On the Road to Atlanta – Dangerous Dan McCook

I have long found Dan McCook interesting. Often portrayed as recklessly ambitious, I find that his mens’ admiration for him belies much of that supposition. Recently I have been editing the chapter recounting his death at Kennesaw:

By now at least the three forward regiments in McCook’s column were intermingled, if not the entire command, all the men merging into a dense mass. The brigade’s frontage was still only little more than that of a regiment, facing the blunt nose of the salient held by the 1st/27th Tennessee and some distance to the north, where Brig. Gen. Vaughan’s brigade took over the defense. Stewart described how the right of the 52nd Ohio struck the nose of the salient—the Dead Angle—while the left was still “two rods” (11 yards) from Vaughan’s trenches. McCook, now at the forefront of the assault, led a renewed effort to scale the works; he scrambled up the glacis “about eighteen feet” north of the angle, shouting “Come on boys, the day is won!” as he did so. At least three men – Lt. Richard Groninger and Corp. Lewis Krishner, both of the 86th Illinois, and one Rebel officer from the Rock City Guards (possibly Captain Kelly, relayed in a conversation with Sgt. Samuel Harper of the 52nd Ohio on June 29th, during a truce) – described McCook ascending the works hat in one hand and sword in the other, to shout “Surrender, you traitors!” [1]

Private Samuel Canterbury of the 86th Illinois was “hugg[ing] the works as close as I could” when “Col. Dan climbed up on the works,” one Rebel trying to shoot through the space under the head log even as he did so. “I heard him say ‘bring up those colors,’ pointing to a nearby flag,” though, Canterbury admitted things were so confused “I didn’t know whose colors they were.” The flag was handed up. Watching McCook, with the flag held aloft in his left hand and “using his sabre in his right hand, parrying the rebels . . . who were trying to bayonet him,” Canterbury immediately grabbed the hem of McCook’s coat, exclaiming: “For God’s sake get down, they will shoot you!” McCook only response was to turn slightly, stoop a bit, and snarl: “G—D D—n you, attend to your own business.” In the next moment, another Rebel fired, the weapon discharging within a foot of the Colonel’s torso.[2]

McCook “was shot about four inches below the collar bone, in the right breast.” The bullet passed “straight toward his back,” clipping his right lung, and lodged in his body. Private Canterbury believed McCook would have toppled into the Rebel trenches if he had not been still hanging onto the hem of the colonel’s coat and pulled him back. Badly wounded, he was borne out of danger and hustled to the brigade aid station. As he passed to the rear, spying “some of his men hugging the ground in the wheat field . . . [McCook] asked, ‘boys, what regiment is this?’ Told it was his own 52nd Ohio, he gave his last command. ‘Go on up boys, you can take the works.’”[3]

[1]Work, Re-Union of Col. Dan McCook’s Third Brigade, 33, 85-86.

[2]Work, Re-Union of Col. Dan McCook’s Third Brigade, 33.

[3]Work, Re-Union of Col. Dan McCook’s Third Brigade, 40, 42; Whalen, The Fighting McCooks, 277.