Rivers Bridge, 1865: The Human Cost of a Small Civil War Battle

The Civil War is usually told through great campaigns and huge armies, and in that telling the casualties become statistics. More than 200,000 men were killed or mortally wounded in combat in the war's four years — not counting those who died of disease; many sources put all deaths above 600,000 — and thousands more survived their wounds. A small battle lets you see the war at human scale: at Rivers Bridge, South Carolina, the fallen were few enough that most have been identified by name.

The battle

In early 1865, the war's last year, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 veteran Union troops through South Carolina. On February 2 and 3, part of his army struck an outnumbered Confederate force holding Rivers Bridge, a crossing of the Salkehatchie River.

• The Confederates, veterans too, had entrenched a bluff above the river and aimed their guns down the single narrow road across the thick Salkehatchie swamp.
• A Union frontal assault along the road on February 2 was thrown back.
• Union troops then worked their way through the swamp, crossed at both ends of the Confederate line, and forced the defenders out. (More Union troops crossed several miles downstream.)
• The victory cleared Sherman's road to Columbia, the state capital.

The Union commander afterwards called the Confederate works "the strongest position I ever saw in my life."

The battlefield at Rivers Bridge, from the Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1891–1895)

"Sherman's March through South Carolina — Road at the Swamp Crossings," a wartime engraving. From the University of Michigan's digitized collections.

Why Civil War battles killed so many

By 1865, soldiers had learned. Defenders fought behind "works" — earth, log or fence-rail fortifications — fronted with obstacles such as abatis (sharpened branches; from a French word meaning "to beat down"). Attackers avoided head-on charges and instead flanked a line: swinging round one end to fire along it. Rivers Bridge was fought by veterans on both sides who knew both lessons.

The count

The Union report, by Maj. Gen. F. P. Blair, February 5, 1865, all from his First Division:

"One officer and 17 enlisted men killed; 3 officers and 103 men wounded. General Mower estimates the losses of the enemy at about 200. There are 16 of their dead on the field and a hospital with 17 wounded found in rear of their position. The number of prisoners taken is 10, and of deserters 17."

The Confederate return came from Col. George P. Harrison Jr., commanding Harrison's Brigade:

Casualties in Harrison's Brigade, February 3, 1865, from the Official Records

In all, about forty men of both sides were killed or mortally wounded, and a hundred or more were wounded.

The men behind the numbers

"The horrid results of every battle." — Lt. Col. Oscar L. Jackson, 63rd Ohio, diary, February 3:

"Again at the hospital I see the horrid results of every battle. Men mutilated in every shape conceivable, groaning, begging for assistance and gasping in death. Many of our wounded will have to lie all night in that horrid swamp… Many have had their heads propped up out of the water where they lay to keep them from drowning."

Jackson wrote that many blamed General Mower for throwing men at the position after he knew other divisions had already crossed; a company of the 63rd Ohio sent charging down the causeway was pulled back by Colonel Parks of the 43rd Ohio because going on "was madness."

"Died from loss of blood." — Sgt. John A. Moore, 3rd South Carolina Cavalry, 1905: John B. Woods, shot in the leg in a skirmish on February 2, died that night; the surgeon, Dr. Kirkland, "believed he could have saved him if he only had some whiskey." Of two comrades captured the next day, Jim Floyd came home after the war; Cox "died in a yankee prison."

"Bang! I got it in the neck." — Capt. Ephraim Wilson, 10th Illinois, to his wife, February 9, 1865. The first across a felled tree, he was hit while deploying his skirmishers: "The blood was gushing out of my wound in great streams and running into my boots." Unable to swim, he crept back over the log under fire, then waded three miles to the field hospital, and refused anesthetic while "that great scraggly minie ball" was cut from his back.

"Left for dead." — Capt. Benjamin S. Williams, 47th Georgia, 1914. His friend Capt. Joe Thompson was shot through the face and reported killed; Williams wrote Thompson's father a letter of condolence. In Savannah that autumn, a fellow officer walked him into an office — and there stood Thompson, one eye gone, face disfigured, speech affected, but alive. Years later Thompson still took out that letter and read it aloud to his wife and children.

"Thirty years of suffering." — Frances M. Cherry, asking the Commissioner of Pensions, in a letter dated "Oct., 12, /97," to reopen her case. Her husband, Pvt. Edgar W. Cherry, 32nd Wisconsin, was hit in the face on February 3:

"He went in to the army in perfect health at the age of twenty-eight, leaving me with two little children. After he came out he never saw a well day; his right eye was put out, his nose shot off, so that he was always obliged to breath through his mouth, which brought on lung trouble… After thirty years of suffering he died leaving me without any means of support."

Edgar W. Cherry in 1865: an army surgeon's drawing of the incisions made to repair his face after a Confederate bullet struck his right cheek and tore out near the bridge of his nose.

Edgar W. Cherry about 1890 — one of two photographs he sent the U.S. Senate seeking a larger pension. Image from the U.S. Senate records

Remembering

In 1876 the Confederates killed at Rivers Bridge were reburied together in one grave near the battlefield, and local people have gathered there every year since for a memorial service. The monument's front reads "IN MEMORY of our CONFEDERATE DEAD who fell in battle at RIVER'S BRIDGES"; the back:

Soldiers rest, your warfare o'er,
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Dream of battlefields no more,
Days of danger, nights of wakeing.

There is no monument to the Union dead there. It was this annual remembrance that preserved the battlefield, and the Confederate earthworks still stand on the bluff.

Visiting

The battlefield and Confederate cemetery are protected at Rivers Bridge State Historic Site, in southern Bamberg County off S.C. Highway 641 — one of the first historic areas the South Carolina State Park Service acquired, and its only Civil War battlefield. See the park's website.

Sources

Based on "These Honored Dead: The Battle of Rivers Bridge and Civil War Combat Casualties," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Dan Bell of the South Carolina State Park Service, edited by the program's staff, National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Quotations are from 1865–1914 sources. The lesson's figure of more than thirty Confederate prisoners is left out: the Union report it reproduces counts 10 prisoners and 17 deserters. The two illustrations are nineteenth-century and in the public domain; the lesson's copies came from the University of Michigan and Broadfoot Publishing.