The volunteer citizen army that fought the Civil War for the North was one of the most remarkable military assemblages in history. It represented every facet of the democratic society from which it came–the raw, brute strength of that society, its youthful self-confidence, its transparent idealism, and its gawkish materialism. It was composed of men who rushed forward in the first fine flush of patriotism, and its rolls exhibited an astonishing range of personal abilities and professional skills.

Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln caught this quality of the army he had summoned forth when he told Congress that there were many regiments whose members possessed full comprehension of all the known arts. Lincoln believed there was scarcely one from which could not be selected ‘a president, a cabinet, a congress, and perhaps a court.’

Lincoln’s analysis was more prophetic of the Twenty-Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment than he could possibly have known. This outfit contained among its commanding and ranking officers more names that would become famous than any other regiment in the Northern armies. Its first commander, William S. Rosecrans, ‘Old Rosy,’ was a West Pointer and Regular Army man who had resigned his commission and was in the oil refining business in Cincinnati when the war began. Rosecrans had but a short tenure with the regiment. In June 1861, before it took the field, he departed to assume a larger command post, but shortly as an army commander in West Virginia he would see it marching again under his orders. Rosecrans eventually rose to command one of the largest Northern field armies and seemed about to emerge as one of the great generals of the war–before his star sank in controversy and in the red afterglow of Chickamauga. His postwar career was distinguished. He held the offices of minister to Mexico, congressman from California, and Register of the Treasury.

Eliakim P. Scammon succeeded Rosecrans. He was a West Point graduate and a mathematics professor who would prove to be too fussily insistent on military protocol to be popular with a volunteer regiment. Still, he emerged from the war a brigadier general, and afterwards represented the United States as consul at Prince Edward Island. The third commander of the Twenty-Third was Rutherford B. Hayes, who after the war served his nation as congressman, Governor of Ohio, and President. James M. Comly followed Hayes; in the postwar era he played an active role in politics and became the American minister to Hawaii.

Even in the lowest ranks the regiment had a name destined for fame. A frail youth of 18 enlisted in 1861 as a private in the Twenty-Third. He rose to the grade of major, and his name was William McKinley. He would enable the regiment to go Lincoln’s prognostication one better. The Twenty-Third contained not one future President but two.

But if the Twenty-Third was atypical in the men it produced, its war experience was typical, not just of other Civil War regiments, but of most outfits in most wars. For these Ohio boys spent the war doing the same dull things day after day. Their main war experience was monotony. Later they would remember only the glorious and exciting days but, like the men in the South Pacific in World War II, during the war they were, for the most part, just plain bored.

The Twenty-Third Ohio did participate in the Antietam Campaign and in 1864 it followed Phil Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, but its fate was to spend the rest of the war in the mountains of West Virginia. Its war was a mean, hard thing, involving some of the roughest if not the most spectacular fighting of the war. it was the lot of the Twenty-Third to spend the bulk of its service in what was essentially a pocket of the war or a side show to the main event.

West Virginia, as a Union-sympathizing area in the Confederacy, had a real political and propaganda value in the Northern scheme of grand strategy and, lying on the flank of Virginia proper, it posed a potential if not always an actual military threat to vital railroad lines of communication united the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy. By any measure, it was important for the North to occupy and hold West Virginia, and the Twenty-Third was one of the units that did the job. The work was necessary to the ultimate triumph of the Union cause, but it was small and nasty work–fighting in pygmy battles, chasing guerrillas, patrolling lonely mountain roads, repressing civilian sympathizers of the South. It was routine, unexciting war, and it offered few opportunities for anyone to make a reputation.

Units such as the Twenty-Third experienced the worst side of war, the very hardest to endure, the kind that required duty, dirt, and devotion. In the end, the most remarkable thing about the Twenty-Third was not that two Presidents and a collection of lesser figures served with it but that it came through the oppressing obscurity of its war years a proud regiment with high morale.

Organized in June 1861, the Twenty-Third contained 950 men when it went to Camp Chase, near Columbus, for its training. The Governor of Ohio appointed its officers, which was unusual–most regiments elected their leaders, up to and including the colonels–and which led to some problems. Colonel Eliakim P. Scammon, who succeeded Rosecrans at the head of the regiment, was a martinet who never could understand the ways of the civilian soldier. For their part, the volunteers disliked Scammon and other West Pointers like him, and sometimes refused to follow him. In these crises it was usually the politician turned officer, like Hayes, who had to step forward and save the situation.

At the start of the war Ohio was practically without weapons to arm its troops, and with the same frenzy that marked all preparations it bought, begged, and distributed whatever small arms it could locate. The Twenty-Third received an issue of old flintlock muskets converted into ‘percussion locks.’ This was too much for the young heroes. They had come forth to save the Nation, and they expected to be given proper weapons to do the job. They refused to receive the guns. Some companies stuck the muskets in the ground by the bayonet and marched back to quarters; others simply stacked them in piles.

Scammon, who had not thought it necessary to explain to the men why such guns had to be issued, flew into a rage and ordered some of the company commanders arrested. His conduct only increased the tension, because these officers could not be fairly blamed for failing to control t the situation. In some way the men themselves had to be reached and persuaded to accept the muskets, and this result could not be achieved by a ramrod colonel or by such junior leaders as captains. it could be done only by officers of some rank who were from civilian life and could speak the language of the men; who could, in the bluntest terms, place on the appeal on the level of a stump speech.

Hayes, the major of the regiment, recognized his role and accepted it. he went from company to company, pleading with the men to take the guns. The weapons were the only ones available to the state, he said. They would do for temporary use, to practice the manual of arms; later better models would be provided. Besides, he went on, the man was more important than the weapon. The ancestors of the men listening to him had won the jewel of American freedom in the Revolution with muskets even poorer than these. Would their descendants then refuse any weapons in an hour of greater peril? It was exactly the kind of exhortation calculated to move the impressionable boys, and they responded as Hayes must have known they would. Somebody yelled: ‘Bully for Hayes. . . let’s get our guns,’ and the crisis was passed.

Following their training, the men of the Twenty-Third moved south, to Weston in western Virginia. Their function there was to protect the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, secure the surrounding area, and protect the Kanawha Valley from Confederate moves. Mainly they marched back and forth on mountain roads, trying to round up guerrillas.

When the Federals first came into West Virginia, they were welcomed as deliverers. But if they thought that all the mountaineers were Unionists, they soon received a rude and sometimes lethal disillusionment. In many areas the inhabitants sympathized with the Southern cause or, if not animated by any ideological attachment, resented the presence of the invaders. Operating in small groups or as individuals, they stalked Union lines of communications, shooting at parties of soldiers and trying to run off cattle, horses, and other supplies. They were called guerrillas or bushwhackers by the Federals, who conducted constant expeditions to round them up. If arrested with arms but not in a guilty act, their invariable excuse was: ‘We were only hunting squirrels.’

One Federal witness described a typical guerrilla. ‘Imagine a stolid, vicious-looking countenance, an ungainly figure, and an awkward, if not ungraceful, spinal curve in the dorsal regions, acquired by laziness and indifference to maintaining an erect posture; a garb of the coarsest texture of home-spun linen . . . and so covered with dirt as not to enable one to guess it original color; a dilapidated, rimless hat, or cap of some wild animal’s skin, covering his head, the hair on which had not been combed for months; his feet covered with moccasins, and a rifle by his side, a powder-horn and shot-pouch slung around his neck, and you have the beau ideal of the West Virginia bushwhacker.’

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