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ix Preface The state of Ohio organized nearly 230 infantry regiments for service in the Union army during the Civil War. This is the story of one of them, the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, told by the soldiers and officers who marched under its flags. Years ago, I was driving through northeast Ohio filling in bare spots in my family tree. Interest in an uncle who had served in an Ohio regiment brought me to the door of a teacher of history in the Akron public schools. He handed me the original of a letter he owned, yellow and brittle, written in a fine, old-fashioned cursive hand. The letter was written in the 1880s by an old man of Cambridge, Massachusetts, named Thomas Clark, who had been colonel of the regiment. He was writing to one of his former sergeants, a soldier for whom he had particular affection, named Rollin L. Jones of Ashtabula County, Ohio. I will “fire away” . . . until I get tired and ready to go off into dreamland or until I think the one who thus receives my attentions is satisfied and generally not stopping to think whether he will give me a return fire or not. . . . Do the misty memories of ’61 to ’65 ever come welling up from the great storehouse of past experience as you halt in the onward march for a little midday, or at other times rest? Of memory, he said, A soldier cannot forget while memory holds sway—and one of the worst things that can happen to a soldier is the loss of memory. Stirring incidents of the past are burned into it and become a part of his life. . . . You must remember it all.1 After I finished reading, the collector told me about an incident that befell Rollin Jones at a place called Pine Knob, Georgia, in the summer of 1864, and also what became of him after the war as a result of what had happened to him that night. In the ten years that followed, I traveled to every place the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Infantry had marched, camped, and fought. I had gathered documents by the boxful , and in the boxes were many voices, which, heard together, told the story of this regiment. Those of the regiment who survived the war hoped above all else that what they had done would be remembered by future generations. I felt the weight of obligation to let them speak to this modern age. More than anything, this book was written to allow them that chance. The regiment was known by its admirers as the Giddings Regiment, after the nationally famous antislavery politician who was its mythic founder. To others, it was known as the Abolition Regiment, which was a salute to the equally well known radical political beliefs that dominated the distinctive counties in northeastern Ohio known as the Western Reserve, in which the regiment was raised. To the soldiers who served in it they were the Giddings Boys, or more commonly, the Boys. The Twenty-Ninth Ohio fought on many of the storied fields of the Civil War and at two of its most prominent: Chancellorsville, where they played a heroic part during the fight’s closing hours; and Gettysburg, where they stood the test of repeated rebel assaults against the Union defenses atop Culp’s Hill. The regiment’s hardest days in the war came at lesser-known places: Port Republic, Virginia, in June 1862; and Cedar Mountain, Virginia, August 9, 1862. Both these battles pushed the x p r e f a c e regiment to the edge of extinction. Their worst day in the war came at a place called Dug Gap, Georgia , in early May 1864. They had the distinction of fighting in both of the war’s major theaters. They marched under the banner of the Army of the Potomac until late summer 1863. Then they moved to the relief of Chattanooga , participating after that in the constant fighting that culminated in the taking of Atlanta. They marched across Georgia under Sherman, through the Carolinas, recrossed their old Virginia battlefields, and on to Washington for the Grand Review. Few regiments made a circuit as long as theirs. The soldiers of this regiment, as of every other regiment in the Civil War, were prodigious letter writers. As they frequently reported, it was not uncommon in their camp, in the hour after mail from home arrived, to find every officer and soldier...

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