We are ordered to Fort Brown, two miles from the city, where
we go into a more permanent camp. During our first days at Savannah, the
Seventh's boys are seen strolling everywhere, viewing the fortifications and
the great guns; they are also seen pacing the streets of the beautiful city,
looking with admiration upon her gorgeous buildings, and standing in awe in the
shade of the peerless monument reared by a generous people to that noble Pole,
Count Pulaski, who fought, bled and died in America's first revolution for
independence. Can it be that traitors have walked around its base and sworn
that the great Union for which this grand and liberal spirit sacrificed his
life should be consigned to the wrecks of dead empires? As we stand and gaze
upon this marble cenotaph, we are constrained to say, Oh! wicked men, why stood
ye here above the dust of Poland's martyr, seeking to defame his name and tear
down what he helped to rear! May God pity America's erring ones! In our
wanderings we are made to stop, by an acre enclosed with a high but strong
palisade, the work of Colonel G. F. Wiles, Seventy-eighth Ohio Veteran
Volunteer Infantry, commanding Second Brigade, Third Division, Seventeenth Army
Corps, and his gallant command. This is God's acre and liberty's, and
emphatically can this be said, for here three hundred or more of our fallen
comrades sleep death's silent sleep. Here in trenches, unknelled, uncoffined,
but not alone, "life's fitful fever over," they sleep well.
They fell not in the deadly breach, nor yet on the grassy
plain. For them no choir of musketry rattled, no anthem of cannon rolled, but
unclad and unfed, their lamps of life flickered out in that worse than Egyptian
bondage—a Confederate prison. For long weary months they suffered and waited
for the time to come when they would inhale freedom's pure air; for long weary
nights they watched the signal lights as they flashed upwards from the monitors
to guide Sherman through the wilderness of pines, down to the sea; long did
they wait to see the sunlight from the waters flash on his serried lines, but
he came not. They suffered on, and died-died martyrs upon the altar of human
freedom; died that not one single star, however wayward, should be erased from
the Union's great banner of freedom. Has the world, in all its history of
blood, from the creation to the christian era, from the reformation to the
revolution, ever produced examples of such heroic endurance as this second
revolution has given to the world? Echoes coming from the soft south winds that
sweep along the Atlantic shore, answer no. These men were murdered! Yes,
murdered because they wore the blue, and fought for the flag and freedom. The
poet alludes most touchingly to an incident that caused the murder of one of
these lonely sleepers who plead for his wife's letters.
"First pay the postage, whining
wretch."
Despair had made the prisoner brave-
"I'm a captive, not a slave;
You took my money and my clothes,
Take my life too, but for the love of
God
Let me know how Mary and the children
are,
And I will bless you ere I go."
This plea proved fruitless, and across the dead-line the
soldier passed, and soon a bullet passed through his brain, and his crushed
spirit was free with God. What a sad picture.
We remember when we stood there and gazed upon that hallowed
acre of God's and liberty's. We thought of those wicked men who whelmed this
land into those dark nights of war; who told us then that the Union soldier
died in vain; that the names of those uncoffined sleepers there would be
forgotten and unsung, and as my comrades and myself stood there revolving these
thoughts in our minds, we vowed over those graves, before heaven, to be the
enemies of traitors. "Died in vain! sacrificed their lives for naught!
their names to be forgotten and unsung!" Who uttered those words in
application to the noble sleepers there? Who spoke thus to the weeping mother
and stricken sister? Traitors in the North! Traitors on the legislative floors
uttered these words! We speak the sentiment of the Seventh when we say that we
would not take millions for what we hate these men, contemptible in nature,
pusillanimous in soul, with hearts as black as the "steeds of night."
Like Brownlow, were we not afraid of springing a theological question, we would
say that better men have been going down with the wailing hosts for the last
eighteen hundred years.
A few days after going into camp at Fort Brown, Major
Johnson is ordered with Companies A, H and K, to proceed down the river to
Bonniventure, about five miles from Savannah. Arriving, we take up our quarters
in the old Bonniventure mansion, a fashionable resort for the chivalry in the
days that have flown. During our stay here we live chiefly on oysters, which
are obtained in great abundance by the boys. Major Johnson and his detachment
will not soon forget how they gamboled and loitered beneath the shades of those
live oaks down by the great Atlantic's shore.
The Seventh remains in camp at Fort Brown and Bonniventure
until the latter part of January, 1865. In the mean time Captain Norton, with
the mounted portion of the regiment, was ordered across the Savannah river into
South Carolina, joining Howard's command at Pocataligo.
SOURCE: Daniel Leib Ambrose, History of the Seventh
Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry, p. 290-93
