The harassment of Sherman's initiatives by Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest's forces became so rampant during the Atlanta campaign that Sherman detailed an army of 14,200 under command of Major-General Andrew J. Smith with the responsibility of preventing Forrest from destroying railroad lines supplying Sherman's army. Smith's army marched into northern Mississippi, destroying everything as it went. With Smith were the 2d, 3d and 4th Iowa Cavalry; 2d Iowa Battery of Light Artillery; and the 12th, 14th, 27th, 32d, and 35th Infantry. At 7:30 A.M. on the 14th of July, 1864, Forrest's Confederate forces met Smith's forces near Tupelo, Mississippi, and delivered several charges upon them, but were beaten back. After two hours the assault was called off. The following day the Confederates retreated, having endured casualties of over 1300 from their 8,000 men. The Union suffered losses of 700. In the fight, Charles Sweeney, a twenty-three-year-old from Mitchell County serving in Company K of the 27th Iowa Infantry, was wounded in the arm and had it amputated. His eighteen-year-old brother Joseph, in the same company, cared for him and fifty years later described his gruesome experience of "Nursing a Wounded Brother": 

I went to the right a few rods away, where Captain Granger was, and told him that Charley was shot in the arm and seriously wounded. I did not know at that time that my brother also was shot in the thigh, the more serious wound of the two. Granger told me to get someone to help me and carry Charley off the field. It was the theory of military organization that members of the regimental bands would, in case of skirmish or battle, follow the command and with stretchers carrying off the wounded to the field hospital. No musicians showed up on that occasion, and seldom did under like circumstances, until things resumed their nearly normal condition. 

I turned at once to Charley, and with the help of Willie Houghton and a Corporal Schulz of Company E, I laid him in my rubber poncho, and taking it by the ends we started to the rear with him. He soon fainted again and I thought for a time that he was dead or dying. I found that the blood was pouring out of his wounds and that there were quarts of it in the rubber poncho in which he was being carried. We laid him down; I tore the sleeve out of his blouse and took a handkerchief, which strangely enough I had with me, and bound his arm above the wound, drawing it as tight as possible, thus in a measure stopping the flow of blood, and I have always believed that without that operation he would not have lived fifteen minutes longer. He fainted several times on the way back while we were carrying him, letting him down at frequent intervals, and pouring water onto his breast, face and arms, and finally we met the bank men with the stretchers, which afforded a much more comfortable and convenient means of carrying him. We carried him back down close to the bridge over which we had originally crossed over Old Town creek; crossed the road to the east side of it, and laid him with a number of other wounded men on the porch, or gallery, as they call it in Mississippi, of one of the houses making up the little hamlet of Old Town Creek. 

The field hospital was established under trees a few rods from this house and close to the bank of the creek. This field hospital consisted of an operating table about the size of a carpenter's bench, put up of rough boards, one end of it being attached to a big tree. Here during the evening and night, the wounded were operated upon, and the amputated arms and legs lying by that table toward morning, presented a spectacle which after fifty year's recollection confirms the truth of Sherman's statement that ”war is hell, “ and the statement of Bacon, I think it is, that “war is the child of hell”…

On that gallery close to where Charley lay was a wounded man from another regiment, when they were first brought in; a man whose abdomen was largely torn away by a shell so that his intestines were exposed, and he was suffering about all that man can suffer. This was before dark and very soon after the fighting was over. He asked me when I came there, “How has the fight gone?” I said to him, “We have whipped them, we have driven them off the field, we have won the day!” He said, “Good. I can die contented.” Those were his last words, and within five minutes of uttering them he was dead. 

I do not know his name nor his company nor regiment, but I have never forgotten that scene, I have never forgotten that hero; the content and happiness with which he died for his country, fifty years ago today and almost at this hour of the day. That man was buried there by that little stream, Old Town creek, in Mississippi. So far as I know, no stone nor monument of any kind ever marked his resting place, and the place where his ashes lie is wholly unknown, but there were thousands, tens of thousands who died like he did, forgetful of any dread of death; forgetting all earthly treasures and prospects, subordinating all hopes, loves and earthly ties, all fear of future punishment for sins, all fear of meeting face to face their God. This is how love of kindred, home and native land can possess the man. This is what love of country means to the man in the hour of his country's peril. It is with this spirit and with such exaltation that in a just cause he follows his country's flag to battle. 

I helped the surgeons carry the wounded to the operating table, and in many cases to administer the chloroform and watch the amputations and help to carry the unconscious ones, to lay them on the ground under the trees in the vicinity. One fellow, a cavalry man whose leg was shattered above the knee, was placed on the table. He very decidedly refused to make use of chloroform, and finally the surgeons went to work without its use. He sat upon the boards, gripping his leg with both hands above the shattered bone, and watched them cut the flesh and saw the bone and take away the entire lower part of his leg, including his knee, with never a whimper, and only a groan or two as the saw went through the bone. 

The command would move promptly in the morning. The ambulances and empty wagons were filled with wounded and the order was issued to leave the most severely wounded there in the few houses of the village, and with such temporary provision as could be made. I went to Captain Granger, and with his permission, to our good Colonel Gilbert and got permission for an order to stay and take care of Charley and help take care of other wounded. I got that order; and then I thought more about it. Here it was the 16th of July; intense heat, away from any hospital supplies, Charley most desperately wounded, and within an hour after our column would move we would be in the hands of the enemy and within their lines, with the very scant supplies and appliances which they would, with even their best efforts, supply us. I did not believe that it would be possible for him to live under such conditions, and I went to work to arrange if possible to get him away with the other wounded. Finally I found an ambulance in which was a man with a not serious fracture of the arm, and another, a First Illinois cavalryman, whose left arm had been amputated in the night just about even with Charley's right arm. I got Charley into the bed of the ambulance along side of this cavalryman, and got the other wounded man up on the seat with the driver. I gathered about a dozen canteens from among the debris of the field, and kept them filled with water as fresh as could be gotten from that time on until, four or four and one-half days afterward, we reached the railroad. The canteens were hung onto the ambulance and filled with fresh water as often as I could do so, or get someone else to do it for me; often giving a darky a quarter or half a dollar, to get the water, while the column was constantly moving along the road.... 

I found that the wounds of my two charges had become alive with maggots. After getting inside of the lines I went and hunted up Dr. Sanborn to come and dress their wounds and take out the maggots. He refused to do so, and I went on and found Dr. Onley, a surgeon of the Thirty-second Iowa, and then acting as brigade surgeon Dr. Olney went with me, at about three o'clock in the morning, and took the bandages and plasters off from those amputated arms, removed the maggots, cleansed them thoroughly and dressed them again. After that I succeeded in keeping the maggots out most of the time, but by the most strenuous and consistent endeavor. I only had to call on the surgeons to help me once or twice after that.... 

I never, aside from that experience, knew that it would be possible, but I saw it time and again there, that after putting fresh muslin, wet in cold water on those superating wounds, with the flies swarming around and lighting on them, that in less than half an hour the maggots, would be crawling all over those wet cloths.  It was only by the frequent throwing away of those saturated cloths, fly-blown and frequently almost alive with maggots, and covering the wounds again with the freshly wet muslin, that the wounds could by any possibility be kept from the maggots. 

I don't think that there was a half-hour during day or night, from the time of our starting from Old Town creek on the 16th, until we reached Grand Junction, Tennessee, and the hospital train on the 21st, near noon, that I did not dress those wounds, and with no medicine nor any other application than the fresh water; cold as I could get it. 
 

Sweeney, Joseph H. “Nursed A Wounded Brother.” Annals of Iowa. Vol. 3 No. 31, 1952. pp. 177-199. Copyright State Historical Society of Iowa. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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