80th Indiana

The inexperienced 80th Indiana Infantry Regiment, part of Union Colonel George Webster’s brigade alongside the 50th, 98th, and 121st Ohio infantry regiments and the 19th Battery, Indiana Light Artillery under Captain Samuel Harris, was deployed to support Harris’s artillery on the ridge. When the Confederate attack began, the regiment lay down awaiting the assault as musketry and cannon fire signaled the ferocity of the fight, and some Hoosiers were killed and wounded by cannon balls bouncing through the ranks. Near 2:20 p.m., Confederate Brigadier General Daniel Donelson’s brigade emerged from woods about 200 yards ahead and advanced toward a gap between Webster’s brigade and Colonel Leonard Harris’s brigade, and the 80th Indiana moved forward to help prevent the Confederates from exploiting it and repulsed Donelson’s men as they struggled toward Samuel Harris’s cannon. Later, after Leonard Harris’s troops withdrew under severe pressure from several Confederate brigades, more Confederate infantry struck Webster, and when troops from Brigadier General S.A.M. Wood’s brigade moved through a nearby cornfield, the 80th Indiana opened a destructive fire on them. Even so, the Confederates nearly surrounded Samuel Harris’s cannon, forcing the artillery to fall back, followed by the 80th Indiana, to a new position along the Dixville Road in the fields behind. Colonel Webster was killed near the road, and as daylight faded the Union troops continued to withdraw until the fighting ended. The 80th Indiana entered the fight with 738 men and lost 27 killed, 116 wounded, and 14 missing, more than 21 percent casualties, as inexperienced Union soldiers here and across the battlefield faced the realities of war for the first time.

Kentucky · United States