Heavily engaged at
Pleasant Hill, the 32nd Iowa Infantry’s regimental history has many eyewitness accounts of the
fighting there. In 2015, I promised to occasionally feature these, and today
excerpts are presented from a commissioned officer’s testimony:
“Captain Michael Ackerman,
of Company A, now Clerk of Courts at Howard, South Dakota, and who was left on
the field, terribly wounded, and without other notice for more than
twenty-eight hours than that of the rebels who robbed the dead and wounded
says:--
‘Late in the evening of
April 8, in the camp among the old graves, some of us were discussing the
defeat of our troops in the advance, and their demoralized condition as they
came into our lines. In this party were Lieutenant Col. Mix, Captains Miller
and Peebles, Lieutenant Howard, myself and others. Colonel Mix, looking up,
said: ‘There I see the moon over my right shoulder. It is a good omen for me. I
need not fret.’ Within twenty-four hours Colonel Mix lay dead on the field of
the hard-fought battle; Miller, Peebles, and Howard, were mortally wounded; and
I was left for dead, with my left knee and right hip crushed by the bullets
that fell among us like hail upon the house top. My Company went into line of
battle with thirty-four men, only five of whom answered the next roll-call; and
half the Regiment was wiped out!
I fell near the close of
the engagement, and soon after the Regiment left the field it had so gallantly
and desperately held. I was stripped of my outer clothing. One of these vultures
thrust his hand into my pocket, but drew it out covered with my blood, and with
an oath left $85.00 there, which no doubt subsequently saved my life.
I rolled into a ditch near
me to escape the still fast falling bullets, and about mid-night was helped out
by a rebel chaplain, who was trying to care for the wounded. I crawled to a
fire, was soon asleep, and did not wake until the sun was high in the heavens.
Some one had thrown a dog-tent over me to shield me from the sun….the ground
was all strewn with dead and wounded that it seemed that one could step from
one to another as far as I could see, without touching the ground. Here and
there a group of wounded were gathered about little fires that had been kindled
by those able to partly help themselves….
About 9 o’clock that
evening Captain Miller and myself were taken in an ambulance to a log house,
and placed on the floor with a single blanket under us. Robert Mack, of my
company, and eight or ten others were with us. We were in this house four days
before we were discovered by the Surgeons who had been left to care for
us,--they having two hospitals that required their continuous attention, and we
were over-looked…. [After removing to a hospital] the wife of a rebel officer
who lived in the neighborhood, a Mrs. Cole…came every week with such supplies
as her home afforded, the tears running down her cheeks as she looked upon the
starving men she could not feed!... [He was thankful for] the two army wagons
loaded with sanitary stores, that came under a flag of truce, and for which the
women at home have our blessings as long as we may live. And of things which my
bloody money bought at the rate of one dollar for a chicken, one dollar per
dozen for eggs, and four dollars per pound for tobacco. And of our parole,
about June 17th, and a trip of seventeen miles in carts and jolting
wagons to the boat on Red River, and of the opium and Louisiana rum the doctor
gave me on the road, and how the entire fifty-two who started from Pleasant
Hill that June morning, all reached
New Orleans!”
Quote from: John Scott, Story of the Thirty Second Iowa Infantry
Volunteers (1896), pages 149-153.
