Feature Article on Battle of Resaca. Topic: CIVIL WAR
Written by Rich Wallace in May, 1997
AREA MEN DIE, HURT IN USELESS BATTLE |
May 14, 1864. Resaca, Georgia. Only the most ardent students of the Civil War can recite the events that occurred on the rocky, rolling Georgia landscape outside the small railroad town of Resaca that day. For scores of soldiers from Shelby County, however, what happened in ten minutes on that site 133 years ago would forever represent the real meaning of hell on earth. As we approach Memorial Day, and the ceremony rededicating the tablets containing the names of over three hundred men who perished in that war, perhaps it is appropriate to pause for a moment and remember. The winter of 1863 in Tennessee and Kentucky had been the most brutal in memory. The Army of the Ohio, commanded by General John Schofield, wintered in that region. It contained 37 regiments, including the 113th and 118th regiments, Ohio Volunteer Infantry. The men had endured subzero temperatures and six months of quarter and half rations. Disease had decimated the ranks. The numbers for the 118th were typical. After leaving Lima, Ohio in the early fall of 1862 with 980 men, the unit reported 300 fit for duty by the first of May, 1864. Dr. Albert Wilson, a physician in Sidney before the war, was a surgeon for the 113th. In a letter home dated January 14, 1864, he commented on the conditions: "We have been unpleasantly short of supplies of clothing and in fact the necessaries of life. I have been living in a tent all winter except that portion when we were in east Tennessee, and then we lived without shelters. But our poor horses and mules have been starving by the score ever since early fall." It was therefore a tattered, but battle-tested Army of the Ohio that emerged from the mountains of Tennessee and entered the hills of north Georgia in late April. Its goals for the Spring of 1864 had been determined two months earlier in Cincinnati. There, General William Tecumseh Sherman and General Grant had met. Twenty-five years later, Sherman, when revisiting the spot, would remark to a friend: "Yonder began the campaign," he said. "He was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston. That was his plan...It was the beginning of the end." [ Back ] [ Next ] [ Up ] [ New Search ] |
