Years after the war Union veterans reminisced and wrote about the battle of Pickett’s Mill, Ga. Fought on May 27, 1864, some two dozen miles northwest of Atlanta, the engagement was an important Confederate defensive victory won by Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne’s troops. One sees this in the pages of the National Tribune, the newspaper published in Washington for Union veterans from 1877 to 1943.1 Especially in the 1880s, when veterans of both sides were publishing their recollections of the war, the National Tribune carried a fair number of pieces about Pickett’s Mill, in particul on what can be called the “bugle controversy.” For instance, in January 1887 the National Tribune printed a short article entitled “The Bugle Was to Blame” by S.W. Bird, adjutant of the 35th Illinois in th First Brigade of Thomas Wood’s
Willich (it was actually led by Col. William Gibson after Willich took a service-ending wound at Resaca on May 15). The brigade had drilled so extensively with orders sounded by buglers that it had come to be called the “Horn Brigade,” according to Bird. On May 27, the troops marched through the woods approaching Pickett’s Mill, just a few hundre yards in front of the Confederate line, to get into position for a surprise flank attack. Yet “all t commands in our brigade during these movements were given by the bugler,” Bird wrote; “if that was not warning enough for the rebs as to what we were driving at, I don’t know how we could have made it plainer, unless it h been to send an Orderly over and tell them.” Reflecting on the cos ly failure of the Union attack th day, Bird concluded, “if some one had smashed that bugle at the start there would not have been s many smashed heads and limbs that night.” In a follow-up artic a few months later, Bird commented further, “I shall always think the bugle was out of place on that particular occasion.”2 W.P. De Land was an Ohioan in Brig. Gen. William B. Hazen’s brigade when it was ordered in at the start of Wood’s assault. H submitted an article published in the Tribune on April 21, 1887. De Land remembered that on the afternoon of May 27, as they marched through the woods,
“The Bugle Was to Blame” there were orders for no loud talking; “we of Hazen’s Brigade were ordered to be very quiet.” Then came “the tooting of those infernal bugles,” he wrote. “We could not help realizing that at every ‘toot’ lives were being sacrificed; for the rebels needed nothing more to guide them, and informed them as to what was up.”3 I.M. Adair, who had served as sergeant-major of the 86th Indiana, also weighed in on the subject. “I have always believed that if Willich’s buglers had kep still the rebels might not have known just when, where or how we were approaching,” he wrote in the Tribune; “but previous to the charge they kept up a braying equal to a corral of army mules a feeding-time.”4 Not all Northerners agreed. W. Wright, whose 78th Pennsylvania in Col. Benjamin Scribner’s brigade advanced after Hazen’s repulse, wrote the Tribune, commenting on De Land’s article: “as to Willich’s bugles, I must say
enemy, and they found us apparently without the aid of bugles o anything else.”5 For all this discussion by Uni veterans about Pickett’s Mill bugling, historians have concluded that it didn’t tip Confederates off about an impending assault. “They obtained their information, not from Federal bugle calls as some Union accounts stated,” Richard McMurry wrote a half-century ago, “but from a morning reconnaissance made by Brigadier General Daniel C. Govan’s Brigade of Cleburne’s Division.” A more recent chronicler of the battle, Brad Butkovic agrees that “the Confederates knew where they [enemy forces] were with or without the bugle calls.”6 Scholarly conclusions, however, do not diminish the color or conviction that characterizes Union veterans’ writings in the National Tribune. The newspaper deserves more frequent citation by future scholars of the Civil War. The National Tribune can be accessed online at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov./lccn/ sn82016187/issues.
Endnotes: 1. Richard A. Sauers, comp., T National Tribune Civil War Index: A Guide to the Weekl Newspaper Dedicated to Civi War Veterans, 1877–1943, 3 vols. (El Dorado Hills CA:
issue of the National Tribune, ng, Ga. Mr. Clark kindly photog a Union veteran a generation a
Savas Beatie, 2018), vol. 1, vi S.W. Bird, “The Bugle Was to Blame,” National Tribune, Jan. 6, 1887; Charles W. Harrington, “New Hope Church,” National Tribune, Jan. 6, 1887 (“we soon heard the bugle calls for which that brigade [Willich’s/ Gibson’s] was noted”); W.F. Tait, “About Willich’s Bugles,” National Tribune, Aug. 18, 1887 (“Willich’s Horn Brigade”); S. W. Bird, “Willich’s Buglers Again,” National Tribune, March 24, 1887. W.P. De Land, “New Hope Church: The Fight at Hazen’s Brigade, and Something About Willich’s Bugles,” National Tribune, April 21, 1887. I.M. Adair, “On to Atlanta. Something About the Battles of New Hope Church and Pickett’s Mills,” National Tribune, June 9, 1887. W.J. Wright, “New Hope Church. A Pennsylvanian’s Account of the Fighting There,” National Tribune, June 2, 1887. Richard M. McMurry, “The Atlanta Campaign: December 23,1863 to July 18, 1864,” Ph.D dissertation, Emory University, 1967, 163; Brad Butkovich, The Battle of Pickett’s Mill: Along the Dead-Line (Charleston: History Press, 2013), 86.
Davis is author of four on the Atlanta Campaign/ ta in the war. His article on