On the road to Atlanta: Nancy’s Creek, July 18, 1864
Col. Emerson Opdycke and Staff, 1864
On July 18 General Howard’s 4th Corps, Army of the Cumberland, was advancing towards Buckhead as part of General Sherman’s next offensive movement against Atlanta’s Railroads. Brig. Gen. John Newton’s Division was in the advance.
Newton selected Col. Luther P. Bradley’s brigade—formerly Charles Harker’s, until that officer’s demise on June 27—to lead his division, with Col. Emerson Opdycke and the 125th Ohio drawing skirmish duty. The colonel and the 125th were Newton’s favored choice for this duty, since they were by now expert in the light infantry role; further, he was assigned the 3rd Kentucky, 64th, and 65th Ohio regiments as supports. At 7:00 a.m., as they approached Nancy’s Creek, they encountered dismounted Rebel cavalry in force; their numbers estimated by Opdycke to be “four howitzers and fifteen hundred troops.” Here, thought Buckeye Lt. Ralsa C. Rice, “it was obvious that a determined resistance would be made, the place chosen being one of great natural strength.”[1]
“The road,” continued Rice, “after crossing the creek, climbed a hill, on the crest of which they had placed a battery of [four] guns in a substantial earthwork.” The stream, “some 20 feet wide,” and marked by swampy banks, flowed sluggishly, while “heavy timber” covered the redoubt’s flanks. The Rebels here were Kentuckians, “Cerro Gordo” Williams’s cavalry brigade. Opdycke ordered Lt. Col. David H. Moore to take the 125th and assault the work directly, while Capt. John Tuttle brought up the 3rd Kentucky on Moore’s left. The Federals found it difficult to cross the stream, with Tuttle recording that the fight lasted about an hour before both blue-clad regiments were able to cross and charge the earthwork. Williams, intent on fighting only a delaying action, then fell back, leaving some casualties and one officer made prisoner. Captain Charles Clark considered that the 125th’s casualties here, one man killed and five wounded, “was a light loss considering the work done, and showed how well the men could take advantage of trees, fences, and inequalities of the ground.”[2]
For Pvt. Jesse B. Luse, the loss was far from trifling. A bullet struck his right hand at the base of the thumb “and followed the small bone of the arm five or six inches up toward the elbo. The wound was simply bandaged on the field and he was taken to Chattanooga, where he underwent three operations.” At first the surgeons thought they could save his arm, removing “4 inches of the small bone” on July 24. On August 1, however, after the wound reopened, they took the arm above the elbow, an operation they had to repeat on the 4th. Sent home in October, Luse’s wound continued to discharge fluid for the next year and a half, until finally a fourth operation in December 1865 induced healing. His mother Hannah and sister Clarissa both traveled south to care for him, but the family’s troubles were compounded when Hannah herself fell ill, dying on September 27.[3]
Colonel Opdycke also suffered a painful loss here, one felt by the whole regiment. During the fight, he wrote, “I had to bring up a couple of the other regiments . . . got a couple of guns to bear on the enemy and soon had them running but Alas! not before a rebel bullet had hit my good horse [Barney.] He fell, and a moment after was dead. The ball entered his right shoulder obliquely and penetrated his heart; he did not seem to suffer any, did not even straighten a limb, only quivered slightly and was dead. He was a general favorite, and had borne me so safely through so many dangerous conflicts, that I was much attached to him.” Lieutenant Rice commiserated. “Sad to relate, Old Barney was killed here. He had been with us a long time and shared our dangers as did few other horses in the army. We gave him the burial of a soldier under a tree by the roadside.”[4]
Captain Tuttle thought Opdycke was greatly affected by Barney’s loss. The Ohio colonel, soon remounted on his spare horse Tempest, rode over to urge Tuttle’s Kentuckians to greater effort. Tuttle was seeking a way to cross the swampy creek when Opdycke found him, and suggested that he move the 3rd Kentucky farther to the left. “The aforesaid Col. said I could cross my horse there and would not consent for me to go around,” complained Tuttle, forcing the captain to dismount and lead the 3rd across on foot, wallowing through thick mud. Shortly thereafter, Opdycke tried to cross on his second horse, “and was compelled to leave him [Tempest] in the bottom of the ravine to be prized out at leisure by some soldiers he left in charge of him.” Describing this same moment, Opdycke wrote that “the left did not move rapidly enough to suit me, and I plunged my horse into this steep banked ditch. Tempest sank into the mud up to his saddle girth and floundered awfully.” Opdycke was forced to leave Tempest in a sitting posture: “The angle was about 45*, but he took it very calmly, and coolly commencing munching the rich grass that grew upon the bank.” Securing yet a third mount from an orderly, Opdycke pressed on. “This was a little rough on the Colonel,” Tuttle admitted, coming just after Barney’s sudden demise, and so “I managed to bear his troubles with tolerable fortitude on account of the petulant impatient manner in which he conducted himself toward me.”[5]
[1]Longacre and Haas, To Battle for God and the Right, 199; Ralsa C. Rice, with Richard A. Baumgartner and Larry M. Strayer, eds., Yankee Tigers: Through the Civil War with the 125th Ohio (Huntington, WV: 1992), 123.
[2]Rice, Yankee Tigers, 123-124; Charles T. Clark, Opdycke Tigers 125th O.V.I. A History of the Regiment and of all the Campaigns and Battles of the Army of the Cumberland (Columbus, OH: 1895), 287; John W. Tuttle, with Hambleton Tapp and James C. Klotter, eds., The Union, The Civil War, and John W. Tuttle: A Kentucky Captain’s Account (Frankfort, KY: 1980), 205.
[3]July 18, Jesse B. Luse Diary, KMNBP. Jesse lived to age 52, dying in 1894, while Clarissa died in 1915, in Chicago.
[4]Longacre and Haas, To Battle for God and the Right, 199; Rice, Yankee Tigers, 124.
[5]Longacre and Haas, To Battle for God and the Right, 200; Tuttle, The Union, 206.
