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17th Iowa Infantry
Manuscripts by Linus Freeman Parrish
Three manuscripts by Linus Freeman Parrish,
17th Iowa Veteran Volunteer Infantry (March 1862-June 1865)
Submitted to ICWP, with introductory notes, by his great-grandson Eric W. Weber ( ), who welcomes all comments and additional information about the 17th IA - and particularly about Linus's fellow soldiers in Company G.
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Linus F. Parrish was born in Illinois on September 16,1845, the fourth child and third son of an itinerant blacksmith who died young in Indiana ten years later. Linus's mother Anna (Vogan) Parrish remarried on Christmas Day, 1856, and in the spring of 1857 the combined families of John and Anna Parrish Hobbs traveled west in a covered wagon to Harrison County, MO. They settled on a farm along Trail Creek near the crossroads village of Mount Moriah, a few miles south of the Iowa line. There Linus spent the four years immediately before the Civil War. His two older brothers remained in Indiana, where they found work with the smithing skills their father had taught them. At the outbreak of the war, they enlisted together in the 26th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, and soon found themselves stationed at Tipton, Moniteau Co., MO. There Linus's brother Samuel fell sick on Christmas Day, 1861. He died of pneumonia in an army hospital the next month, seven weeks short of 21. Sixteen-year-old Linus was burning to enlist, and far from being discouraged by his brother's death, he redoubled his efforts. After two months of being laughed off by Missouri recruiters as too young and too small, in March he found one at Adel, Iowa who swallowed the story that Linus was 18. That was how he came to fight in an Iowa unit, and why he knew only one other soldier in the regiment when he enlisted. He and Ross Richmond, former schoolmates from Mount Moriah, had made the trek to Adel to sign up together. Richmond would be dead within eight months.
I have Linus's three original manuscripts of war recollections, neatly written in what is now faded brown ink on lined foolscap. The pages are crumbling at the edges, and a few are missing words or parts of sentences. He wrote them in the mid-1880s, probably at the urging of his wife Waitie - who, as a former schoolteacher, was more literate than Linus, and may have coached him through these memoirs in the hope that their publication would bring in some needed cash. Unfortunately, thousands of other CW veterans and their wives had had the same idea. Like most of the others, Linus never made it into print.
When he wrote these recollections, Linus was a general storekeeper and sometime postmaster at Ravanna, MO. He had never recovered from his imprisonment at Andersonville, and never did. His digestion was badly impaired, and though he lived 53 years after the war, he never fully regained the weight he had lost in prison. I suspect he may have had some sort of chronic intestinal infection or parasite. Pictures of him in later years show a small man, razor thin in the face. He had been brought up doing farm chores and was plenty strong for his size (reportedly about 5'-5" and 130 pounds) when he enlisted - as his three years' hard service and prison-camp survival prove - but after Andersonville he never had the strength or stamina for farm work, though he tried to make a go of farming three different times. His sixteen or seventeen years tending store at Ravanna, where nine of his thirteen children were born, were probably the happiest time - and the first really settled one - in his life. It was the only time he ever had the leisure to write.
After penning these three labored pieces (manuscripts A and B are obviously different drafts of the same thing, but it's hard to tell what he was trying to improve), he apparently never wrote again. His last surviving child, my grandmother, kept these manuscripts until the 1970s when she went into a nursing home, and she would have kept any other such papers that existed. Linus just wasn't much of a writing man (that's what leads me to suppose Waitie badgered him to grind these out). He and Waitie did, however, try to give their children the education Linus had missed. About 1901 he gave up his last attempt at farming, near Amoret in Bates County, MO, and moved his family to Ottawa, Kansas, where his three youngest children could attend high school (there had been none near the Bates County farm) and attend a small Baptist college.
Waitie died at their Ottawa home on her 75th birthday, in 1923. Linus died there five years later. Their two youngest sons, unmarried, lived on in the Parrish home until 1974, when it passed out of the family. My mother, born in 1925, never knew Linus and Waitie, but she heard stories about them from her aunts and uncles. They told her that the Civil War had always been with Linus: it was the great adventure and nightmare of his lifetime. Reading his manuscripts after all these years, I think he must have wished he could more easily put his experiences into words. And nearly twenty years after
the end of the war, his memories surely weren't as vivid and detailed as they could have been, had he started writing sooner. I wonder whether that bothered him, or whether he was just as glad not to have even more to write down.
Linus didn't write about his regiment's activities at Iuka or the second battle of Corinth, because he wasn't there: those battles were fought while he was recuperating from an attack of fever at Mound City, Illinois, or traveling back to rejoin the regiment. General Rosecrans's stinging reprimand of the 17th Iowa after Iuka goes unmentioned in Linus's writings, though it must have rankled the men for some time. Linus probably figured the less he said about it the better - particularly since Rosecrans had praised the regiment highly for its part in Second Corinth soon afterward. Still, it would have been interesting to read a foot-soldier's commentary on the justice or injustice of that reprimand. Official reports of Iuka and many other CW battles make it clear that regimental commanders rarely knew or guessed the reasons for the orders they received. They were often at a loss to proceed usefully when the movements they'd been ordered to carry out were thwarted, as the Seventeenth's movements at Iuka were.
Like infantrymen in every war, the private soldiers of the 17th hardly ever had any clear idea what they were doing or why, save in the most general terms. This was truest in the early engagements, when even the generals had little or no combat experience, but it remained substantially true throughout the war. Early in the siege of Vicksburg, Gen. Logan's assault on Fort Hill was mismanaged into utter futility at a horrifying cost, yet Linus and his fellows apparently never grasped that for them to "hold the position" at the bottom of the crater would be a military failure, not a
success. As late as Missionary Ridge (the end of November 1863), Sherman himself sent his whole army, including the Seventeenth, to attack what proved to be the wrong hill: a non-target. They had no part in the astounding victory won by Gen. Thomas's troops in the center of the Union line, and their losses in the battle were wasted - but Linus, who was pursued off a cliff during this misdirected attack, never knew the effort had been pointless. He still didn't know in the 1880s, for all we can tell. The first time Linus saw his role in the larger war to any degree was when the 17th was pulled off the Atlanta campaign's front lines and stationed in the rear to guard Sherman's railroad lifeline.
It would be interesting to know how many of the soldiers who fought in the war and wrote about it later made an effort to find out, once the fighting was over, what was behind some of the orders they had received. The real answers would probably have been hard to shake loose, but at least some of the men must have had a burning desire to understand what they had been through and why their companions had died. But Linus wasn't one of those who could afford to look into it, and maybe he didn't even want to. His recollections are unleavened (and in a sense, uncorrupted) by any expanded historical perspective - the work of an ordinary, unreflective man who had been drawn by youthful curiosity and the hope of adventure into the greatest cataclysm of his age, and had grown from carefree boyhood to sober and hard-bitten manhood in a matter of a few months, under conditions we can hardly imagine.
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