Eddington Civil War Memoir Pulls No Punches
by
John J. Dunphy
This is a revised, expanded version of a column published in the 7/25/20 edition of The Telegraph of Alton, IL
The memoirs of Civil War soldiers make fascinating reading. The Madison County Historical Society has posted to its web page several wartime accounts written by long-ago area residents. William R. Eddington, who was born in the Macoupin county town of Woodburn in 1844, wrote his Civil War memoir, titled My Civil War Memoirs and Other Reminiscences, shortly before his death in 1936. His sharp memory and candid words bring the Civil War to life for modern readers.
Eddington’s upbringing was marred by alcoholism and domestic violence. “My father was a drunkard,” he wrote, who often sent him “to a little town two miles distance to buy whiskey for him. In those days every grocery store and street corner sold whiskey. The price was 20 to 25 cents per gallon.” Eddington’s father sometimes “would not draw a sober breath for two weeks at a time.”
Violence was a regular occurrence in the Eddington household.
“I have seen him take a gun and try to shoot my Mother and shoot the candle light out. I have seen him many times take a butcher knife and take after my Mother and drive her out doors, where she had to hide out in the brush all night to keep away from him. I have seen this many times.”
Eddington’s father on January 4, 1855 at the age of 43. “He drank himself to death,”Eddington wrote. His mother died in 1896 at 82. Eddington had eight siblings, all of whom were deceased when he wrote his memoir.
His education was limited. There were no free public school where he lived until he was 14. Private schools, which parents financed by paying tuition, were held in a succession of private residences. Despite his spotty schooling, Eddington at age 19 “taught a six months school in the new school house.”
When the war broke out in 1861, Eddington’s widowed mother refused to allow her underage son to enlist. A year later, however, she relented. This young man and “four of the neighborhood boys” journeyed to Gillespie to enlist in the Union army. They were sent to Camp Butler, which was near Springfield, for training. Later, these young men “were put on cars on the Chicago and Alton R.R. and started for Alton.” Upon arriving, they were placed on a train destined for Terre Haute, IN. Eddington wrote “as we rolled along the great prairies of Illinois for miles and miles, there was not a house to be seen — nothing but a great ocean of wild prairie grass waving in the wind higher than a man’s head.”
Eddington, who served in Company A of the 97th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, is blunt about the hardships he endured. While in Kentucky, he wrote about marching through a snowstorm. He and the other men pitched their blankets on the ground that night and, “too weary to eat,” tried to get some rest. The next morning, they discovered that their “blankets were frozen solid to the ground.”
Upon taking a Rebel fort at Arkansas Post in January of 1863, Eddington and the other Union troops discovered “a lot of new Enfield Rifles which had been smuggled to them [the Confederates] from England.” Eddington and many others eagerly exchanged their muskets for these English-made weapons, which they regarded as superior in quality.
They took about 5,000 Confederate prisoners who were placed on boats and sent “to Alton, Illinois, where they were put in the Old State Penitentiary and kept there as prisoners of war for about two years.” The wounded of both armies were placed on “hospital boats” and then taken to hospitals. Eddington grimly noted that “Many of them had to have their legs or arms cut off…. Such are the horrors of war.”
Eddington’s description of the Arkansas Post battlefield is brutally frank. He saw a man lying on the ground and thought he was asleep, since he appeared unharmed. Upon rolling this man onto his side, however, “I saw that the whole back of his head was shot out.” While the man’s face was untouched, his head “was hollowed just like a gourd.” Eddington also wrote of seeing a dead man who was lying on his back, “but his feet were standing up in front of him in a long legged pair of boots.” This soldier’s legs had been blown off just above his boots.
Eddington’s account of the fall of Vicksburg to the Union army on July 4, 1863 gives readers insight into the hardship and deprivation endured by Civil war soldiers. Upon surrendering, he noted, the Rebel prisoners “were allowed to come out and mingle all together with the Union forces.” The Rebels were ravenously hungry.
“Many of them had not had a bite to eat for forty-eight hours. We opened our haversacks and gave them everything we had — even to the last hardtack. They even had eaten their last mule and did not have one left. They had eaten even all the rats they could catch.”
Eddington conceded, however, that he and his fellow Union soldiers were a sorry lot as well.
“We felt pretty dirty and lousy too, as we had not had a clean stick of anything to put on for more than six weeks and we were covered with graybacks (slang for lice), as we had not had any chance to clean up for the past two and a half months, not even to pick them off. Sometimes were unable to get water enough to wash our faces for two weeks at a time, and other times some of our trenches did not have outlets and when it rained we had to take our caps and bail the water out with them so we could stay in them. We were a miserable looking set. I doubt if our own mothers would have recognized us if they saw us.”
Hunger stalked these men. When rations ran low, Eddington recalled troops ripping the bark from elm trees and chewing it while they marched. While in Alabama, Eddington and his officer asked a woman seated by the door of a plantation house if they could have something to eat. The woman not only refused them food but added that she hoped “God would strike every Yankee dead before they got off her place.” However, a “colored boy’ who lived on the plantation brought the invaders some bread, ham and eggs.
While awaiting the order to launch “the big charge” against Fort Blakely in Alabama, “we knew that many of us would never see the light of another day,” he recalled. “The tears are running down over my cheeks so fast they blind my eyes and I have to stop and wipe them away.“
Eddington returned to Brighton after his discharge. The ground he tilled as a farmer surely contrasted sharply with the corpse-strewn battlefields of the Civil War.
Most Union veterans associated the Republican party with loyalty to the nation and victory in the Civil War. Eddington concluded his memoir by stating “In politics I am a Republican. I have voted seventeen times for president and always for a Republican.” The Democratic party for Eddington and his fellow veterans was the party of treason and slavery. “I believe in freedom and liberty and this is something we get very little of under a Democratic administration.” Writing 71 years after the Civil War’s conclusion, Eddington was still bitter over what he saw as the treachery of the Democratic party. “The war of their party rebellion took the lives of 640,000 of the boys of the North and it can never be known how many Mothers died from worry and broken hearts against that party’s great rebellion against liberty and freedom.”
Eddington was mistaken, of course, when he claimed that 640,000 “boys of the North” died during the Civil War. His 640,000 figure is close to the total number of Civil War casualties on both sides: 624,511. That number, from the ehistory site of Ohio State University, becomes even more horrifying in light of the fact that it represents about two percent of the American population at the time. The OSU sites notes that 224,580 Union military personnel died of disease, while 164,000 Confederates perished from disease. While horrifying, these numbers are hardly surprising. Modern medical science was still in its infancy during the Civil War and the germ theory of disease had not yet been generally accepted.
For some reason, Eddington felt compelled to note that his life had been austere to a degree that seems astonishing to modern readers.
“I never drank a glass of any kind of liquor in my life. I have never used tobacco in any shape, for, or fashion. I have never played a game of cards…. I never played a game of dice or chuckaluck. Never played a game of baseball, football or basketball. Never bet or gambled in any way. Never was inside a theater or hospital….I never go to prize fights or horse races. I never danced.”
Eddington then shared the values that had guided him through life.
“My policy is to love and serve God to the very best of my ability. To love my neighbor as I do myself and to do unto others as I would like then to do unto me. This is the only road there is to true happiness in the world and the life that is to come hereafter.”
Eddington closed his memoir with an uncharacteristic boast. “I think this is the longest article ever written by a ninety-two Civil War veteran. It has approximately 22, 100 words.” He closed his memoir with his name, outfit and address.
Lieutenant W.R. Eddington
Co. A 97th Reg. Ill. Vol. Inf.
R.F.D. 1, Box 51
Brighton, Illinois
Although a civilian for 66 years, he still identified himself as Lt. W.R. Eddington. His military service had forever defined him.
John J. Dunphy’s published works include Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois and Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials: The Investgative Work of the U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group, 1945–1947.