Rufus Dawes’ Civil War

“I am fairly heart-sick at the stories of blood I hear from the old regiment,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes when he left his beloved 6th Wisconsin Infantry after the bloody summer of 1864. “It seems almost certain to me that I could never have lived through another such carnival of blood. Only eighty men are left in the ranks for service.” Dawes had fought every battle with the 6th Wisconsin from August 1862 through summer 1864 without suffering a single wound, and had led the regiment in its two most famous and catastrophic battles, Antietam and Gettysburg.¹

Craig Johnson Collection

Wisconsin Officer Rufus Dawes

Dawes’ memoir, Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers, has long been a favorite among Civil War historians and enthusiasts. Published in 1890, the book presents a classic version of the volunteer officer in the Union army. Dawes drew on a variety of sources, including his letters to family members, the just-published War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, and published memoirs and articles by other officers. Dawes comes across as self-aware, self-deprecating, and proud; he also understands exactly the cost at which the Union was saved those decades ago. He was 22 when the war started, the median age in his regiment. Yet he was unanchored in the world, torn between divorced parents and with no career laid out. His diary suggests a certain impulsiveness, a weakness for flattery, and a palpable need for recognition. An armchair psychologist could make something of the tension between Dawes and his father, of his seeming isolation in the near-wilderness of west-central Wisconsin, and his lack of focus. As it did to many thousands of young men at the time, the war provided an opportunity to come of age. But it took its toll.²

In 1860 Dawes was a disgruntled recent college graduate, living in Juneau County, Wisconsin. Born in Malta, Ohio, he had attended Marietta College near his hometown for a couple of years before his estranged father, for whom he worked on school breaks, brought him west. He attended the University of Wisconsin, but spent many of his days clearing brush, making hay, and working in the timber on his father’s property. “It is very dull here for me,” he wrote in August 1857. There was nothing he could learn from anyone he met “except such as pertains to farms or is directly connected with their narrow sphere of action. I will not spend another vacation here if I can help it.” The family he boarded with “are continually caviling or complaining about something. The boys have no respect for their Father,” he complained. “And he has no patience with them. Each one is ‘Boss.’” He made fun of their accents, pronouncing chairman “cheerman” and dropping the final “g” from words like “getting” and “meeting.” He complained that he was “again in the backwoods … and I fear almost inextricably entangled in them by the mesh … of circumstances.” This was a long-standing gripe; he never got along with his difficult father and resented being pulled away from his mother, siblings, and familiar community back in Ohio.³

But by 1860, Dawes had begun to make an effort to be part of his adopted home in Wisconsin. A few months earlier, perhaps to recreate the comradery and intellectual friendships of his years at Marietta College, he became clerk of the local Young Men’s Lyceum—a kind of debating and lecture society often reflecting an antebellum town’s cultural ambitions. He no doubt joined the Republican Club formed in May 1860.⁴

That was the summer in which he found a voice and a role for himself. His father was well-known in Juneau County, and that likely led to Rufus being chosen as one of the organizers of a July Fourth celebration (coincidentally his 22nd birthday). After a few other locals gave talks, “I was then loudly called for and responded with considerable éclat,” he remembered. His words have not survived, but clearly he had found a message and an audience. In a sign of his personal ambition, he declared, “The people of this settlement need sadly someone to lead.”⁵

On the Fourth he was asked to read the Declaration of Independence and to lead the procession through town. In another passage, he recalled, “I was very agreeably astonished at the … very respectable appearance of my company. I made a short speech to them before pronouncing ‘forward march.’ There must have been three hundred in my army—the longest regiment I have marshalled. They were remarkably docile and yielded … to my orders.” Ironically, Dawes would rarely command that many men when he led an army regiment.⁶

Library of Congress

Abraham Lincoln in 1860

Dawes liked attention and liked to talk, so it was natural that a few months later he became an enthusiastic campaigner for Abraham Lincoln’s presidential bid. In his diary he listed at least 14 stump speeches in county seats and tiny hamlets, town halls and schoolhouses, noting the size of the crowds and other details—“large and enthusiastic,” “good time,” “Very Good Discussion.” In the November election, Lincoln won Wisconsin with about 57 percent of the vote; he received just under half the vote in Juneau County.⁷

When Lincoln’s victory sparked the secession crisis and led to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Dawes’ life took another dramatic turn. In late April 1861 the Mauston Star, his community’s primary newspaper, called the “Freemen of Juneau County” to a public meeting for the purpose of organizing a volunteer company. “Brave hearts are needed to protect the rights and liberties guaranteed us in our time honored Constitution…. Come then one and all. Old men to give counsel. Young men to give strength. Juneau county must be heard from.”⁸ Dawes’ father presided at the meeting, which passed a series of resolutions, including a vow to “organize a Juneau county Military Company, pledged to aid in preserving the Union and a just administration of the laws.” Dawes led the way in volunteering, and 47 men offered their service to the Union. They adopted the name “The Lemonweir Minute Men”—after a river that meandered through the county—and elected Dawes captain.⁹

Library of Congress

In the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Rufus Dawes—like countless other northern men—rallied to the Union cause, helping raise a company for army service. Above: “Our Heaven Born Banner,” one of many patriotic works of art published after the fall of Sumter, depicts a Zouave sentry standing guard, with his rifle and bayonet forming the staff of an American flag formed by the sky’s light.

Dawes was overjoyed. “I am Captain of as good and true a bunch of patriots as ever rallied under the Star Spangled Banner,” he wrote his sister in a letter that betrayed both his youth and his determination to make a change in his life. “My men are terribly in earnest and they will stand by me to death…. I think no company bids fair to do more honorably than the ‘Lemonweir Minute Men’…. I have no rowdies, no drunkards, no off scourings of society but the very flower of Juneau, Adams & Bad Axe Counties. I shall esteem it an honor worth a better life than mine to be permit[t]ed to lead them in this glorious struggle.”¹⁰

Twenty-two of the men who signed the pledge that evening ended up in the 6th Wisconsin, most of them in Dawes’ Company K. The 6th would become part of the famous Iron Brigade, which would suffer more casualties than any other Union brigade; the 6th would rank tenth among all Union regiments in the number of men killed or mortally wounded. Six of the men who pledged that night in Mauston would die of wounds or disease, one would go missing in action, and five would be discharged with disabilities. This would haunt Dawes years later, but in the summer of 1861 he was going to war unencumbered by doubt or by any particular knowledge of how to fight a war.¹¹

Jim Rivest Collection

New to military life and command, Dawes learned their rules from study and the example set by his experienced superior officers. Above: Dawes as he appeared in late 1861 or early 1862.

Thrust into the captaincy of the Lemonweir Minute Men, Dawes, like thousands of other enthusiastic but woefully inexperienced junior officers around the country, scrambled to learn his new mission. He frequently commented on his path to becoming an effective leader. Dawes had spent May and June lobbying by letter and in person in the capital, Madison, for his company to be included in Wisconsin’s first six regiments. He also kept recruiting to make sure his company would be “full” by the time they were called. He spent time with a Mauston man who had served in the British army under Wellington and who assured his worried young friend that the war would not end before he got into the fighting. “I constantly advised with this venerable soldier who gave me excellent counsel and suggestions of practical value.”¹²

Until his company was called to Madison in late June—they were the last company of the 6th to arrive, hence their designation as Company K—he had a hard time keeping his men together enough to drill. Once they reached Camp Randall, when the company was ordered to get into formation and march to the barracks, Dawes had to admit they couldn’t do it. In full view of the 2,000 men already there, Dawes’ men were a motley sight, “stumbling along in two ranks, kicking each other’s heels…. A few wore broadcloth and silk hats, more the red shirts of raftsmen, several were in country homespun, one had on a calico coat, and another was looking through a hole in the dropping brim of a straw hat.” A few wore “those ugly white caps with long capes, called ‘Havelocks.’”¹³

Now the serious work of becoming soldiers began, and Company K joined the other nine companies of the 6th Wisconsin in “the severest kind of drill.” Despite the fleas and the cold drizzle, they began to come together. “It is a new life to us all,” Dawes wrote to his sister. “I am studying up on tactics, drilling and attending to the business of the company.”¹⁴ Perhaps he got his hands on one of the many published versions of the army drill and tactical manual distributed to the raw troops. Governor Alexander Randall had declared earlier in the year that the state had to figure out “the way of arming, equipping and uniforming its own citizens for military purposes. The men sent to war should be soldiers when they go, or there will be few of them living soldiers when it is time for them to return.” To that end, the state ordered the printing of a new and entirely plagiarized edition of William J. Hardee’s 1855 book on tactics; each regiment received 300 copies. It is likely that Dawes absorbed this trusted volume.¹⁵

Dawes had good teachers and learned quickly. The regiment’s colonel, Lysander Cutler, 54, was a crusty militiaman from Maine and veteran of the bloodless Aroostook War. His fellow captain, Edward Bragg, a lawyer and Democrat from Fond du Lac, became a friend, model, and confidant. Bragg, Dawes wrote, “appeared to be much gratified that a Captain had come in, who knew less than he did about military matters,” and they soon formed “an intimate association which lasted through three hard years of trial.” Both Cutler and Bragg would be wounded in battle; Cutler rose to the rank of brevet major general and command of a division, while Bragg became a brigadier and would eventually command the Iron Brigade.¹⁶

Library of Congress (Cutler); USAHEC (Bragg)

Lysander Cutler (left) and Edward Bragg

The regiment was rushed to Virginia after the Union defeat at Bull Run in July and was eventually brigaded with the 2nd and 7th Wisconsin and the 19th Indiana under the command of Rufus King, a West Pointer and longtime resident of Wisconsin. Most of the 2nd Wisconsin had fought at Bull Run as the 90-day 1st Wisconsin, but otherwise King’s “Western Brigade,” as it was called (the only brigade in the Army of the Potomac made up entirely of western regiments), was kept out of the fighting in its first year.

However disappointing it was to the officers and men bored with camp life and anxious to fight, they took advantage of the time to become one of the best-drilled units in the army. This they owed largely to the leadership of John Gibbon, the artillerist who took command of the brigade in early May 1862. He was tough but fair, and in addition to making the brigade wear the frock coats and tall black hats with feathers issued to the Regular Army, he drilled them incessantly, instilling a discipline that the men at first hated and a pride that they eventually appreciated. “He was anxious that his brigade should excel in every way,” Dawes wrote of Gibbon, “and while he was an exacting disciplinarian he had the good sense to recognize merit where it existed. His administration of the command left a lasting impression for good upon the character and military tone of the brigade, and his splendid personal bravery upon the field of battle was an inspiration.” Even before Gibbon’s arrival, division commander Irvin McDowell had compared the brigade’s performance in drill and formal reviews favorably to the cadets at West Point. “Beyond a doubt,” Dawes wrote, “it was this year of preparation that brought the ‘Iron Brigade’ to its high standard of efficiency for battle service.”¹⁷

The 6th Wisconsin and most of the rest of the Iron Brigade got a taste of combat in the prequel to Second Bull Run, when the brigade ran into a large portion of Stonewall Jackson’s corps at a battle they called Gainesville, but which has come to be called Brawner’s Farm. There in August 1862 they slugged it out with a much larger force of Confederates and then did well in a minor capacity in the subsequent battle. Lieutenant Colonel Bragg temporarily assumed command of the regiment after Colonel Cutler’s wounding at Brawner’s Farm, making Dawes, by now a major, second in command. Two weeks later the troops earned their “Iron Brigade” nickname in their uphill fight at Turner’s Gap (part of the Battle of South Mountain) and endured the savage fighting in the Cornfield at Antietam, where a minor wound to Bragg left Dawes in command of the regiment for much of the battle.

By the end of its first month of combat, the 6th Wisconsin was down to fewer than 300 men out of its original 1,000.

Earlier in 1862, Dawes had begun a long-distance courtship with a woman from his Ohio hometown, Mary Gates. Dawes projected his ambition and fears onto Gates. After they had become engaged, Dawes recounted a scene from a dire moment at Antietam that he apparently thought was a sweet account of his devotion to both her and the Union cause, but could only have made her worry. It had happened when the regiment was thrown back from the Cornfield and he had tried to rally them by seizing the state flag—under which four men had already been killed or wounded—and “swinging it over my head, and calling every man from Wisconsin to follow me…. When I took that color in my hand I gave up all hope of life…. I felt all the burning throng of thoughts and emotions that always come with the presence of death. I had no right to think of you then. I would have died with your name on my lips.” Ambition, love, and patriotism all flashed through his mind, in a competition of impulses that would continue until the last few months of his service.¹⁸

Harry Philip Fischer Collection, Marietta College Special Collections

In 1862, Dawes began a long-distance relationship with Mary Gates (pictured above), who hailed from his Ohio hometown. “We have the healthiest regiment in the corps,” a satisfied Dawes wrote her in June 1863. “We have a harmonious, quiet and satisfied set of officers. There is no intriguing, court-martialing or backbiting, which is common in the army.”

The catastrophic Union defeat at Fredericksburg in December 1862—in which the 6th was only peripherally involved—did not improve Dawes’ opinion of his army’s timid general officers, the second-guessing politicians running the war, or the foolish civilians back home. He wrote bitterly in a letter to his sister early in December, “Oh no, ‘the country demands’ we advance, Richmond must fall, Lee’s army must be ‘bagged,’ there must be a bloody battle, at least ten thousand of our brave soldiers must be killed and wounded. Nothing short of this will approach the blood thirsty appetite of our people, our valiant ‘stay at home Rangers.’”¹⁹ In another letter written on Christmas Day, he expressed hope that the regiment could stay for a time in the log houses they were building, “Not because I am not willing to fight … but I think our brigade with its bill of 1700 killed and wounded has earned a respite for the winter.” The army, he complained, “is cursed with second rate men from Burnside” on down. “This winter is the ‘valley forge’ of the war.”²⁰

The regiment did little fighting again until the summer of 1863. In late April, Dawes predicted a “bloody desperate battle” in a letter that was supposed to be delivered to Mary only in the event of his death. Unfortunately, it was delivered anyway, causing no little consternation back in Ohio. “I am sure my dying prayer will be that God will bless you always and make you happy,” he wrote, continuing his theme of love and patriotism. “I don’t believe you will ever think lightly of the love of a man, who, if he had few other merits, gave his life freely for his country and the right.”²¹

When not waxing poetic—Dawes was a young man, after all, and calculating how much patriotic posturing his fiancée could take—he and his regiment continued to work hard at soldiering. Gibbon had left the brigade a few months earlier and Bragg, disabled by a riding incident, was gone for much of June. Lieutenant Colonel Dawes, now acting commander of the 6th, wanted to “brag a little about our regiment” to Mary. “We have the healthiest regiment in the corps,” he wrote in mid-June. “We have a harmonious, quiet and satisfied set of officers. There is no intriguing, court-martialing or backbiting, which is common in the army. The arms, accoutrements and clothing are kept in excellent condition.” He described in detail the schedule he maintained, which featured daily inspections, battalion drill, officers’ training, and strict policing of the camp. He loved the drill, “as our regiment is not to be surpassed, and I feel very proud of their splendid movements.”²²

In another letter to Mary written two days later, Dawes warned that the army was about to move. “This is your second time ‘under fire,’” he wrote. “You are mustered into the service now, and must endure your trials and hardships as a soldier, and I doubt not they will be harder to bear than mine.” This was, of course, rather common boilerplate for a soldier expressing sympathy with a wife’s or sweetheart’s having to wait for news after a battle. He ended with confidence: “The regiment will go out strong in health and cheerful in spirit, and determined always to sustain its glorious history. It has been my ardent ambition to lead it through one campaign, and now the indications are that my opportunity has come. If I do anything glorious I shall expect you to be proud of me.” Although we don’t know how Mary responded, it must have given her pause, reading her betrothed’s promise to put himself in harm’s way for the purpose of achieving glory and his ambitions. There was no mention of politics or slavery or Union; he clearly wanted to impress her, impress others, and, perhaps most importantly, fortify himself for the fight to come.²³

Dawes was given his opportunity when the Army of the Potomac turned north to counter the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania.

July 1 found the 6th Wisconsin, the Iron Brigade, and the rest of I Corps marching toward Gettysburg. Eleven days earlier, Dawes had written Mary: “I think my life would make a readable romance with all the standard characters and the happy finale.”²⁴ As the regiment neared Emmitsburg Road, about three miles south of town, Dawes seemed in the mood for an appropriately notable entrance, almost as though he wanted to fashion a memory to savor later in life. On that morning he had command of 340 officers and enlisted men—his own regiment, plus the 100-man brigade guard made up of 10 men from each company. Intending to make a show in the streets of Gettysburg, he brought the drum corps to the front and had the colors unfurled. The drum-major had begun “The Campbells Are Coming,” and the regiment had closed its ranks and swung into step. “The people would infer,” Dawes thought, mostly in jest, “that the rebels are running, or would run very soon after so fine a body of soldiers as the 6th Wisconsin … confronted them.”²⁵

The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission

On the Battle of Gettysburg’s first day (depicted above in a painting by Peter Frederick Rothermel), Dawes led the 6th Wisconsin in a dramatic charge that temporarily blunted the Confederate advance. Before long, Dawes and his men joined other Union forces retreating under fire toward Cemetery Ridge.

But they would never reach the town. The Iron Brigade was ordered to leave the road and hustle toward the Lutheran Seminary, where Union cavalry were holding off approaching Confederates. As Dawes’ men jogged toward Seminary Ridge, loading their guns as they ran, they readied themselves to go into line at the far left of the brigade. But a staff officer galloped up with another order from Abner Doubleday, who was leading the I Corps after its commander, John Reynolds, had been killed earlier that day: The regiment was to remain in reserve. The men stopped and lay down to await orders—which came soon. On the right of the Union line, a brigade commanded by Cutler, the 6th Wisconsin’s first leader, was being flanked by Confederates. As Cutler later wrote, “The moment was a critical one, involving the defeat, perhaps the utter rout, of our forces. I immediately sent for … the Sixth Wisconsin …, whom I knew could be relied upon. Forming them rapidly perpendicular to the line of battle on the enemy’s flank, I directed them to attack immediately. Lieutenant-Colonel Dawes, their commander, ordered a charge, which was gallantly executed.”²⁶

All of Dawes’ ambitions for contributing to the Union cause came together on this day—especially in the next half hour. His experience—he had actually commanded the regiment for most of the Battle of Antietam—and his confidence in his men led him to order a complicated maneuver in which the regiment first moved in line of march a short way to the east, away from its target, and then changed front to the left, into line of battle. Dawes directed them toward Chambersburg Pike, which ran west/northwest from Gettysburg just under a thousand yards away. As the men jogged at the “double-quick” into heavy fire, Dawes’ horse was shot from under him. His men did not fire until they reached a rail fence along the pike, where they paused to fire a volley. By this time, many of the Confederates—the 2nd Mississippi Infantry and elements of two other regiments—had taken cover in an unfinished railroad cut, from which they continued to pour deadly fire onto the 6th. They could not stay in the open, so Dawes ordered his men over the fence and then over a second fence on the north side of the Pike. Then he spotted the 95th New York to his left (the 14th Brooklyn was farther to the left, beyond Dawes’ vision). “I did not then know or care where they came from, but was rejoiced to see them.” The 95th was down to perhaps 100 men and was under the command of Major Edward Pye. “Running hastily to the major, I said, ‘We must charge,’ and asked him if they were with us. The gallant major replied, ‘Charge it is,’ and they were with us to the end.” The regiments surged forward. “We were now receiving a fearfully destructive fire from the hidden enemy,” Dawes remembered. “Men who had been shot were leaving the ranks in crowds. Any correct picture of this charge would represent a V-shaped crowd of men with the colors at the advance point, moving firmly and hurriedly forward, while the whole field behind is streaming with men who had been shot, and who are struggling to the rear or sinking in death upon the ground. The only commands I gave, as we advanced, were, ‘Align on the colors! Close up on that color! Close up on that color!’” Despite taking heavy losses, the 6th, and eventually the two New York regiments, crashed into the 2nd Mississippi, trapping them in the railroad cut.²⁷

Ultimately 225 Confederate soldiers and seven officers were captured at the cost to the 6th Wisconsin of 29 killed, 111 wounded, and 20 missing—nearly half the number who had left Emmitsburg Road less than an hour earlier.²⁸ When the colonel of the 2nd Mississippi offered Dawes his sword, in the old-fashioned ritual of surrendering, Dawes took it. “It would have been the handsome thing to say, ‘Keep your sword, sir,’ but I was new to such occasions, and, when six other officers came up and handed me their swords, I took them also, and held the awkward bundle in my arms until they were given to a wounded soldier on his way into Gettysburg. They were later lost when the Confederates overran the town.”²⁹

The 6th’s dramatic charge temporarily blunted the Confederate attack along Chambersburg Pike. During the brief period of quiet that followed, Dawes moved his men a short distance forward, or west, where he spent a half hour organizing his shattered companies. Two of his company commanders had been killed and five wounded and Dawes, and no doubt everyone still standing with him, only then came to fully appreciate the tremendous cost of their charge. By this time the Army of the Potomac’s XI Corps, which had followed the I Corps to the battlefield, was engaged with Confederates north of the town—and it was not going well, with more Rebel forces coming down on their flanks.

As Union forces to their right and to their left began to fall back—grudgingly to the left, more rapidly on the right—Dawes felt isolated. He had not received orders since leaving the rest of the Iron Brigade, and in what was perhaps an even greater demonstration of leadership than his impulsive decision to charge the railroad cut, Dawes managed to keep his regiment together as they raced back toward Gettysburg and the developing Union defensive position on Cemetery Ridge. Under heavy fire, the regiment—down to fewer than 150 men by this time—ducked through the railroad cut, bullets and shells spraying dirt all around them, and headed for town. As Dawes later noted, “It was an even race which could reach Gettysburg first, ourselves, or the troops of Ewell’s Corps, who pursued the Eleventh Corps” from the north. “If we had desired to attack Ewell’s twenty thousand men with our two hundred, we could not have moved more directly toward them. We knew nothing about the Cemetery Hill, but we could see that the oncoming lines of the enemy were encircling us in a horseshoe. But with the flag of the Union and of Wisconsin held aloft, the little regiment marched firmly and steadily.”³⁰

Following Chambersburg Pike into town, they squeezed single file through a hole in a board fence—Dawes at the opening, pulling men through—and hurried past the buildings of Pennsylvania College (now Gettysburg College) meanwhile exchanging gunfire with Confederates in town. Suffering only a few casualties, the 6th Wisconsin headed south on Emmitsburg Road, joining a somewhat less orderly retreat of the rest of I Corps (including their fellow Iron Brigade regiments). They turned off the road at about the same spot they had turned toward the firing earlier in the day, rested for a time near the gatehouse at Evergreen Cemetery, then worked their way to the relative safety of the brigade’s position on Culp’s Hill.

It had been a long and deadly day, and the men sank to the ground hoping to rest. In his memoir, Dawes’ memory of that sad evening is shaped by his knowledge of the ultimate victory of the Union army two days later, but still captures the jumble of thoughts and the numbing realization of just how badly the regiment and brigade had been battered that day. He also came to understand that due in large part to his leadership, his regiment had helped to ensure that the Army of the Potomac would be in a position of strength when the battle reopened on July 2:

The men now lay down to rest after the arduous labors of this great and terrible day. Sad and solemn reflections possessed, at least, the writer of this paper. Our dead lay unburied and beyond our sight or reach. Our wounded were in the hands of the enemy. Our bravest and best were numbered with them. Of eighteen hundred men who marched with the splendid brigade in the morning, but seven hundred were here. More than one thousand men had been shot. There was to us a terrible reality in the figures which represent our loss. We had been driven, also, by the enemy, and the shadow of defeat seemed to be hanging over us. But that afternoon, under the burning sun and through the stifling clouds of dust, the Army of the Potomac had marched to the sound of our cannon. We had lost the ground on which we fought, we had lost our commander and our comrades, but our fight had held the Cemetery Hill and forced the decision for history that the crowning battle of the war should be at Gettysburg.

Dawes may have realized that his wildest dreams of leadership and glory had actually come true on the slopes west of a small Pennsylvania town, but in the moment, as he recalled, the day’s bloody exertions overwhelmed him: “It is a troubled and dreamy sleep at best that comes to the soldier on a battlefield.”³¹

The relative calm of the fall of 1863 allowed the 6th Wisconsin to recuperate. By December enough men had accepted the War Department’s offer of furloughs and hundreds of dollars in bounties in exchange for early reenlistment—227, or the required three-fourths—that the unit became designated a “veteran” regiment. During his furlough in Wisconsin, Dawes detoured to Marietta to wed Mary Gates. The return to Virginia for what everyone hoped would be the war’s last campaign was, of course, bittersweet.

In May 1864, the 6th Wisconsin was among the first units to cross the Rapidan River at the beginning of the Overland Campaign—Ulysses S. Grant’s Virginia offensive against Robert E. Lee—and was heavily engaged during the nearly nonstop marching and fighting at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. Dawes, who had recently taken formal command of the 6th Wisconsin, led it effectively throughout this more intensive phase of the war, one that resulted in unprecedented bloodletting, producing more than 80,000 total casualties over seven weeks. In his letters to Mary, he revealed a sadness and near hopelessness that he had been able to keep at bay earlier in the conflict. “Through God’s blessing I am yet alive,” he wrote from Spotsylvania. “The perils of the last week have been fearful. I cannot hope to pass thus safely through another such.” The blood and horror “of the last week make my heart almost like a stone.” In another letter he wrote, “Day after day we stupidly and drearily wait the order that summons us to the fearful work.”³² The five days at Spotsylvania were Dawes’ worst of the war, with skirmishers constantly firing between opposing breastworks and some bodies of the dead and wounded of the 6th Wisconsin were burned when fires started in the grass and dry leaves.

After two years of combat, Dawes’ compulsion for action had disappeared and his thirst for glory had been sated. He wrote in July that the men who had not reenlisted the previous year and were due to return home “are nearly wild at the prospect of seeing once more their long separated families.” ³³ Sometime during the summer Dawes turned down the chance for a colonel’s commission and command of a regiment comprising survivors of the 2nd, 5th, and 6th Wisconsin, mostly because it would have required him to reenlist for three years. “I am ready to stand by the country and at the post of peril as long as any other man,” he wrote Mary, “but after staying there about sixteen times as long as the average I believe my first duty is now at home.” His odd streak of good luck weighed on him; writing in line of battle near Spotsylvania, Dawes admitted that, although “I know you are praying for me, & suffering as only few can know,” he could not “write false hopes of escaping forever.” Dawes betrayed the fear that his days were numbered; in mid-July, as the Army of the Potomac was settling into siege operations outside Petersburg, he wrote with only slight exaggeration, “I am myself the only man who has passed unharmed through every battle and skirmish of the regiment.”³⁴

Dawes put his official affairs in order and left the regiment in late August 1864. A civilian again, Dawes settled down with Mary in their hometown. By August 1865, they had their first child, Charles, who would in the succeeding century share in a Nobel Prize and become vice president under President Calvin Coolidge. Dawes stayed in Marietta, generally prospering in various businesses, being a trustee of his college, and serving a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In late 1881, already at work on his memoir, Dawes visited Arlington National Cemetery to “worship at the shrine of the dead.” His mission was to find the graves of “my friends and comrades, poor fellows, who followed my enthusiastic leadership in those days, followed it to the death which I by a merciful Providence escaped.” He located those two dozen gravestones among the 16,000 in the cemetery, including several of the men who, 20 years ago on a spring evening in Wisconsin, had signed the promise to put their lives on the line for the country. But the occasion also made him reflect on the past, on his youthful enthusiasm, on the ways in which the war tempered that enthusiasm and shaped his ambition—both as an officer and as a civilian. His troops had camped on these very grounds when they first reached the war, their young captain full of “ambitious imagination” looking out over the Potomac River at the unfinished capitol rising in Washington City, envisioning “castles of the time when I might take my place there.” Now, “at middle age, with enthusiasm sobered by hard fights and hard facts,” Dawes stood with “uncovered head” at each of the graves of his wartime comrades, and thought differently about service. Their deaths—their lives, really—had inspired him to run for Congress, “to stand for all they won in establishing our government upon freedom, equality, justice, liberty, and protection to the humblest.” “For what they died I fight a little longer.”

Dawes was all of 42 when he described this visit to Arlington, yet he felt old. “The shadows of age are rapidly stealing upon us,” he wrote in a section directed at his fellow soldiers. “Our burdens are like the loaded knapsack on the evening of a long and weary march, growing heavier at every pace. The severing of the links to a heroic and noble young manhood, when generous courage was spurred by ambitious hope, goes on, but you have lived to see spring up as the result of your suffering, toil and victory the most powerful nation of history and the most beneficial government ever established.” As a kind of benediction, he wrote, “this is your abundant and sufficient reward.”³⁵

Dawes lived to see his memoir published and was 61 when he died in Marietta in 1899.

 

James Marten is professor emeritus of history at Marquette University and author or editor of nearly two dozen books. His most recent book, The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment, is now available from the University of North Carolina Press.