed, mortally wounded, or missing and presumed dead, compared to one officer and 122 enlisted men by disease, for a total of 209 deaths.⁵

In death, Otho was more fortunate than many other fallen soldiers were: he received a marked grave and his family was notified. As historian Drew Gilpin Faust has written, in the absence of arrangements for interring and recording overwhelming numbers, hundreds of thousands of men—more than forty percent of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of Confederates—perished without names, identified only, as Walt Whitman put it, ‘by the significant word UNKNOWN.’⁶

Copperheads and Butternuts

Otho’s letters frequently use the terms Copperheads and Butternuts. These were derisive labels applied to Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War. Butternuts applied specifically to dissenters in the lower Midwest. Mocking their rural Southern roots, the term referred to the butternut color of dissenters’ homespun clothes. These labels covered a wide variety of sentiments. The majority of Copperheads and Butternuts favored a return to the pre-war status quo. Many were alarmed by the loss of personal liberties in wartime, and some were incensed when the war against secession became a war for emancipation. Only a small minority of this anti-war sentiment supported an independent Confederacy.

However, war-weary Union soldiers like Otho and Tom McManus did not see these distinctions. They saw only widespread anti-war sentiment that dampened soldiers’ morale and impeded the war effort. They lumped all anti-war dissenters into one malevolent mass. Otho fulminated against the treacheries of Copperheads and Butternuts. In one letter, Otho wrote: Be sure and write all about the copperheads. Are they still killing = Do they still threaten Union men = Is the Union Club doing anything or are they still doing nothing while the hypocritical Butternuts cut their throats and dig their graves?

Otho’s own brother, Hiram McManus, was a classic example of the complexities of anti-war dissent. Both Otho and his younger brother Tom were distressed by Hiram’s political leanings. Otho wrote, I also got a letter from Bro. Hiram last night. He denies being a copperhead but says he wants me to resign, as soon as I can honorably. Tom wrote even more bluntly, Hiram is a copperhead though he don’t [k]no[w] any better. Surprisingly, Hiram had begun the war as a strong Union supporter. He was the first in his family to enlist, sixteen months before Otho. After the Civil War, Hiram received both a pension and a land grant for his military service. Then why did Hiram turn away to the anti-war chorus? His anti-war sentiments can probably be traced to the early battle of Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, in which Hiram fought as a raw recruit. Wilson’s Creek was an incompetently led debacle for the Union and could easily have inflamed Hiram with the senseless folly of war.

Sam Snavely and I were taken prisoners

Mustering in, September 6, 1862

Seven hundred miles separate Washington, D.C. from Clark County in eastern Illinois. The distance is deceptive. During the Civil War, the fifteen thousand residents of this rural county were intimately connected to leaders and passions in the Nation’s Capital. Some in Clark County knew President Abraham Lincoln personally from his appearances in law cases there. Others had ridden across the county line to watch the politically charged Lincoln-Douglas debate in Charleston, Illinois. Lincoln’s stepmother still lived on a farm only a dozen miles from Clark County. General Ulysses Grant began his Civil War military service as colonel commanding a fledgling regiment camped in neighboring Mattoon. That regiment included at least 102 residents of Clark County. The county’s own congressman and neighboring representatives were leading anti-war firebrands in Congress.

By July 1862, the Civil War had already lasted fourteen months, far longer than expected. Reflecting the heightened sense of urgency and frustration, President Lincoln called on the nation’s governors to enlist 300,000 additional soldiers to serve for three years. Later in July, Congress passed a law requiring the states to provide yet another 300,000 troops. These latter were required to serve for nine months. The law authorized a draft to fill the states’ quotas if the states failed to enlist enough three-year volunteers to meet both demands by mid-August. The threat of conscription spurred enlistments.

Bk109256_Fig05.jpg

Four rural counties from which most soldiers in the 123rd Illinois Volunteer Infantry were recruited. Company G was recruited in Clark County. ‘Lincoln farm’ marks the location where Lincoln’s stepmother still lived throughout the Civil War. The National Road was a principal highway of early westward migration.

On August 14, the recruiting campaign came to Otho McManus’ hometown of Martinsville in Clark County. The patriotic rhetoric was doubtless protracted and emotionally compelling. Family considerations, rather than these civic appeals, drove Otho’s decision to volunteer. Two of his younger brothers had enlisted more than a year earlier; one was now a veteran of four battles. It was time for the oldest brother to step forward. Secondly, a half dozen of his extended family were enlisting into a single regimental company on the same day. Most compelling, however, was the urging of his wife. Otho later wrote to her: In one of your letters you seemed troubled with regard to your having been so anxious for me to go into the army and you ask if I would have gone if you had not been so very willing and anxious for me to go. I hardly know how to answer these questions.

Otho McManus responded to all these considerations. He enlisted in the Union army for three years’ service. Enlisting with him on August 14 were sixty-four other men from his hometown, including his brother-in-law and five cousins. Martinsville was then home to only about 220 young men aged 16-45. Thirty percent of those eligible boys and men enlisted on that single day, August 14.¹ The company descriptive book described Otho as married, 5 feet 11 inches tall, with blue eyes, light complexion, and light hair. His birthplace was listed as York Sulphur Springs, Pennsylvania, a hamlet near Gettysburg.

Four days after Otho enlisted, the new soldiers of Company G were assembled and marched thirty miles from Martinsville to Camp Terry, located at Mattoon, Illinois. Other companies arrived throughout August. At Camp Terry, the recent civilians would typically be confronted by squad drills, and platoon drills, and company drills, and regimental drills, and dress parades every day; preparing the muster rolls, . . . procuring clothing and quartermaster’s stores and camp and garrison equipage; the desperate struggle for arms and ordnance stores.² Finally, on September 6, the regiment was officially mustered into service. Mustering-in began with the companies being inspected and approved by an officer of the regular army, followed with each recruit’s taking an oath of allegiance, and ended with a reading of the articles of war, whose 101 ordinances governed every aspect of military life.

The ten companies of the 123rd Illinois Infantry were recruited in four adjacent rural counties. Six companies were recruited entirely in Coles County; one in Cumberland County (B); one (G) in Otho’s own Clark County; one (E) in both Clark and Jasper counties; and one (F) in both Clark and Coles counties.³

Otho was mustered in as a sergeant in Captain Lovelace’s Company, later renamed as Company G. A thirty-eight-year-old cabinet-maker named Reason L.