Portrait of a soldier 155girl.' he wrote, 'captured a thousand hearts.'
Seeing his first cotton field was given space
in his dairy.
Murfreesboro. Tennessee, was quite a
place for Beatty. He remarked:Murfreesboro is an aristocratic town, many of
the citizens haw as fine carriages as are to be
seen in Cincinnati or Washington. On pleasant
week-day evenings they sometimes come out to
witness tlie parades. The ladies, so far as I can
judge by a glimpse through a carriage window,
are richly and elegantly dressed. The poor whites
are as poor as rot, and the rich are very rich.
There is no substantial well-to-do middle class.
The slaves are, in fact, the middle class here.By April 1863, however, Murfreesboro had
undergone a transformation. The fine houses
and trees of the city had been 'cut or
trampled down and destroyed.' 'Many frame
houses, and very good ones, too,' he
remarked, 'have been torn down, and the
lumber and timber used in the construction
of hospitals.' Even the air had changed:
'There is a fearful stench in many places
near here, arising from decaying horses
and mules.'
Perhaps nothing caught Beatty's attention
more than the ordeal of the battle. In
February 1862, he wrote that although it was
bitterly cold, 'the conviction that a battle
was imminent kept the men steady and
prevented straggling.' The evening before the
Battle of Stone's River (Murfreesboro) in
December 1862, Beatty wrote: 'To-morrow,
doubtless, the grand battle will be fought,
when I trust the good Lord will grant us a
glorious victory, and one that will make glad
hearts of all loyal people on New-Year's Day.'
At one point during the battle, he glanced
up to see a soldier who was heading to the
back of the line struck in the back between
the shoulders, killing him instantly.
After the battle he walked the battlefield
and found the dead and wounded scattered
for miles. As he walked across the terrain, he
commented: 'we find men with their legs
shot off; one with his brains scooped out
with a cannon ball: another with half a face
The Rutherford County courthouse in Murfreesboro,
Tennessee. The courthouse reflects the aristocratic
facade of the Tennessee town that so impressed
soldiers like Ohio's John Beatty. The Battle of Stone's
River was fought near the courthouse, which was
converted into a hospital for Braxton Bragg's forces.
(Review of Reviews Company)gone; another with entrails protruding ...
another boy lies with his hands clasped
above his head, indicating that his last
words were a prayer.' 'How many poor men
moaned through the cold nights in the
thick woods, where the first day's battle
occurred,' he penned, 'calling in vain to man
for help, and finally making their last
solemn petition to God!'
The fact that Beatty survived the Civil
War was a testament to his fitness as an
officer and to a significant degree the result
of simple luck. When he resigned his
commission in January 1864 and returned to
Sandusky, the Civil War became central to
his life. An everyday banker from Ohio who
had witnessed the drama of the Civil War,
Beatty was no longer an ordinary citizen.