66. Deerfield Civil War Vets, 84th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, John Wall, Chas. Taylor

Winchester News-Gazette,
by William Jackson.



  The men who served in the armies of both sides during the Civil War developed an attachment for each other that only soldiers who have faced death together can know. This comradeship was all the closer for veterans of the Civil War, since whole companies would be raised in the same community, and the soldiers a man fought side by side with would usually be from his own neighborhood, men whom he had known all of his life.

John Wall

  Charles N. Taylor and John Wall, both of Deerfield, enlisted and served together in Company E of the 84th Regiment, Indiana Volunteer Infantry, and became literal comrades in arms. The reminiscences of "Shirkey" Taylor and the memories of Hoke Wall, son of John, and Lorena, Hoke's wife, tell a tale of two men who helped each other to survive the many trials that soldiers faced during wartimes.
  Hoke and Lorena still live in Deerfield, the town from which both John Wall and Shirkey came. Hoke, who is 86 years old, still remembers his father, who died in 1928 at the age of 83.
  John had a brother, Moses, who was several years older than John in the summer of 1862, Hoke recalls. When Moses joined the army that July, John decided to go along with him. John was only 17 years old at the time, and had to stretch the truth a bit to enlist, so he said that he was 18 years old.

  The recruiting officers who raised the troops at this time were political favorites who received their recruiting commissions from Governor Morton, of Indiana. If they managed to fill their companies, they stood a good chance of receiving a commission of an officer, and so the recruiters were not to concerned about details such as a year or two in a prospective soldier's age. As long as he could pass the required medical examination, which was also not too rigorous, he was welcome in the ranks. So John was taken at his word, and signed up in what was to become Company E of the 84th Indiana on July 28, 1862.
  Charles Taylor joined just 11 days later, on August 8, and within a month the company was in camp in Camp Wayne, Richmond, waiting for the rest of the regiment to be filled.
   By mid-summer of that year the 84th had been fully organized and sent into the field, as Taylor remembered 50 years later in an open letter to his comrades at a reunion. "Ours, you remember, was a soldier's life of ease, only the camp routine and fed on milk and honey. We certainly had a glorious easy time for the first year of our enlistment camping at Cattletsburg and Louisa, Kentucky, up on the Big Sandy River.
  Taylor and Wall were bunk mates when their regiment went into the field. During the war each soldier carried among his gear, if he was properly supplied, a shelter half, or a square piece of tent canvas with buttons along one side. When two or three men would put their shelter halves together, they could be buttoned together, stretched over a ridgepole, and staked at the edges to make a tent. This would be big enough for two men, or, if the weather was cold, a third could be squeezed in whose shelter half could be buttoned over one end of the tent for more protection from the weather. Taylor and Wall shared their tent and soon became fast friends.
  As they went into the second year of their service, however, as a part of General Gordon Granger's Reserve Corps in Tennessee, life became harder for the two bunk mates, and it was at this time that Taylor earned his nickname of Shirkey, from his frequent visits to Dr. Davis, the regiments hospital steward. John Wall was commonly known as Sol, after his father's name, Solomon. This tradition is still carried on in the Wall family.
  Shirkey, ready to take whatever advantage there was to being sick, reported often to sick call, along with his friend Sol. "Say Sol, but didn't he give us some awful stuff, as you used to say?" Taylor recalled later. "We had better gone on duty. Guess so!"
  The doctor's medicine was good, apparently, for at least making a shirker wish that he were well, but when it came to real sickness, Shirkey had his friend Sol to depend on.
  One night, before the regiment was to move out on a march, Shirkey came down with what was commonly referred to as camp diarrhea. This disease was common in the unsanitary Civil War camps, and for the soldier it was not the uncomfortable inconvenience which it is today. At that time, diarrhea was a debilitating disease, and if it could not be checked it could eventually lead to death through dehydration over a period of years.
  If Shirkey was unable to march with his regiment because of his disease, he would have to be left behind in a hospital. Although the Civil War was the first war in which a systematic effort was made to care for the sick and wounded in hospitals, the field hospitals of that time were often regarded with more horror by the soldiers than the battlefield itself. His nickname may have been Shirkey, but Taylor would rather march on with his comrades in the 84th than be left behind in a hospital, where more soldiers died than in battle.
  Shirkey's friend and bunkmate, Sol, took care of him that night, staying up to dig blackberry roots and feed him blackberry tea through the night. This home remedy, aside from being more pleasant than the "awful stuff" which was dispensed by the regimental surgeon, was also more effective, and when morning came Shirkey was able to march on with the rest of the 84th.
  This devotion to his friend, which was probably shown sometime during the summer of 1863, was soon paid back to Sol when the regiment entered it's first test in battle early that fall. On September 19, the first day of the bloody fighting at Chickamauga, the 84th was involved in a skirmish on the left flank of the Union army in which Sol, Shirkey and Eph Baugh, all of Company E, were in the forefront.
  The 84th was thrown foreward in a skirmish line along a road, with several other regiments of the brigade held in reserve. Three companies, including Company E, were sent out in advance of the rest of the regiment, and these three comrades were sent down the road as an advance guard, "And down the middle of the pike you see Sol Wall, Taylor and Baugh with their trusty rifles at their shoulders, ever on the alert for the rebels," Shirkey wrote later.
  Suddenly Confederate rifle fire began, with bullets swishing all around the three and Sol was shot through the calf of his leg. The wound was bleeding and Sol needed something to tie it up with. The only bandage available was a silk handkerchief in which Shirkey had his sow belly bacon tied. It had been given to him by his sweetheart from Randolph County and "of course was some dirty and greasy," but out it came, the rations were emptied from it, and the bandage was applied to Sol's wound. The three men survived the attack, however, and the 84th was eventually pushed back over a creek by the rebel force before they were relieved by the 40th Ohio.
  After Chickamauga came the siege of Chattanooga and finally the Battle Above the Clouds on Lookout Mountain on November 24, 1863, which opened the way for Sherman's advance to Atlanta. The 84th fought for three months continuously during the summer of 1864, but for Shirkey and some dozen other men the campaign ended at the Battle of Kenesaw Mountain in June.
  Once again the 84th was in the front lines and a squad of men were sent to a foreward position where they were attacked by the rebels, surrounded, and ordered to surrender. Most of the men fled back to the Union lines, but Shirkey and a few other men were captured and escorted back to the rear of Confederate General Pat Claiborne's division, and from there were soon on their way to the infamous prison at Andersonville.
  Many of the Union soldiers who were sent there did not survive Andersonville. Shirkey was exchanged, however, after three months, although he says he was ready to leave after the second day. He was put on a railroad flat car and sent to Atlanta, now in Union hands, and was too weak to even walk at that time. He had no clothes to speak of, and was almost helpless.
  Shortly after arriving at a Union hospital he was found by his friends Sol and Eph Baugh. They carried him to a stream and gave him a bath, and then dressed him with clean clothes although they were not a very good fit for a man who had been starved for three months. Like a sack stretched over a pole was the way Shirkey described it.
  With the care of his friends Shirkey soon recovered and was able to join the rest of the regiment on its final campaign, which climaxed in the decisive battle at Nashville in December. Both Shirkey and Sol survived the war and returned home to Deerfield and began raising families.
  The bonds of friendship formed during the war were never broken. Through annual reunions and encampments of the Grand Army of the Republic the veterans often saw each other, although they soon began spreading over the state. The bunkmates were both alive to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 84th's formation, in 1912, although Shirkey was living in Fort Wayne and could not be present. He did, however, write a letter to his old friends recalling the good-and the bad-old days.
  Hoke remembers his father saying that if the rest of the world felt about each other the way the old soldiers did, there would be no more wars.