Toil and Mud

For nearly five months, thousands of soldiers and African-American laborers worked around the clock to build Fortress Rosecrans, digging, shaping, and compacting the works in backbreaking, highly unpopular duty. On Feb. 1, 1863, Lyman S. Widney of the 34th Illinois Infantry wrote that building fortifications might be valuable and necessary in a military view, but the men objected because it was Sunday, because it was muddy, and greatest because it was work, adding that they had not enlisted to get a job of working but had expected a big picnic with good clothes, good rations, regular pay and glory, not work and mud. The curtain wall of Fortress Rosecrans, designed for infantry, included a dry ditch on its outward side and a firing step for infantrymen on the inward side, while the works perpendicular to the curtain wall, called traverses, were designed to prevent flanking fire from sweeping the length of the fort. During the first four months of 1863, nearly 40,000 fighters, including men of the 21st Michigan, cast aside weapons and took up shovels to help construct Fortress Rosecrans.

Murfreesboro, Tennessee · United States