Title : From a "whirlpool of death . . . to victory" Civil War Remembrances of Jesse Tyler Sturm 14th West Virginia Infantry
Author : Jesse Tyler Sturm
Binding : Paperback
Publisher : West Virginia Division of Culture and History
Date Published : 2002
Description: The Civil War stories of Union veteran Jesse Tyler Sturm are now available in a new book from West Virginia History. Born in Marion County in 1844, Jesse Tyler Sturm was living in Harrison County when the Civil War began in 1861. His own state divided by the conflict, Tyler Sturm, as his acquaintances knew him, chose to support the Union.
After serving a year with a local militia company, Sturm enlisted in Company H of the 14th West Virginia Infantry in 1862. He spent much of the next two years guarding the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad before participating in his first important action at Cloyds Mountain in southwestern Virginia on May 9, 1864. Over the next six months, the regiment fought at several places in the Shenandoah Valley, including Carter's Farm, Fisher's Hill, Winchester (Opequon), and Cedar Creek. Sturm saw his last action during a March 1865 skirmish near Patterson's Creek in West Virginia.
More than forty years later, Sturm, by then a longtime resident of Kansas, wrote several series of articles about his wartime service. Originally published over the course of a decade in several different newspapers, most of his stories have been assembled in From a "whirlpool of death . . . to victory." Supplementing Sturm's reminiscences are an introduction, annotations, illustrations, and an index.
"Forty miles more without rations! Could we stand it? We were poor and emaciated, the skeletons of our former selves, without strength or energy, but we plodded on as best we could . . . ."