From Western Deserts to Carolina Swamps

A Civil War Soldier's Journals and Letters Home

John P. Wilson

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780826351425
• eBook ISBN: 9780826351449
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

While eyewitness accounts of the Civil War by enlisted men are uncommon, even scarcer are personal narratives from the Civil War in the West. These journals and letters were written by Lewis Roe, an Illinois farm boy who served in the 7th U.S. Infantry and the 50th Illinois Volunteer Infantry between 1860 and 1865. They offer details of an epic march from Fort Bridger, Wyoming, to New Mexico, a firsthand account of the Battle of Valverde (1862), and Roe's efforts to understand ongoing events as the country rushed toward the outbreak of hostilities. Later in the war, Roe documented the Union occupation of Rome, Georgia, and the battle of Allatoona, and left us a candid account of an enlisted man's experiences with Sherman's army on its March to the Sea and in the Carolinas Campaign. His relative objectivity and attention to everyday details make this valuable record a lively read.

Chapter I: The Search for Lewis Roe

I grew up in the small community of Knoxville in west-central Illinois. At the time, in the 1940s and early 1950s, I read a good deal and even had a mild curiosity about the early history of our town. An 1854 vintage building known as the Hall of Records housed our city library. The librarian, Mrs. Amy Grant, had local roots herself and was a lady of about seventy years.

The last Civil War veteran in Illinois, Lewis Fablinger of Downers Grove, passed away in 1950 at the age of 103.1 Although no one from that era lived in Knoxville or even in Knox County, many children of veterans were still active, including Mrs. Grant. She told me that her father served in the Union army and took part in General Sherman’s March to the Sea. She also brought one or more of his letters to the library for me to read. Her immediate relationship to a Civil War soldier and the fact that he had kept a journal drew my interest, perhaps because I knew of no Civil War veterans among my own ancestors.

Unfortunately, her older brother out in Kansas had their father’s journal and he would not send it back, so unless he came to Knoxville and brought it with him, I wouldn’t be able to read it. He did return once with the journal, but I was away in college and he had gone back to Kansas by the time of my next trip home.

Mrs. Grant was the youngest child in her family, born in 1879. She attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, for two terms in 1898–1899 and 1901–1902, and Western Illinois State Teachers’ College in Macomb from summer 1905 to June 1907.2 This educational background no doubt increased her appreciation for the historical value of her father’s experiences. So I paid attention when she described the journal. She recalled that he actually compiled it some years after the war, based upon his letters to his wife. The journal was not an actual transcript of these wartime letters, however, and the editorial changes left his later account differing from the contemporary one to some extent.

Mrs. Grant explained that as he finished compiling the journal, her father began to burn his original letters, feeding them into a stove. His wife or an older daughter happened to come into the room at that moment, saw what he was doing, snatched away the unburned letters, and saved them. After her father died in 1908, the journal passed to her oldest brother, who decided that it would eventually go to his own son, named for his grandfather.

I seldom returned to Knoxville after graduating from the University of Illinois and then spending five years in graduate studies. The journal was forgotten when I began a career as an archaeologist in Santa Fe and later in Las Cruces, New Mexico. By the 1980s, I had a business as a consultant and many of my contracts involved historical research. Then in 1984, while rummaging through the vertical files at the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library in Santa Fe, I came across an old photocopy of an article printed in the November 3, 1910, issue of the National Tribune. This was the national newspaper of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the principal Union veterans’ organization.

The article, titled “With Canby at Valverde, N.Mex.,” had escaped scholars of the Civil War in the Southwest. It appeared to be reliable and written by a participant, but what caught my eye was the signature line at the end—“Lewis F. Roe, Co. F, 7th U.S., Knoxville, Ill.” I’d never heard of a Civil War veteran named Lewis Roe in Knoxville, or so I thought. There had been a Roe family when I lived there, and I sent a copy of the article back to my aunt in Knoxville, Dorothy England, with the question—who was Lewis F. Roe?

This was no challenge for her. She wrote back and gently reminded me that Lewis Roe was the father of Amy (Roe) Grant, who had wanted me to see her father’s Civil War journal when I was in high school. Those memories came flooding back, and while I now knew who Lewis Roe was, I had no idea he had also served in the Southwest. Although Mrs. Grant had passed away, her daughter, Eleanor Grant Verene, was a customer of my uncle’s insurance business in Knoxville. When my aunt gave her a copy of Lewis Roe’s article, this delighted her, as the family had no idea that this existed.

The Search for Lewis Roe’s Journal

Other materials now began to come out. Mrs. Verene had some family papers, thanks in part to Ella Roe, Mrs. Grant’s older sister, who had assumed the role of historian in that family. Mrs. Verene did not have the journal, of course, but she did find a small notebook in which Lewis Roe kept a diary for about four months while serving with the Regular Army before the Civil War, in Company F of the 7th U.S. Infantry. She made a partial transcript of this diary in November 1985 and later allowed my aunt to Xerox the original. From the photocopy I transcribed two largely parallel versions of the march of the 7th Infantry regiment from Fort Bridger, Wyoming, to New Mexico in the summer of 1860, plus another partial diary Roe kept when he, as part of an escort detail, accompanied a train of wagons sent from Fort Craig, New Mexico, to Fort Buchanan in southern Arizona late in the spring of 1861.

The family papers and this notebook now showed that Lewis Roe enlisted in the 7th U.S. Infantry prior to the Civil War, mustered out at the end of his term, and later reenlisted in a volunteer Illinois regiment that formed part of Sherman’s Army. My aunt busied herself with the published records of the Illinois Adjutant General’s Office and from these we learned the dates of Roe’s service with Company C of the 50th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. With her discoveries and some dates in the family papers, we knew enough about his military service by the summer of 1986 for me to request Lewis F. Roe’s service and pension records from the National Archives. The pension records especially provided much new information. This incremental approach to the research was unavoidable because the only living person old enough to remember Lewis Roe in that family was a cousin in Florida, who was not available to us. Everyone else had been born after their grandfather died in 1908.

Mrs. Verene also provided copies of nine letters that her grandfather wrote in 1864 and 1865. With respect to the journal, however, we were stymied. Charlie Roe, the older brother who had had it, was now deceased, but his daughter lived in Emporia, Kansas. We tried to communicate with her but were unsuccessful at the time. The whereabouts of Charlie Roe’s son, Lewis Roe, was not known. Then in the spring of 1987, Mrs. Verene wrote that this grandson had once worked at the city water department in Emporia.

With this slim lead, I finally called the city of Emporia and learned that Lewis Roe had been employed there from April 1966 until October 1972, not long enough to become eligible for a pension. The city offices had no record of where he might be living. They referred me to Ron Rhodes, supervisor of the city water works, who had known Mr. Roe. From Mr. Rhodes, I learned that Lewis Roe came back to visit now and then (his daughter lived north of Emporia), and he thought that Roe moved to Deming, New Mexico, in 1972 or 1973. This was an incredible coincidence, since Deming lies only sixty miles west of my home in Las Cruces.

The Deming telephone directory showed a Lewis T. Roe living on E. Jote Rd., an address that proved to be a misspelling of Elote Road. The question now was whether I should approach him myself or let his cousin, Eleanor Verene, do so. We decided that I should be the one. Another year passed before I could make a visit.

Finally on December 19, 1988, I drove over to Deming. The Luna County Assessor’s Office showed me the location of Lewis T. Roe’s house, which appeared to be the only one in an entire Deming Ranchette subdivision situated just southwest of Deming. He was at home when I called. I introduced myself and told him what I was doing and about my interest in his grandfather’s journal. This didn’t seem to surprise him; he had it right there in the front room and pulled it out for me. I looked through it while we talked, and then I asked about photocopying it. He said that I could take it with me and keep it for a year if I needed to. This was the end of a trail that stretched back almost forty years, and at last I had the opportunity to read Mrs. Grant’s father’s Civil War journal.

A bit overwhelmed by this good fortune, I returned to Las Cruces and inventoried the documents we had from Lewis F. Roe’s own hand. These included:

1. A small notebook with the following:

a) Pvt. Lewis F. Roe’s journal, first version, of the 7th Infantry’s march, June 7–July 20, 1860 (incomplete).

b) Pvt. Lewis F. Roe’s journal, second version, of the 7th Infantry’s march, June 9–August 30, 1860 (parallel to the first version but lacking entries for June 7 and 8, 1860).

c) Short diary of Pvt. Lewis F. Roe, April 5–June 2, 1861 (missing entries from April 8 partway through April 23).

2. Surviving installments of Lewis Roe’s original (daily) Civil War journal, 1864–1865:

Journal 30th (October 9–15, 1864)

Journal 31st (October 16–27, 1864)

Journal 32nd (October 28–November 3, 1864)

Journal 33rd (November 4–20, 1864)

Journal 34th (November 21–December 3, 1864)

Journal 35th (December 4–18, 1864)

Journal 36th (December 19, 1864–January 4, 1865)

Journal 37th (January 6–17, 1865; possibly the last in this numbered series)

Unnumbered journal from Camp No. 4 (February 4, 1865) through Camp No. 46 (March 25, 1865)

3. First Notebook, “Record of a Journal Kept by Lewis F. Roe.…” Includes:

Introduction (12 manuscript pages)

Transcription of his daily journal (pp. 13–89 with pages missing at the ...

Table of contents

• Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter I: The Search for Lewis Roe
• Chapter II: Retracing the March of the 7th Infantry, June–August 1860
• Chapter III: Fort Bridger to Fort Craig; Lewis Roe’s 1860 Diary
• Chapter IV: Escort Duty in the Southwest and the Battle of Valverde
• Chapter V: Reenlistment, Joining Sherman’s Army, and the Beginning of the Atlanta Campaign, February–May 22, 1864
• Chapter VI: Rome, Georgia, and the Battle of Allatoona, May 23–November 9, 1864
• Chapter VII: The March to the Sea, November 10–December 14, 1864
• Chapter VIII: Savannah, Georgia, December 15, 1864–January 26, 1865
• Chapter IX: Up Through the Carolinas, January 27–March 27, 1865
• Chapter X: The End of the War and Home Again, April–July 1865
• Notes
• References
• Index