For One Local Soldier In The Civil War
News-Gazette
September 30, 1978
By William Jackson
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The route to Randolph County for many of the early settlers and first families of this area began on the Eastern Seaboard, particularly in the states of Virginia and North Carolina. By the time the nation was split apart by Civil War in 1861, Indiana was populous enough to furnish a large number of men to the Union cause, but because of the ties to "Old Virginia" and her neighbors this became much more than a civil war for many Hoosiers -it was in many cases a family affair, literally putting brother against brother.
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| Some of the Civil War artifacts on display in The Annex of The Museum at RCHS, Inc. |
This was the case for at least one Randolph County man who lived near Deerfield at the time the war broke out. The Steed family traces its roots in this country to Warren County, Virginia, and at least one member of that family made his way westward in the 1840s or 1850s, passing through Ohio and settling in the northern part of this county. Lemoine Wright, of Winchester, is this Steed's grandson, and remembers his grandfather's tales of the war which he heard as a boy.
Steed traveled from Virginia with about 20 other persons in a wagon train, Wright recalls. There were six wagons in the group, one of which was pulled by a team of horses. The rest were pulled by oxen, and the trip into the west took the small party six months to complete. Roads at this time were, for the most part, non-existant. What roads there were consisted mainly of dirt traces, which became almost impassable with mud when it rained. Much of the time it took the party to reach Indiana was filled with felling trees in the forests of Western Virginia and Ohio to make the corduroy roads which were necessary to move the wagons over the mud.
Indiana was no longer filled with hostile Indians, but Indians were still around. Steed became acquainted with one Indian in the state, whose name was Lemoine, and later his grandson was named for this early Hoosier friend.
Steed married a woman named Minerva, and the couple had a daughter, who became Lemoine Wright's mother. In the prime of his life, Steed stood over six feet tall, was broad shouldered, with a dark complexion, black hair and hazel eyes. Land was what drew the settlers to Indiana from the more established eastern states, and the settlers put this land to use by farming. Steed was a farmer both before and after his service in the Civil War.
These early farmers in the county cleared the land themselves, cutting down the trees, or girdling them and leaving them to die and fall on their own. Once the trees were down the logs would be piled together to be burned. Lemoine recalls that his grandfather would make the most of clearing the wood by covering the logs with earth once they were burning and making charcoal from them. The charcoal would then be burned in the home during the winter.
Home for the Steeds in their early years in Randolph County was a log cabin with a dirt floor downstairs and bedrooms upstairs, heated with fireplaces on the ground floor. To keep the bedrooms upstairs warm, coals from the burning charcoal would be put in iron kettles and placed in the unheated rooms.
Steed retained his health for most of his life, working on the farm until a few years before his death at the age of 92 in 1929. Lemoine took care of his grandfather in his reclining years, but remembers that only three years before his death Steed, with the flowing white beard of a patriarch, would help in the butchering on the farm, carrying half of a butchered hog over his shoulder.
Lemoine was a young man when his grandfather died in 1929, but can still recall his tales of the Civil War years, and the accounts of the hardships of the life of the soldier.
Steed knew about the hardships of the soldier's life from personal experience, having served for a year in the 9th Indiana Volunteer Infantry after being drafted in September of 1864. Since he served only a year, Steed never rose higher than a private, but his name gave him a dignity he never attained in rank. His full name was Colonel M. Steed, which probably game him the distinction of being the only Private Colonel in the Civil War.
Discipline in the army was much stricter then it is now, Lemoine says of his grandfather's tales. Steed related to his family how soldiers would be punished with hanging by their thumbs for minor infractions of the rules. One soldier was so punished and left hanging overnight, with his toes just touching the ground, and the boy swore to get even with the sergeant responsible for this. The next time the regiment got into a fight, Steed saw the soldier raise his gun towards the sergeant. Steed knew what was coming, but there was nothing he could do and the soldier fired, killing the sergeant.
The campaigns in which the 9th Indiana fought after Steed joined its ranks included the race against General Hood's rebel army through Tennessee to Nashville, which resulted in the fights at Franklin and Nashville. Following this, Steed took part in the pursuit of Hood back to the south. During these rapid marches the men slept in the mud and water of winter, and at one point Steed had a horse shot out from under him.
When the marching columns would come to a stream or a river, the men filled their canteens while they could, mindless of the dead soldiers and horses in the water. There was no time to search for cleaner water.
But what bothered Colonel Steed most following the war was the fact that his brother, who had stayed behind in Virginia, had joined the confederate army and had been killed in the war. Steed always worried that perhaps it was a bullet from his gun which killed him.
The Randolph County soldier needn't have worried on this account, for by the time he shouldered a gun for the Union he had missed his chance to cross paths with his brother by 3 years.
The rest of the Steed family had remained in Warren County, Virginia, when Colonel left for Indiana, and it was in this county that Companies B and E of the 7th Regiment, Virginia Cavalry, were raised. Six Steeds enlisted in this outfit at the beginning of the war: Charles F., Chaney J. and John W., all in Company B, and Frank S., Shelton and William T., in Company E. One, or perhaps more than one of these men were Colonel N. Steed's brother. Almost undoubtedly these Steeds were all of some relation to Randolph County's member of the family.
In the fall of 1861 a Union force consisting of the 8th, 9th and 14th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, with Winchester's Silas Colgrove, and two Ohio regiments, moved into Western Virginia under the command of John F. Reynolds. It was at the Greenbriar River, in Pocahontas County, that the men of the 9th Indiana first "Saw the elephant," and went into battle with the rebels.
The experience was not a happy one, as 100 Confederates from the 12th Georgia held off the three Indiana regiments for two hours at a pass until additional Confederate forces could be brought against the Yankees. While the Hoosier soldiers were moving along a cow path in an attempt to flank the rebels, the southern soldiers shot down the marching men as if in a shooting gallery. One of the rebel units brought into the battle at this point, also for its first taste of enemy fire, was the 7th Virginia Cavalry with the Steed family.
The ancestors of one other Randolph County resident, James Ponder, also served with the 7 Va. Cav. at this time. Many of the Branner family enlisted in Rice's 8th Star Artillery, which was attached to Company K of the 7th Va. Cav. Fortunately, one of the Branners recorded his experiences on the 3rd of October, 1861, in a letter to his brother Josiah, a copy of which is now in Ponder's possession. This simple account of the battle tells the story of the clash between the 7th Va. Cav. and the 9th Ind. from a point of view very close to that of the Steeds':
"Dear brother,
"I seat myself to inform you about the battle on yesterday as well as I can. They commenced firing on our pickets about half past 8 o'clock. They came down with 8 cannons and opened on us. We just let them fire till they shot some 25 or 30 rounds and then they came up nearer to us and we opened on them. We shot 65 or 70 rounds with one cannon, and then a ball struck Frank Graves and tore off his left leg and then we moved to another place, and fired 4 times and then Luther Tidler was killed: a cannon ball struck his head and tore the whole top of his head off. Capt. Rice pulled him back and walked about ten steps when a cannon ball struck his foot and tore it off; and the same ball tore one of our cannon horses legs off. They were all taken away to some doctors that were up the mountain about 2 miles. Capt. Rice had his leg taken off about three inches above the ankle, and is doing very well now. Graves died last night at 11 o'clock. Roby and Stillwell were also wounded; Stillwell was not hurt much, but Roby had his hand tore up right bad. They are all that were hurt in our company, and ours suffered most of all. Some of Shumaker's men were wounded and some of the pickets were killed, ut I do not know how many. I tell you it was awful to be in a battle to see men fall and others hollering. I never expected to escape the way the balls fell around me when I was holding the horses. I am tending to the horses Rafe Estep had. Mike (Branner, Phillip's brother) was in the ditch with a musket, and therefore wasn't in as much danger as we were with the cannon. I have told you all about the fight or at least as much as I know, and therefore I will close for this time by saying that these few lines leave us all well."
After this initial engagement of the two units, the paths of the 9th Indiana and 7th Va. Cav. did not again cross. When Colonel Steed joined the 9th Indiana for the last year of the war, the two regiments were fighting in different theaters, and Colonel Steed's brother was killed by a stranger.
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