A new furlough system lessened desertions.  Soldiers were granted extended leave to visit home, some for the first time since they’d enlisted more than two years prior.  And as the furlough system lessened the number of men deserting, those that had already run were welcomed back.  The last three weeks of March 1863 became an amnesty period, enacted by President Lincoln.  Simply stated, anyone could return to their units by April 1^st, no questions asked.  While it’s difficult to put an exact number on the men who took advantage of this amnesty, several officers reported that the army must have had thousands of wayward soldiers return to bolster the ranks.

Other changes weren’t so welcome.  March 30^th saw the outlawing of all sutlers selling or gifting alcohol in the camps.  While some credit this and the removal of the US Navy grog rations the previous summer on a new religious movement sweeping the country (hard to justify as many 19^th Indiana soldiers commented on how little used the unit’s chapel was that winter), mostly it was to curb unruly drunken behavior that came from idly sitting in camp.

The spring campaign started in late April with the battle of Chancellorsville.   The Iron Brigade and other units separated from the main army and moved as a diversion against the rebel forces still entrenched at Fredericksburg.  On April 29^th the unit came to Fitzhugh Crossing, only to find that the engineers had been unable to erect a bridge for crossing the Rappahannock River due to enemy soldiers on the opposite shore.  After waiting the better part of a day for the engineers to complete their work while under enemy fire, General Hooker sent word for the army to cross “at all hazards”.  What followed was one of the only amphibious operations of the Civil War.

While under heavy rifle fire from the Confederate rifle pits on the opposite shore, the members of the brigade ran for the water, piling into boats with whoever was already there, and pulled for the opposite bank as bullets skipped across the water so that “the water fairly boiled”, and smacked into boats and bodies.  During the crossing, those left behind kept up a heavy fire on the Confederate positions, but even with this added help, the oarsmen had to huddle for cover several times, and in more than one boat the soldiers stood up in the rocking wooden boats and fire a volley to suppress the enemy fire.  Once the first soldiers reached the opposite shore and began to swarm across the bank and up the rise towards the enemy rifle pits, the Confederate soldiers, surprised by the quickness and boldness of the crossing, turned and ran.  The rout happened so quickly that some members of the 6^th Wisconsin in the lead of the charge were hit by friendly fire as they crested the enemy ridge.

The first of May found the Iron Brigade digging in and applying pressure to the Confederates around Fredericksburg, as the rest of the army moved towards Chancellorsville in the west.  On May 2^nd, though, they were ordered to move and follow the main army.  They re-crossed the river at the same point, this time over a pontoon bridge the engineers had been finally able to build.  During the marched west they could hear the fighting around Chancellorsville.  “I never in all my life heard such firing”, one of the men wrote.  They arrived on the battlefield after Stonewall Jackson’s famous sneak attack had crushed the right flank of the Union army, and as the fighting moved off to the east and out of their sector, the Iron Brigade once again dug entrenchments.  The brigade held their position until May 6^th, but never once was directly engaged, only at long range by cannon on one or two brief occasions.

By May 7^th the battle at Chancellorsville was over and the Iron Brigade retreated with the rest of the army under the cover of darkness.  As they marched along, units familiar with their reputation cheered the men in the tall black hats, but many of the famed unit felt they “hadn’t done nothing to deserve any cheers” at Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg, and indeed felt cheated that the army retreated before they and the rest of the reserves were even put into the fight.  The brigade hadn’t been heavily engaged since Antietam, and some began to feel as if they weren’t doing their part to end the war.  Little did they know that their most important contribution to the war lay less than two months in their future, and how their actions on July 1^st 1863 at Gettysburg would save the army’s position at a most critical juncture, would cement their legend in history, and nearly wipe them out in the process.

Finished this back in January, but it took a while to get the photos shot and processed.  Lots of fun building this one.

The full table of contents, which includes many authors I’m proud to be published with, is below:

“Raw Recruits” by Will Ludwigsen
“The Swell of the Cicadas” by Tenea D. Johnson
“Bad Penny” by Carrie Laben
“Spectral Drums” by Devin Poore
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce
“Ten Thousand Miles” by Connie Wilkins
“No More Amongst the Cities of the Earth” by Christopher M. Cevasco
The Country House” by Jameson Currier
“An Unclean Thing” by Cindy Potts
“The Blank Flag of Arthur Kerry” by Kristopher Reisz
“Three Silent Things” by John F. D. Taff
“Across Hickman’s Bridge to Home” by Russell Davis
“Mistress” by Jennifer R. Povey
“Tommy Cleburne” by Jeff Mann
“The Overseer” by Albert E. Cowdrey
“Red Animal” by Ed Kurtz
“Proving Up” by Caren Gussoff
“Vermont Muster” by Nick Mamatas
“Like Quicksilver for Gold” by Chaz Brenchley
“The Beatification of Custer Poe” by Laird Barron
“The Arabella” by Melissa Scott
“The Third Nation” by Lee Hoffman

I’d planned on the joining of the upper and lower hulls on Chickasaw to be an ordeal, but it wasn’t as bad in some respects as I’d expected, but was worse in other respects.  While Chickasaw doesn’t have the full “raft over a lower hull” arrangement of the original Monitor or her follow-on Passaic class ironclads, it does exist.  While building the lower hull, I exerted too much moisture and force in getting the sheeting applied, and completely removed the curve from the lower hull.  I wasn’t prepared to clamp the two hulls together in an effort to straighten the problem out, as that would have just caused more.  My resolution in the photos below…

Something unusual.  Overall a fun little kit, but I have to admit that at times I wasn’t having fun at all with some of the smaller bits and more than once Luzon nearly went sailing across a sea of profanities into the from room’s brick wall.

I’ve got a few more of these Niko resin kits from various eras (Great White Fleet, WWII British, and U.S. Cold War missile cruisers), and I’ll surely build something else from them in the future.

More photos and the full story on the build can be seen HERE.

My second piece for the Times’ “Disunion” web series has been published.  “Rise of the Infernal Machines” gives an overview of the torpedoes of the day, what we now mostly know as mines.  Crude, unstable, and mostly non-functional, they provided the Confederacy with a new weapon with which to strike back at the superior Union navy.  Despite their endless problems, they succeeded in sinking more Union warships than all other means combined (probably speaking more to the ineffectiveness of Confederate warships and fortifications than to effectiveness of the torpedoes).  The article can be access HERE.

January 1863 saw the 19^th Indiana and the Iron Brigade in winter quarters, camped at Bella Plain, VA, on Potomac Creek.  Still smarting from the defeat at Fredericksburg, many referred to the winter of 1862-1863 as “the Valley Forge of the Army of the Potomac”.  The soldiers built wooden cabins that they fitted with fireplaces and covered with their field tents, then settled in for several months of inaction.

With little to do, talk among the soldiers turned to the recent Emancipation Proclamation.  Most were against it, in the respect that they thought it changed the course of the fight.  A Captain of the 19^th wrote “I dont want to fight to free the Darkeys.  If any body else wants to do so, they are welcome to come and do so.”(sic)  The near-general consensus throughout the unit and most of the army was that they had signed up to restore and preserve the Union, not free slaves.  Obviously little thought was given to the main reason that had caused the war and brought them to that place.  Still, others welcomed the proclamation and couldn’t wait to get freedmen in the army, carrying guns and fighting for their own freedom, if only to bolster the dwindling ranks.  As with most things political during a time of war, the soldiers soon lost interest even in this topic.  Letters home and interviews with correspondence spoke often and heatedly about the Proclamation, either pro or con, for the first few months of 1863, but then as spring came around, it all but disappeared from most records.

Besides discussing the changing political aspects of the war, the men had picket duty around the perimeter of the army.  Units spent days at a time on guard, camping in outposts, barns, or out in the open if the weather cooperated.  Most considered it a nice change from the camp routine of standing duty, inspections, chopping wood, gathering water, and occasional kitchen duty.

When not on official army business, many spent their idle time drinking and gambling.  Stills brewed alcohol from whatevercould be found and spared; the German members of the units brought their old-world skills to this with a relish.  Concoctions such as “Tangle Foot”, “Splitting Headache”, and “Dead on the Floor” permeated the camps, even though technically illegal.  Games also figured largely to fill time: chess, dice, baseball (weather permitting), and cards.

These distractions didn’t ease the major concern of that winter, though: Desertion.  As Private John Hawk wrote “the Grand Army of the Republic has one third playing cards, the other doing duty, and the last third deserting as fast as they can”.  Even though the 19^th Indiana and the Iron Brigade had seen little action at the Battle of Fredericksburg the month prior, they still felt the sting and depression of the crushing loss of that battle.  Coupled with the cold and the absence of so many friends around the fireplaces — the unit had lost over 60% of its men to wounds, disease, and death since they’d mustered in less than two years before — the mood took the men to low places in their minds, and many of them simply ran.  Rates of desertion varied, some with over two-dozen men missing during the month of January, while the Nineteenth Indiana at one point had nearly fifty men missing.  Some had deserted prior to Antietam and were still missing.

Reinforced picket lines made it more difficult for deserters to get out, but some built rafts and rowed across the Rappahannock before changing to civilian clothes to make their way home. For those caught, a trial would be held, with punishment going all the way from extra duty and forfeiture of partial pay, to the extreme cases for repeat offenders (some men had run from more than one battle) of being drummed out of the service, or even execution.  One mass drumming-out occurred on February 21^st, when seven members of the Iron Brigade were formed up as their comrades stood in formation completely encircling them, and watched as their heads were shaved, the buttons tore from their coats, and were discharged from the service.

As others ran, other soldiers returned to their units.  William Ray, of the Seventh Wisconsin, had been wounded at Brawner’s Farm in August of 1862, when a spent-ball struck him in the back of the head and he “spun around on my heels like a boys top and fell with my heels in the air and spun around again for a few seconds”.  Ray spent the rest of 1862 in the hospital recovering from what now would be classified as a concussion.  He recovered, and stood guard duty for the brief periods he could stay on his feet, enjoying an actual bed with linens, a bathroom with hot and cold running water, and more than he could eat.  On January 6^th he volunteered to return to his regiment, instead of waiting for a doctor’s release as most others did, and rejoined the 7^th Wisconsin after four days of travel.  He found his company that had started the war with 100 members now, “numbered 40 men, which was much larger than I expected to find”.  Most of the wounded from Brawner’s, South Mountain and Antietam that would return to their units would do so during the early months of 1863 as the army sprawled in camp along the Virginia countryside.

The only real activity of the winter, besides occasional picket duty, was the infamous “Mud March”.  General Burnside, looking to redeem himself for the spectacular defeat at Fredericksburg, planned to move the army across the Rappahannock and attack Lee’s unsuspecting forces, also in winter quarters.  Mother Nature hadn’t been at the war council, though, and turned loose one of the worst rainstorms in memory shortly after the army moved on January 20^th.  After three days of men marching in mud up to their waist, puddles of water that swallowed entire wagons, and progress so slow that dogs that served as company mascots had to stop and wait for the men to catch up, Burnside called off the campaign and all returned to camp.

The Mud March proved the end for Burnside.  Lincoln replaced him with Fighting Joe Hooker on January 26^th.  This surely proved a relief to Burnside, seemed a great opportunity to Hooker, and more of the same to the men of the army.  Simply another general gone and come.  As one soldier wrote, “Well, perhaps it is best to give them all a trial — it only costs fifteen or twenty thousand lives to take each one on trial; so we may as well try them all, while we are about it.”

I’m extremely pleased to be able to put all of the historical research I’ve done while building models and writing stories into this format.

The first revelation is that I had no idea how often I use “of” in my writing.  I mean a lot.  A whole bunch of “ofs”.  That and the always prevelant “and”, “was”, and “were” jumped out at me as I ran through the process in the book.  The interesting bit came when the process didn’t simply result in deleting words, but recasting entire sentences and paragraphs when those issues are called to attention, and how the resulting product is so much the better.

I’ve always taken the “walk away” approach to writing and other projects – such as model building, computer issues, etc. — in that I’ll finish something, or stop in-process, and just walk away from it for a while.  The most recent example is the X-Wing model I finished this past weekend.  I actually “completed” the model last month, but I left it in the spray booth, sealed up, and every now and then, usually once a day, I’d open up the booth and look at it, see if anything jumped out at me as “not quite right”.  Sometimes, before I’d seal it back up, I’d rotate the model, so that the next time I opened booth, I’d be confronted with a different angle and perspective.  Over the course of a few weeks, this lead me to finding paint imperfections in the canopy, a spot on the upper port wing that wasn’t finished consistent with the rest of the model, and adding more weathering.

In the past I’ve put writing projects away in the proverbial spray-booth for months at a time.  What I’ve found with “The 10% Solution” is that by doing a syllable by syllable search through a story, forcing myself to see not the entire piece, but the tiny parts that make up the whole, it takes my writing and gives it that little twist, a different angle of light and shadow, showing the defects more quickly than letting it ferment and simmer for an extended period of time.

If you haven’t tried it, I recommend giving the “The 10% Solution” a look.

“…I heard an explosion from the

“…just as we were training on the battery (gun emplacement or torpedo), we were struck by a torpedo, which exploded under our starboard bow, a few feet from the center and some 35 or 40 feet from the bow proper just under our provision store room, which crushed in the bottom of the boat so that the water rushed in like the roar of Niagara.  In five minutes the Hold was full of water and the forward part of the gunboat was flooded… One of our heaviest bow guns had been dismounted by the force of the explosion, injuring three men. ” -George Yost.

On December 12^th, 1862, the  American Civil War saw yet another military first: USS Cairo became the first warship sunk by an underwater mine, or torpedo as they were known at the time.  The Union Navy had known of the Confederate devices since the summer of 1861 and had captured and destroyed dozens of them — and the weapons had been tried in past wars, such as the American Revolution and the by the Chinese and Russians — but this was the first time one had succeeded in sinking something other than a target hulk.

USS Cairo (pronounced KAY-ROW), one of the class of armored gunboats of the City Class, had served well before her date with fame on 12/12/62.  She’d participated in most of the campaigns on the western rivers up to that point, as the Navy and Army for the first time in U.S. history worked in close coordination to ring up victory after victory in the west, but it was her sinking and eventual fate that would make her one of the most well-know 19^th century warships.

Cairo sank fast, most estimates put the time from initial explosion (she actually hit two of the torpedoes) to being fully settled on the bottom in just twelve minutes.  Only her chimneys (smoke stacks) and flag poles remained above water.  More impressive than the quickness with which she sank was the fact that not a member of her crew was lost during the event.

Opinions vary as to whether the torpedoes that sank Cairo were of the common cask variety (old lager beer barrels filled with gunpowder and contact-triggers) or the more complicated battery activated design (triggered by observers on shore by battery current through wires that ran to the torpedo to detonate it).  Regardless, they did their job well, and others would continue to do so. More Union ships were lost to torpedoes than Confederate warships, fortifications, and gun batteries, combined.

Sinking a warship was not necessarily a permanent result, as resurrecting warships on rivers during the Civil War was a common occurrence.  Cairo’s sister, USS Cincinnati had been rammed and sunk earlier in 1862 and raised to fight again, and would be sunk and raised yet again in 1863.  Cairo, however, had gone down in a narrow stretch of the Yazoo River, in enemy territory, and recovery was deemed too risky.  One of Cairo’s consorts, Queen of the West, attached ropes to her stacks and flag poles and pulled them down, so that the Confederates would not know where she had sunk, and the expedition returned to the Mississippi River.

Cairo’s sisters fought out the rest of the war (except for Baron De Kalb**; she fell prey to a torpedo as well in July 1863 and was also left where she sank), and were subsequently sold off and scrapped.  Cairo, however, laid where she had sank.  It was reported by locals during the early 20^th century that, during times of drought when the river ran low, you could see parts of the warship’s armored conning tower protruding above the slack river’s surface.

USS Cairo’s wreck was positively located and identified in 1956, and raised in 1965.  The book “Hardluck Ironclad” by historian Edwin C. Bearss details the operation, and is a step by step description of how one should NOT raise a sunken wreck.  Large sections of the ship were lost when she broke apart on raising, and then the parts that were saved were left in the open air on a dock for months, causing most of them to simply rot and rust away (wood and iron that’s been on the bottom for a century needs to be specially treated, dried, etc.).  Much of Cairo was salvaged, though, including hundreds of personal possessions from her crew, and she’s now a museum in Vicksburg, Mississippi, not far from where she sank.  She is now one of the few Civil War warships that can still be seen today; unknowingly preserved for future generations by a new weapon of war, 150 years ago today.

**Trivia: You can see a wartime photo of Baron De Kalb (also known as St. Louis) for a split-second during the opening sequence and theme song of the television show “Big Bang Theory”