It should be borne in mind that the Kanawha men
had the position of advance-guard, and I believe did not camp in the
neighborhood of the other divisions in a single instance from the
time we left Leesboro till the battle of South Mountain. What is
said of them, therefore, is not from observation. The incident
between Reno and Hayes occurred in the camp of the latter, and could
not possibly be known to the author of the regimental history but by
hearsay. Yet he affirms as a fact that the Kanawha division
"plundered the country unmercifully," for which Reno "took
Lieutenant-Colonel Hayes severely though justly to task." He also
asserts that the division set a "very bad example" in straggling. As
to this, the truth is as I have circumstantially stated it above. He
has still further indulged in a "slant" at the "Ohioans" in a story
of dead Confederates being put in a well at South Mountain,--a story
as apocryphal as the others. Wise's house and well were within the
camp of the division to which the Twenty-first Massachusetts
belonged, and the burial party there would have been from that
division. Lastly, the writer says that General Cox, the temporary
corps commander, "robs us [the Twenty-first Massachusetts] of our
dearly bought fame" by naming the Fifty-first New York and
Fifty-first Pennsylvania as the regiments which stormed the bridge
at Antietam.
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