American Civil War

Enlisting in the War on August 22, 1862, John Bross raised two companies for the 88th Illinois Regiment and enlisted as captain in one of them. On September 8, 1862, the Chicago Tribune reported a ceremony at the Third Presbyterian Church where the Sunday school students presented a sword to John. The 88th Illinois was sent to Kentucky in September 1862 to join the Army of the Cumberland under General Don Carlos Buell. They had gathered in Louisville to head off a threatened attack by a Confederate army under General Braxton Bragg. John’s first combat was the Battle of Perryville, 70 miles southeast of Louisville. The Confederates retreated into Tennessee although the results of the battle were not totally clear. General William Rosecrans took command of the Union army in Nashville later in the autumn of 1862 and John Bross fought in his second battle at Murfreesboro, sometimes called the Battle of Stones River. It was a confused battle with many deaths on each side, but Bragg’s army withdrew so it was considered a Union victory. In the first part of 1863, Rosecrans built up his battered army and then in the summer of 1863, John moved with it to Chattanooga, an important commercial and railroad hub for the Confederacy. There, on September 19, Rosecrans suffered a major defeat in John’s third battle, the Battle of Chickamauga, just over the Georgia border and south of Chattanooga. Letters that John wrote home to Belle described the hardship of war but also what life was like when they were not in battle, but were marching, or waiting or feeling the effects of hunger and bad weather. In October 1863, soon after the Battle of Chickamauga, the Illinois Governor named then Lieutenant Colonel John A. Bross to raise a regiment of African American soldiers in the state. His recruiting headquarters was in Quincy, Illinois, on the border with Missouri which was a favorite crossing place of escaped slaves. In April 1864 John’s regiment, the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, was ordered to Washington to join the army of General Ulysses S. Grant who needed troops for his planned Virginia campaign.

John‘s army first trained for a month in Washington, D.C. during May 1864, before joining Grant’s army as it moved south to Petersburg, the supply town for Richmond, Virginia. His regiment was assigned to the Fourth Division of General Ambrose Burnside’s corps which consisted of nine African American regiments.

The siege of Petersburg was the first modern example of trench warfare, and was used 50 years later in World War I. The explosion in the 510-foot tunnel, some 20 feet down and not detected by the Confederates, was set to go off on Saturday, July 30 at 3:15 in the morning to be followed by the colored troops going through the breach, fanning out to the sides and then charging up to a hill beyond. The following soldiers would then invade the town. But before the explosion, General George Meade announced that he would not use the colored troops to lead the attack, causing much last-minute confusion. The explosion went off at 4:45 am, an hour late. Finally, at 7:30 a.m. as the battle stalled, the colored troops were ordered to go in. At 8:45, John Bross, in full-dress uniform, grabbed the colors of his regiment, climbed on the parapet, and said, “The man who saves these colors shall be promoted”. He was shot just afterwards, and neither flag nor its bearer were ever returned from the battlefield.^[2] Of the 400 men who followed Bross into battle, only 128 came back.^[3] Afterwards, General Grant said that these black troops should have been allowed to lead the charge. After John’s death there were many tributes to him at a special meeting of the Chicago Bar Association.^[4] When veterans from the 29th Colored Regiment formed a chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic in Springfield, Illinois in 1886, they named it the John Bross Post in honor of their fallen colonel.^[5]