The story of Capt. Samuel Fletcher Cheney 

By Fred Brown
Special to the Courier

CHICKAMAUGA, GA —Sam Fletcher Cheney, great-grandfather to U.S. Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney, was a 34-year-old lieutenant when he enlisted with the 21^st Ohio Volunteer Infantry Sept. 19, 1861.

On that same day in September two years later, Sam Cheney found himself in one of the biggest campaigns of the Civil War. He was first a sergeant for a three-month tour and then made a lieutenant for agreeing to a three-year stretch.

And right then, Sept. 19, 1863, in a field shadowed by Tennessee and North Georgia mountains, in a place of farms and rolling beauty, it looked as if the world were coming to an end.

The lieutenant had just lived through the Battle of Stones River with the 21^st, and had chased the Confederates to Tullahoma, Tenn., and now over the mountains into Chattanooga with “Old Rosy”, Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland.

Now he was in the mountains and valleys of Tennessee along the jagged border with Georgia, hunting Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg and his Army of Tennessee.

Before the Battle of Chickamauga, Sam Fletcher Cheney, born in Boscawen, Merrimack County, New Hampshire, in 1829, was promoted to aide-de-camp to Col. William Sirwell, commander of the Third Brigade, Second Division of the XIV Corps.

Elements of the 21^st OVI would play a crucial role in the final hours of the battle, but Sam Cheney would not get to be a part of one of the great moments in U.S. Army history. Not on this day. Fate was saving him for other fields of glory in Georgia and the Carolinas.

The boys of the 21^st OVI, 539 of them armed with the 1855 version of the .56 caliber 5-shot Colt revolving rifle, proved their mettle on Sept. 20, 1863, standing with Maj. Gen. George Thomas on Horseshoe Ride and Snodgrass Hill as another wave of Confederates stormed yet again.

Seven of the 10 companies of the 21^st OVI were equipped with the Colt Revolving Rifles, which could turn out five rounds faster than a Confederate could load and cock his muzzleloader and get off one round, two at best.

Brad Quinlin of Suwanee, Ga., a long-time re-enactor with the 21^st OVI and now its official historian, has been assembling information, letters, diaries, photos and other documentation about the infantry regiment for about two decades. In the last seven years, he has been working specifically on Sam Fletcher Cheney, and has met with not only the vice president but also his wife, Lynne Cheney, about the Civil War history of her husband’s ancestor, Sam Cheney.

Quinlin says that by 1 p.m. on Sept. 20, Sam Cheney had departed the battlefield with the XIV Corps’s Second Division Commander, Maj. Gen. James S. Negley and Third Brigade Commander, Col. William Sirwell.

Negley and Sirwell had got caught up in the complete route caused by Maj. Gen. James Longstreet’s exploiting a gap in the Federal line along the LaFayette Road a little before noon on the second day of battle.

The catastrophe was the result of an order given by Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland, who ordered XXI First Division Commander Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood to move his division out of the thick of the battle and head north.

The order made no sense, but Wood, who had been upbraided publicly by Rosecrans on two other occasions, was not about to suffer another affront. He pulled his division out, and moved them north in support of Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds, also heavily engaged along the Federal battlefront.

This move opened up a 600-yard gap in the Federal center, which Longstreet’s three divisions, stacked one behind the other, all from the Army of Northern Virginia, were aimed to exploit, and happy to do so.

Around 11 a.m., when the gap occurred, Longstreet aimed his three divisions at George Brotherton’s farm, a large cultivated field to take advantage of Wood’s departure, basically from the Glenn-Kelly Road.

Then resulting chaos swept up Rosecrans, Negley and others in a wild dash to escape the Longstreet onslaught.

In this mad dash was Capt. Sam Cheney, along with Col. Sirwell and Maj. Gen. Negley. They apparently didn’t stop to catch their collective breaths until reaching the safety of Chattanooga.

This left Maj. Gen. Thomas to hold the line for Rosecrans’ hasty retreat. That battle along Horseshoe Ridge, Snodgrass Hill, and two other crests known as Hill One and Hill Two, has become the stuff of Civil War legend, and American Army history.

The 21^st OVI, unaware that its top commanders had fled the field, began a stand under the command of Lt. Col. Dwella M. Stoughton on Horseshoe Ridge that has been celebrated in Civil War art and the writings of such historians as Peter Cozzens in his extraordinary work on the Battle of Chickamauga, “This Terrible Silence.”

Armed with their repeating Colt rifles, the 21^st OVI blunted charge after charge of Maj. Gen. Thomas Hindman’s Confederates, expending more than 43,000 rounds of ammunition.

As boys in butternut charged up the slopes, the boys in blue fired so ruthlessly that at times the powder clogged their revolving rifles, or the sparks from shells set the grass on fire at the feet of the on-coming Confederates.

The stand by the 21^st OVI on Horseshoe Ridge has been compared with the 20^th Maine at Gettysburg, giving the event the glitter of historic significance. This was one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances, that if you lived to tell about it, the remembrance itself became a timely treasure.

Not many of the 21^st OVI lived through the fighting, however. Some faded when overrun by the Confederates. An estimated 120 were captured and sent to Andersonville Prison near Americus, Ga.

Of that number, less than a dozen survived the infamous POW camp built on top of a swamp.

Around 5 p.m. on Sept. 19, Rebel Brig. Gen. William Bate, who earned a promotion to major general from Confederate President Jefferson Davis after the battle—Bate had three horses shot from beneath him, impressing the president—sent his brigade charging LaFayette Road to take out Union Brig. Gen. William B. Hazen’s artillery.

It was not a good decision by Bate, a future governor of Tennessee (1883-1887). Hazen’s artillery plowed into the brigade. He lost 30 percent of what was left of his brigade after a day of hard fighting. It took the artillery less than three minutes to cut to shreds Bate’s Brigade, made up of Alabamians, Tennesseans and some Georgians.

Ambrose Bierce, a future journalist and author, wrote that the Confederates simply melted away in the withering storm of steel.

“When all was over, and the dust cloud had lifted, the spectacle was too dreadful to describe,” Bierce wrote. “The Confederates were still there, all of them, it seemed, some almost under the muzzles of guns. But not a man of all these brave fellows was on his feet, and so thickly were all covered with dust that they looked as if they had been re-clothed in yellow.”

Dust covering the dead Rebels at the mouth of the guns, was from the cannon shells, aimed to bounce first on the ground, and then up into the ranks of the charging enemy, thus covering the dead in a gloaming of yellow. The boys in butternut were soiled as they were blown asunder.

Capt. Sam Cheney missed this action, but he lived to fight another day in Chattanooga, and joined Maj. Gen. William Sherman on his march through Georgia and up into North Carolina.

He was in command of the 21^st OVI at the Battle of Bentonville, N.C., where the Civil War finally played out like dark storm, which eventually loses its breath.

Editor’s Note: The Twenty-first Ohio was organized April 27, 1861, for three months' Service; and reorganized September 19 for three years, under Col. Jesse S. Norton. It served under Gen. Buell in Gen. O. M. Mitchell's Division; was with Gen. Rosecrans at Stone River and Chickamauga. Having re-enlisted as veterans, the Twenty-first joined Sherman's Atlanta campaign, and was present at the battles of Buzzard's Roost, Resaca, New Hope Church, Kennesaw Mountain, Vining's Station, Peach Tree Creek and Jonesboro. It followed in pursuit of Hood to Galesville, from whence it returned to Atlanta; then moving north through the Carolinas, it participated in the last battle of the war at Bentonville, took part in the review at Washington on May 26, 1865, and was mustered out of the service the following July, at Louisville, Ky.