Hazen Brigade Monument

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hazen Brigade Monument stands in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, at Stones River National Battlefield. It is the oldest American Civil War monument still standing on its original battlefield ground. On the last day of 1862, Colonel William Babcock Hazen led his men into a cedar grove at the center of the Union line. They refused to break. By the following summer, survivors from that brigade had returned to the same ground and built a stone monument before the war was over. What drove them to do it? And why, more than four decades later, did a celebrated American writer return to this stone shaft and place it at the heart of a disturbing short story?

• 2. The Stand at Round Forest

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  Confederate General Braxton Bragg opened the morning of the 31st of December 1862 with a surprise attack on his left flank. The assault drove the right wing of the Union army back three miles. By the time the line stabilized, it had bent nearly at right angles to where it had started. At the bend stood Hazen's brigade, holding a four-acre clump of cedar trees called the Round Forest. The position jutted forward as a salient, just east of the Nashville Pike and straddling the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad.

  Major General William S. Rosecrans commanded the Union forces that day. He rushed artillery to the high ground behind Hazen's men and massed it there. Even so, Confederate troops attacked four times. Four times Hazen's brigade, backed by those guns and by other Union troops, drove them back. Soldiers on both sides gave the grove a name for what they witnessed: "Hell's Half-Acre." Hazen's regiments absorbed 409 casualties, 29 percent of the entire brigade; 45 of those men were killed. The brigade held, and arguably kept the Confederate Army of Tennessee from splitting the Union line. Before the war ended, those 45 dead would have their names cut into stone at the Round Forest.

• 3. Building in Wartime

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  During the summer of 1863, the Union Army of the Cumberland was maneuvering through the Tullahoma campaign in Tennessee. While that operation unfolded, a detail of soldiers from Hazen's Brigade was sent back toward Stones River. Their orders had nothing to do with fighting. They were to build a monument in the Round Forest to honor the brigade's stand and to memorialize the men who had not come home.

  Lieutenant Edward Crebbin commanded the construction detail. The site chosen was private property, set in the middle of the brigade's own cemetery within the Round Forest. A Union army captain described what rose there; he called it "a quadrangular pyramidal shaft, ten feet square at the base and eleven feet in height." Around the monument and the cemetery, workers assembled a dry-stacked stone wall four feet high and two feet thick. Three low steps broke through the south side of the wall so that visitors could enter. In 1864, two experienced stone cutters from the regiment carved the inscriptions. They cut the names of regimental officers killed at Stones River and at the earlier Battle of Shiloh. On the south face, they cut a declaration the monument still carries: HAZEN'S BRIGADE / TO THE MEMORY OF ITS SOLDIERS WHO FELL AT STONES RIVER, DEC. 31ST 1862 / THEIR FACES TOWARDS HEAVEN, THEIR FEET TO THE FOE.

  The monument stood on private property for more than a decade before the federal government took ownership.

• 4. A Writer Returns

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  The 0.84-acre parcel around the monument became War Department property in 1875, more than a decade after the stone was raised. From then until 1930, the monument's care fell under the superintendent of the Stones River National Cemetery. That period produced what one account described as "periods of neglect and deterioration." In 1930, the Hazen Memorial and the National Cemetery were officially consolidated into the Stones River National Military Park. Three years later, in 1933, the National Park Service assumed control from the War Department.

  In 1907, decades before that institutional change, Ambrose Bierce climbed to the monument for the second time in his life. Bierce had served as a staff officer in the 9th Indiana Volunteers and had known Colonel Hazen personally. He survived the fighting at Stones River unscathed. As a topographic engineer, he had examined the monument closely when it was first completed in 1863. More than four decades later, he returned. In 1908, he published a psychological tale called "A Resumed Identity." The story's protagonist shares Bierce's age, rank, and brigade affiliation. The Hazen Monument provides that story's twist ending. Bierce gave his protagonist a description of the stone that probably mirrors what the writer saw in 1907: "brown with age, weather-worn at the angles, spotted with moss and lichen. Between the massive blocks were strips of grass." The interior of those massive blocks had not been opened since the monument was sealed in 1863.

• 5. Inside the Stones

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  In 1985, workers repairing the monument found more than limestone when they opened the fill. Among the soil and stone, they uncovered a first group of objects: two bullets, eight buck-and-ball shot, a lead disk, and a freshwater mussel shell. Also embedded in the fill were two bone fragments, six horse teeth, and two small wood fragments. Archaeologists concluded that those items had been in the soil used to fill the monument during construction. They were battlefield remnants, absorbed into the ground and sealed inside by accident.

  About five feet above ground level, the workers found a second cluster. The nine items included two 12-pound cannonballs, one 6-pound cannonball, three rifled artillery shells, two rifled musket barrels, and a cedar staff. All nine occupied the same height, which convinced the National Park Service that their placement had been intentional. No agreement was ever reached about what the objects signified. The Park Service called the deposit a "presumptive time capsule." The cedar staff, placed alongside artillery shells inside a stone built in a cedar grove, has never been explained by any document found since.