June 17, 1862

June 17, 1862:  Union troops under Gen. George W. Morgan re-occupy the Cumberland Gap area.  At the same time, Gen. Ormsby Mitchel and his troops, having recently raided Chattanooga, Tennessee, still remain in the area.  Together, these two forces, to most observers, seem to have Eastern Tennessee bottled up for the Union, fulfilling Lincoln’s desire that the mostly Unionist people of this end of the state be free from Confederate persecution.

---Sarah Morgan records in her journal:

June 17th.

Yesterday, and day before, boats were constantly arriving and troops embarking from here, destined for Vicksburg. There will be another fight, and of course it will fall. I wish Will was out of it; I don’t want him to die. I got the kindest, sweetest letter from Will when Miriam came from Greenwell. It was given to her by a guerrilla on the road who asked if she was not Miss Sarah Morgan.

---Captain William Thompson Lusk, of the Union army near Charleston, writes his mother to tell of the disaster of the previous day as his troops partook in the ignoble Union defeat at the Battle of Secessionville:

My dear Mother:

Yesterday was for us a hard, cruel, memorable day, memorable for its folly and wickedness, memorable for the wanton sacrifice of human life to gratify the silly vanity of a man already characterized . . . You have heard already from rebel sources, I doubt not, of yesterday’s disaster. I can only say that the plan of the attack was ordered by Gen. Benham in direct defiance of his subordinate Generals’ opinion. Gen. Wright, Gen. Stevens and Gen. Williams pronounced on the evening of the 15th, the project of storming the battery attacked, as conceived in utter folly. They entered their earnest protest against the whole affair. But Benham was excited by stories of Donelson and Newberne, and would not yield. Had the fort been taken, it would have done us no good, except that we could have spiked the three guns it contained, but had it been taken, the éclat, perhaps, would have made Benham a Major-General, and for this contemptible motive between six and seven hundred men strewed the field, dead and dying. I do not know how I escaped unhurt — it must have been your prayers, mother — but this I know, that sixteen boys of my company were killed or wounded, fighting nobly, fighting like heroes on the parapet of the work, but fighting vainly to give a little reputation to . . . Mother, when I see their pale fingers stiffened, their poor speechless wounds bleeding, do you wonder at the indignation that refuses to be smothered — that my blood should flow feverishly to think that the country which our soldiers love so well, loves them so little as to leave them to the mercies of a man of. . . . Tell Walter that when galloping across the field yesterday I saw a sword and scabbard lying in my path. I looked instinctively at my side, and found, when or how I cannot say, my sword-belt had been torn or cut, and the sword was gone, but you can understand the pleasure I experienced at discovering the sword in my path was Walter’s gift, which I strangely recovered.