A soldier’s story: search for ancestor uncovers tragic wartime experiences

By Sharon Barnes

To me, before I began searching my family roots, my great-great-grandfather, Charles “Charley” Herb, was just another name on a tombstone. One of his grandsons remembered hearing that “he was sick a lot.” My dad, Charley’s great-grandson, never heard even that much.

Then a cousin located and shared statistics of Charley’s military service.

In 1862, 17-year old Private Charles Herb enlisted in Company D, 21st Wisconsin Volunteers. A veteran of three major Civil War battles, he was shot in the leg and face and taken prisoner at Chickamauga, then endured 17 months and five days in various Southern prisons.

In 1882, he applied for a total disability pension and, on doctor’s orders, left the harsh Wisconsin winters for the milder climate of Oregon.

Charley’s war experience should have been the stuff of family legend, but it’s a story he never told. His silence wasn’t unique. Historians met a wall of silence when they attempted to interview veterans after the war. Reliving the horror for posterity was too much to ask of men who couldn’t tell even their wives and children what they’d suffered.

The Internet provided information about Charley’s regiment, and Shelby Foote and other Civil War historians gave me a doctoral education on the battles and prisons.

But the more I learned about Charley’s times, the less I knew about him. More than 120,000 men fought at Perryville, Stones River and Chickamauga, along battle lines that stretched for miles.
Where was Charley in all the confusion? Flat on his belly in the cornfield? Crouched behind breastworks at the river? Advancing tree-by-tree through the woods? Or was he somewhere in the rear, hauling up artillery canisters or steadying the mules?

Charley was only one among thousands of starving prisoners at Danville and Libby; nearly a third of his fellow captives died of exposure and disease at Andersonville, Ga. How had he made it out alive?

For $37.50, the National Archives sent Charley’s pension affidavits and, at last, in his own hand, I had a crucial piece of the story.

With nothing more to go on, I was ready to call the story good. Then, last summer, a likeness of Charley surfaced, the depression in his left cheek testifying to the mini ball that tore through his face at Chickamauga. It was such a young face and, for that reason alone, I couldn’t bring myself to type “The end.”

Late one night last April, the name of David Gould popped up on my computer screen. Gould, according to a reviewer, was the editor of a must-read Civil War diary penned by his great-great-grandfather, John H. Otto.

The hair stood up on my arms and in less than a minute I confirmed that Gould’s great-great-grandfather and Charley’s company commander were the same man. I couldn’t enter my credit card number fast enough and haunted the post office until Memoirs of a Dutch Mudsill, published by Kent State University, finally arrived.

Charley appears numerous times in the book, and again in the outtakes Gould was kind enough to share.

One of the youngest members of John Otto’s “dutch squad,” Charley was a willing and resourceful kid. When his comrades fell ill from maggoty hard tack and raw bacon, he managed to “find” a chicken or goose for the stewpot. Exhausted after a battle, he tramped miles in the dark to find water for the wounded.

I’ve tramped a lot of those miles with Charley, sat around the campfire with him and his friends, joined them in cussing the dust, the mud and the balky mules, and hunkered beside them, trembling but ready for the signal to advance.

Then the terrible moment on page 186, when a hapless colonel fails to hear the order to fall back, dooming my great-great-grandfather and 70 others to “a fate worse than death” in the prison pens.

Of course, I never really knew Charley, he died in 1900. But we share a good deal more than DNA now, and he can rest assured that he’ll never again be just another name on a tombstone. Not if I can help it.