NO ONE WILL EVER know exactly what happened on the morning of Thursday, April 13, 1865, just after General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army marched into Raleigh, North Carolina. The citizens of the state capital were well aware of the mayhem that Sherman had inflicted on the cities and towns of Georgia and South Carolina, and officials in Raleigh, keen to avoid that fate, had surrendered the previous day. Still, Raleigh’s residents were wary. They locked doors and blockaded windows against his arrival.
Sherman’s troops, by contrast, felt hopeful about the coming day. When reveille sounded at 4:00 a.m., the soldiers of the Ninety-fourth Ohio Volunteer Infantry quickly broke camp and fell in. After years of war, their early-morning movements were rote, and on this day their steps felt lighter despite the chill and the patter of light rain. They hoped to be the first into Raleigh. The troops strode down muddy, eerily silent streets, past shuttered homes.
There was ample reason for optimism. They’d heard persistent whispers that the war was nearly over, an eventuality that—after all that had transpired—felt both impossible and inevitable. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox four days earlier, accelerating the death rattle of the Confederacy. An exhausted and bitterly rent nation was tilting toward the uncertain place between all-out war and whatever came after.
There was no way to anticipate the chaos that was coming. The very next day, John Wilkes Booth would fire a pistol ball through Abraham Lincoln’s head, and the North, on the verge of cathartic celebration, would instead convulse in horror. Several thousand of Sherman’s enraged and vengeance-minded troops would gather to torch Raleigh, and the city would be saved only when a Union officer threatened to fire cannons on the blue-clad mob.
The city would be saved, but the South would be doomed to a bleak Reconstruction. But all of that would come later. All that Sherman’s soldiers saw before them that April morning was a clear path to victory. They planned to claim the spoils of the victor and vanish into the fog of a fading war.
Rue P. Hutchins felt the turmoil of that most tumultuous week in United States history. Three years earlier, Hutchins, a loyal supporter of Lincoln and the Union, a schoolteacher turned whiskey distiller, and a decorated major, had led much of his small Ohio town into battle.
No one would have blamed Hutchins for being an unenthusiastic combatant. His ancestors were southerners, from Virginia and North Carolina. They were Quakers, too—people whose religion prohibits violence.
But the Hutchins clan had a defiant streak, an inclination to do things differently. Hutchins’s grandfather, Meredith, joined the great westward movement that accompanied the opening of the Ohio Territory in 1795. He married an Irish woman, Susannah Fitzgerald, from outside the Quaker faith, resulting in his expulsion from the church. On the frontier the couple started over, opening the first inn in Little York, Ohio. One of their sons was also named Meredith. The younger Meredith married and had an only child, Rue, in 1833.
He eventually settled in Tippecanoe, population 949, the town’s name a transliteration of the Native American word for a river rapid.
Western Ohio in the 1860s was a place of tall corn and robust wheat and barley crops and deep Union loyalty. During political rallies leading up to Lincoln’s election two years earlier, there were festive barbecues and torchlight processions with brass bands and fireworks and well-heated oration. But by mid-1862, as the news of the horrors of Bull Run and Shiloh and Fort Donelson filtered back, the festivities ebbed. Talk of quick and decisive victory gradually blinked out. In July, Lincoln issued a call for three hundred thousand more volunteer troops to smother the uprising.
Within weeks, a month shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, Hutchins began enlisting the men of Tippecanoe. Recruiting could not have been pleasant just a month or so short of the stout fall harvests, but there was an air of inevitability to the proceedings. Confederate forces were raiding neighboring Kentucky, only about seventy miles to the south. Hutchins signed up a hundred or so men, including three relatives: Benjamin, Tanzy, and William Hutchins.
The outfit was absorbed into the Ninety-fourth Ohio Volunteer Infantry and named Company D. Rue Hutchins was made captain and commanding officer. He had no military experience, and training was not an option. The 1,010 men of the Ninety-fourth Ohio were sworn in at Camp Piqua, in southwestern Ohio. A few days later they were issued guns and three cartridges each, but no uniforms, backpacks, or canteens. The next morning they marched south in street clothes. That night they were in Kentucky.
The Ninety-fourth fought its first real battle in Perryville less than three weeks later. Colonel Joseph W. Frizell, in his field report, told how “a most murderous and incessant fire from infantry was opened upon me.” At Stones River, near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on New Year’s Eve 1862, the men charged the enemy through a cedar forest during a ferocious daylong battle, Hutchins out in front of Company D. That frigid night the thoroughly spent opposing armies lay down with their weapons in close proximity. The troops of the Ninety-fourth hunkered in the mud and standing water without food or fires. Stones River cost the regiment fifty-four men—including much of Rue Hutchins’s family. Cousin William’s sons, Benjamin, Tanzy, and William, were all injured; all three later died in hospitals.
A photo of Hutchins from that era shows the grim-faced officer in profile wearing a thick, droopy mustache, his wavy hair receding. After Stones River, many of the badly fatigued troops, exposed to wet, frigid nights, contracted typhoid fever and measles. One March day alone, five men of the Ninety-fourth Ohio died in camp.
The months unfurled in a blur of hardship. In September 1863 the Ninety-fourth Ohio fought at Chickamauga, the war’s second-bloodiest battle: “So close were the enemy,” Hutchins wrote in his report, “that we could plainly see into the barrels of their muskets at each discharge.”
After Chickamauga, the army’s “Report of Effective Forces” showed the Ninety-fourth Ohio had 193 men ready to fight—fewer than a fifth of its original number.
In October 1863 Hutchins, now a lieutenant colonel, led his men into battle on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, and on the grand charge on Mission Ridge. In 1864 the Ninety-fourth joined Sherman’s elite army for the march into Georgia. The Ohioans were now hardened veterans—survivors of two years of Confederate gunpowder and bayonets, and disease.
Sherman stormed Atlanta and launched his iconic March to the Sea, slicing the Confederacy in half. His army fought at Buzzard’s Roost and Resaca and Kingston and Pumpkin-Vine Creek and Kennesaw Mountain and the Chattahoochee River and Peachtree Creek and Jonesboro. In the first months of 1865 they crossed into North Carolina.
The Ninety-fourth Ohio, like much of Sherman’s army, virtually consumed the South. Sherman adhered to the doctrine of total war—war not just on enemy soldiers, but on the general population. The army stripped the landscape. This was the original shock and awe. “Sherman’s bummers,” as they became known, seized every chicken and pig and vegetable garden and any other object of desire in their path, and they burned and destroyed the rest. Many took Confederate documents—which were light to carry but proof of their far...