Citizen Soldier by John Beatty

[Matt McKeon]

John Beatty wrote this memoir of his service as an officer in the 3rd Ohio.

Military service in the Civil War consisted, in Beatty's experience, of marching long distances, getting lost, lots of rain, rumors, and hanging around trying to amuse yourself. He's quite funny.

On a more serious note, Beatty is an early abolitionist, partly because he doesn't like slavery, and partly because he thinks it will hurt the Confederacy, and finally because the profound effort and lost of the war demand a fundamental change in American society.

 

[TomEvans]

John Beatty wrote this memoir of his service as an officer in the 3rd Ohio.

Military service in the Civil War consisted, in Beatty's experience, of marching long distances, getting lost, lots of rain, rumors, and hanging around trying to amuse yourself. He's quite funny.

On a more serious note, Beatty is an early abolitionist, partly because he doesn't like slavery, and partly because he thinks it will hurt the Confederacy, and finally because the profound effort and lost of the war demand a fundamental change in American society.

And because he never questioned authority.

 

[LJMYERS]

Beatty is kind of a Mellon Name. Most of them lived near Negley Ohio.

 

[Matt McKeon]

Beatty's diary is mostly mundane incidents. His command(he eventually leads a brigade) fights at Stone River, Chickamangua and Chattanooga, but countless skimishes. His account of battles are generally confusion: seldom knowing the strength of the enemy, which friendly units are where. At Chattanooga, with Thomas in command, he says he felt something he had never had: a sense that a little common sense was going to be applied.

In an environment of spotty communications, brigade commanders must show initiative.

 

[Matt McKeon]

He writes briskly about battle itself. A few days afterwards he describes the losses in a moving way.

 

[Matt McKeon]

As the Army of the Cumberland advances into Tennessee, he runs up against moving and camping in a population often very hostile, as manifested by sabotaging trains, and bridges, sniping "bushwhacking." When his regiment is fired upon at one point from a hamlet, he marched his troops into the town, burns it down, and tells the inhabitants he will hang someone at random if they are fired upon again. Buell's more conciliatory approach, he writes, in the policy of an amiable idiot.

 

[Matt McKeon]

He writes rather cuttingly of his fellow officers and commanders, especially Buell, McCook and a couple of others he considered either windbags or gloryhounds, or plain incompetent. His mockery, is quite funny. After one officer claims that he blew apart John Hunt Morgan, Beatty notes dryly that Morgan managed to reconstitute himself. He receives a somewhat brutal, and unjust chewing out from Rosecrans, over another's error. He broods for a week over the insults, delivered in public, then writes a letter of protest to Rosecrans.
Rosecrans calls him to headquarters, and makes a handsome apology, which lifts a tremendous weight from Beatty, psychologically. He writes in an admiring way about Rosecrans in several places.