The 21st Ohio Volunteers had been an indispensable part of Thomas’s feat at Chickamauga. Although their role in the battle was obscured for a variety of understandable reasons, it is indisputable that they were a vital key. Due to their detachment from brigade and division, few high-level officers knew where they were and what they did. Most of the battle reports couldn’t have evaluated the 21st’s contribution even had they known of it.

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This little backwoods Ohio regiment, with their odd-looking guns, had demonstrated that every military textbook in the world was obsolete. The scholarly experts who, in the quiet days of the future, were to dismiss the five-shot Colt Rifle as a fault-laden failure were not behind the guns on Snodgrass Hill. For while it was inferior even to contemporary breechloaders like the Sharps, it was there when it counted. Not a single man, on either side, who survived the battle ever denounced the Colt Repeating Rifle.

Although it would slip into oblivion as the metallic-cartridge breechloaders came into general use, it had provided the extra punch needed at a desperate moment. It also had, by its very existence, produced new tactics which seemed impromptu to the fast-thinking men who were using them. Three years later, and thousands of miles away. Prussia would defeat Austria in the Six Weeks War. Military strategies would unite in praising the genius of the Prussian Von Moltke’s tactics, while noting in passing that the Prussians were equipped with ‘needle-guns.’ Every army in the Western world spent the next 60 years studying Von Moltke. They would have profited more by studying the actions of the 21st Ohio, part of the ‘armed rabble’ as Von Moltke termed soldiers of our Civil War, on a September afternoon in Georgia.

Major McMahan, who had been captured, was exchanged early in 1864. He waged a bitter and fruitless campaign to win recognition for the 21st’s heroic stand at Chickamauga. He also tried to find those responsible for the useless sacrifice of the regiment at the day’s end.

He accomplished neither. The commanding officers of the 2d Division had their hands full explaining to Boards of Inquiry just why they had arrived in the streets of Chattanooga instead of on Snodgrass Hill. They were not about to become advocates of the single regiment which had succeeded in doing what they had been busily explaining was impossible. And no one sprang to volunteer that they were responsible for leaving the regiment deserted to its fate. The Western armies were gathering for the last great campaigns, and there was no time for postmortems on a lost battle, however unjust it might be.

So the 21st Ohio went on to the end. It was considered a peculiarity of their that any strange officer who wore colored glasses in their vicinity was inviting harsh treatment. They arrived, like many others, in Washington to participate in the Grand Review of the Armies of the Republic. Here they discovered that the glory-covered New Englanders of Berdan’s Sharpshooters had discarded the Colt Repeater early in the war in favor of the superior Sharps. Some of the knock-down brawls the Ohioans had with Eastern soldiers may have been precipitated when they pointed out that they had done more marching, more fighting, and won more battles with their inferior Colts than Berdan’s men had done with the great Sharps. On the second day of the Grand Review, looking unnaturally neat and clean, the Western armies marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. The 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry marched among them. In perfect step, carrying proudly and with honor their battle-scarred Colt Revolving Rifles, they marched into history; ‘unsuccessful’ guns in the hands of ‘unmilitary’ men, who had accomplished unparalleled things.

This article originally appeared in the January 1967 issue of Civil War Times Illustrated.

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