Notre Dame and the Civil War: Marching Onward to Victory by James M. Schmidt

Author:James M. Schmidt [Schmidt, James M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Higher Education, History, France, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781614230496
Google: ESNLvgAACAAJ
Publisher: History Press
Published: 2010-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Orville T. Chamberlain. Indiana Historical Society.

Chamberlain was born in 1841 in Leesburgh, Indiana. His family moved to Elkhart, Indiana, when he was but two years old. In his teens, Chamberlain clerked in his father’s drugstore, learned the printer’s trade and taught school at a local schoolhouse. He entered the University of Notre Dame in 1860 and after a year of study was awarded the degree “Master of Accounts.” He returned the next year to take advanced classes in English and the classics and returned home to Elkhart in June 1862. A few weeks later—“yielding to the prompting of his patriotic heart”—he enlisted as a private in the 74th Indiana Infantry.110

Chamberlain’s service and thoughts are preserved in a collection of more than eighty wartime letters that he wrote to home and friends, now held by the Indiana Historical Society. The letters begin with his enlistment at Fort Wayne and his initial encampment in Indianapolis in August 1862. He happily reported that “I saw quite a number of my [Notre Dame]acquaintances there,” and he wrote regularly of classmates in his own regiment. The regiment moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, in September 1862; Chamberlain became quite ill but was nursed back to health by a comrade in a private home and wrote home on “captured” official stationery left by retreating Rebels.111

Over the course of a year in the Union army, Orville Chamberlain was promoted from private to sergeant and then to lieutenant; by the next summer, he was in command of Company G of the 74thIndiana. After a year of drilling, marching, countermarching and guard duty, the war finally started in earnest for Chamberlain and his men.

A PERILOUS JOURNEY

Inmid-August 1863, the regiment—then occupying middle Tennessee—moved south as Major General William Rosecrans consolidated his scattered forces and successfully forced the Rebel army out of Chattanooga. Confederate general Braxton Bragg was determined to reoccupy the city and launched an attack on the Union army in mid-September. Late on September 18, 1863, the 74thIndiana struck out on an all-night march on the Chattanooga Road and arrived at Chickamauga early the next morning. The official report declared that the regiment halted and took a hasty cup of coffee—“‘hasty’ indeed it was, for the few who got any,” Chamberlain recalled.112

On September 19, the regiment was placed in line of battle. During the fighting in the morning and the afternoon, the men of the 74thIndiana had discarded their knapsacks and blankets. “We never saw them again,” Chamberlain remembered, and when they bivouacked that night they had no food or water, little to make themselves comfortable and were also under orders not to start fires. “Some succeeded in getting some straw. More had to sleep on the bare ground,” Chamberlain wrote, adding that “[i]t was very cold…All were worn out by the terrible experiences of the day. It was a terrible, cheerless, cold, desolate, miserable night.”113

The next day, Chamberlain recalled, “We were lying behind our hastily built breastworks, lying as flat upon the earth as we could flatten ourselves, to

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