Brooks, Edward Marshall, b. ca.1840

TMsS Memoir, ca.1915?
19 pp.

Brooks, Edward Marshall, b. ca.1840
Rank:	Private?
Regiment:	3rd Chicago Board of Trade Battery of Light Artillery (1862-1865)
Service:	1862 August 6-1865 June 30

Background note:

The son of a stern willed native of Vermont, Edward Marshall Brooks was raised to believe that it was his religious duty and family obligation to fight for the defence of his country. Having settled in Chicago in 1844, the Brooks family were also imbued with a sense of how members of their family had risen to the occasion to fight for their country during the Revolution, and Asa Brooks, Edward's father, further instilled them with abolitionist sympathies. Thus for Edward Brooks, the decision to volunteer for duty in the Union army during the Civil War was almost inevitable, and on August 6, 1862, he enlisted in an independent company of light artillery, the 3rd Chicago Board of Trade Battery.

The Board of Trade Battery was assigned to duty in the western theatre, experiencing the typical difficulties of unhealthy food and water and a hostile populace. In late December, 1862, they were stationed in northern Mississippi when they were ordered to participated in some of the early movements against Vicksburg. Some of Brooks' memories of the time seem never to have faded: the image of sitting before Haine's Bluff in January, 1863, and seeing the severed heads of Union soldiers mounted on stakes was powerful enough even fifty years later that he asked a Confederate veteran whom he met at a reunion how they could do such a thing, "why did they go out and rob our wounded men of their clothing, then go back and make targets of them and shoot until they had them killed aplenty." The veteran admitted that the stories were accurate, but added that the attrocities were committed by "some damned Texans whom they never could control."

Brooks' first major engagement was the hard fought assault on Arkansas Post in January, 1863. While fifty years later he could still recall the confusion and butchery of the assault, his most affecting memory was of meeting a fellow Illinoisian who had been drafted into a regiment from Texas by death threat and threats against his family, and of hearing fanatical Texans, prisoners of war, shouting threats and vows of vengeance. After transporting the prisoners taken at Arkansas Post to Illinois aboard an unhealthy prison ship, the Board of Trade Battery was debilitated by smallpox. Brooks spent two months nursing his comrades to health to the best of his ability, but was never ill himself. When back to strength, they discovered that the worst lay ahead. After being ordered south again, the battery was placed under the command of the "heartless" Samuel D. Sturgis. Brooks resented the administrative errors that led to near starvation among the troops, but he was outraged when Sturgis ordered that the cavalry prevent foraging, the only means available of feeding themselves. Brooks recalls that hunger drove him and his fellow soldiers to offer to shoot anyone who attempted to stop them, and went ahead foraging. Matters only worsened with Sturgis' botched attempt to attack Nathan Bedford Forrest at Guntown, Miss. (Brice's Cross Roads). Sturgis ordered a series of lethal, but ultimately ineffective charges, and retreated in disarray and disgrace before Forrest's drunken rabble. Brooks' memories of the engagement, however, were of the heroic performance of the "colored" brigade led by Col. Edward Boughton, which prevented the total annihilation of Sturgis' force. As it was, the Chicago Board of Trade Battery lost almost half their number as prisoners of war.

After Guntown, things did not improve. The remainder of Brooks' regiment were on duty in Memphis, when the city was attacked and briefly captured by their arch-nemesis, Forrest in August, 1864 -- a particular embarassment for the Union -- and the drunken Colonel of the regiment was lured into Forrest's trap at Chickasaw Bluffs, resulting in further loss.

During the winter of 1864-65, Brooks was called north to help recruit African Americans for militarys service, and while he was not attached to any regiment, he was given the brevet rank of captain. He mustered out in June, 1865, returned home to marry his sweetheart, Mary E. Waters, and settled into life as a farmer near Onarga, Ill., and later in Kansas and Minnesota.

Scope and Contents:

Edward Marshall Brooks' memoir of his experiences in the 3rd Chicago Board of Trade Battery is patchy, having been written more than fifty years after the fact, but contains several excellent accounts of his service, leavened by the distance of years.

The memoir is a powerful testament to the operations of a veteran's memory. He vividly recalls the engagements at Arkansas Post in January, 1863, and at Brice's Cross Roads in June, 1864, and the heroism of African American soldiers. More valuable, perhaps, are the small anecdotes he recalls of aiding a dying African American soldier at Chickasaw Bluff, of a tearful meeting with a Unionist from Texas unwillingly impressed into the Confederate Army, or of the hatred of his men for the incompetent and heartless S. D. Sturgis. All told, the emotions that remained with Brooks, and the small vignettes of military life, make it an extremely interesting account of the long-term effects of war.

At both the beginning and end of the memoir are genealogical notes on Brooks' family and his wife's family, the Waters, both of which seem highlight their participation in the Revolution.

Provenance:

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Henry Vanderschalie, Ann Arbor, 1982.

Link to subject index to the Edwin Marshall Brooks Memoir

Alphabetic index to the Schoff Civil War Collections

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