May/June 2026 (Volume 18, Issue 3)

 

By Norman Van Mersbergen

 

There are some older buildings in Oskaloosa on which the name of the original owner is detailed in concrete. The First Baptist Church in Oskaloosa, for instance, displays the name of its builder on its front: “J.M. Byers Master Builder.” Though J.M. Byers cemented his legacy as a builder, it was his son—Samuel Hawkins Marshall Byers—who would quit his father’s building trade and eventually etch his name into the history books as a renowned soldier and poet. “Godspeed the trowel for I won’t,” wrote the younger Byers. This is his story.

 

Samuel H.M. Byers, who was born on July 23, 1838, in Pulaski, Penn., and moved to Iowa in 1851 with his father (his mother died shortly after he was born) before settling in Oskaloosa by 1853, laid aside the trowel as a young man and began teaching school in Iowa near Oskaloosa and Peoria. During that time he began to “read the law” under such Oskaloosa names as Crookham and Loughridge as the nation was headed toward the American Civil War. 

 

In July 1861, after being admitted to the Iowa bar, “Marsh” Byers became the first man to join the 5th Iowa Infantry Regiment. He would serve with the Union Army under the command of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the western theater of the Civil War and was promoted to quartermaster sergeant. The battles of Iuka, Corinth, Champion Hills and Chattanooga at Missionary Ridge would turn this former bricklayer, schoolteacher and short-time lawyer into a combat veteran, and for the last half of the war, 16 months as a prisoner of the Confederate Army after being captured in November 1863 at the Battle of Missionary Ridge. He would serve time in Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., a camp in Macon, Ga., and eventually Camp Sorghum outside of Columbia, S.C., after twice escaping and being recaptured. 

 

A cold night in Dixie

Byers, because he was an officer, was first confined in the notorious Libby Prison. In November of 1863 Byers wrote a letter from there to his friend Will Edmunson in Oskaloosa: 

 

“Well, William! My boy, tis in prison, I thank ye;

They’ve got me, at last, just for being a ‘yankee!’ 

And waiting, I am, for the paps to arrange 

That beautiful system they call ‘an Exchange.’

And while I am waiting, this letter I’ll send by the first flag of truce, the poor yankee’s friend.”

 

Byers’ optimism would soon diminish, but his love and talent for verse would not relent. In Oskaloosa before the war, he had written poetry which was printed in what was known as the Herald. On occasion, he would write spontaneously, as when a family named DeWitt lost three children in a fire near Oskaloosa:

 

“Bright as shadows, fondly dreaming

In our youth and beauties bloom

Life seems but a rosy gleaming

‘Till we’re ushered to the tomb.” –Impromptu

 

The Confederate prison camps, after Byers was removed from Libby Prison, were outdoor pens. The prisoners used the earth and tree limbs for shelter. Not only was Dixie cold in the winter, but hot in the summer. The summer of 1864 found Byers in Macon, Ga. His health continued to deteriorate. It was here that Byers describes the “sweetest comforts in the camp in the music of the mocking birds.”  

 

“A light broke in upon my brain.

It was the carol of a bird.

It ceased and then came again.

The sweetest song ear ever heard.”

 

History would have to wait six more months, until cold weather returned to Dixie. And it was the cold that set the scene which changed the direction of Byers’ life (and to some degree, the nation’s direction). 

 

On the night of Dec. 11, 1864, Yankee prisoners in Camp Sorghum were very cold. So cold they had to stay awake at night to survive. Among them was Byers, who had been a prisoner of war for more than a year. 

 

On that night, Byers and his fellow prisoners were awake as usual when the Iowan read one of the newspapers that a slave had smuggled into the camp. That is how Byers learned of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta. And that is how Byers learned of Sherman’s “change of base” as the general described it to Savannah. 

 

 

Byers returned to his shelter the next morning and wrote the poem “Sherman’s March to the Sea.” A musician from New York and fellow Union prisoner named W.O. Rockwell heard Byers reading the verses to his shelter mates and offered to put the words to music. 

 

Two other Iowans made it possible for Byers’ eventual fame for having written the famous poem. First, Maj. Thomas M. Isett from Muscatine had formed a glee club in the prison camp. Once Byers’ words were put to music, Issett’s glee club performed the first rendition of “Sherman’s March to the Sea.” It was an instant hit—even with the Rebel guards. 

 

The second Iowan, Lt. Daniel W. Tower from Ottumwa, was to be exchanged because he had lost a leg in the Battle of Champion Hill, a Union victory in Hinds County, Miss., on May 16, 1863. Tower had made a wooden prosthesis and it was in this hollowed out wooden leg that a copy of Byers’ war ballad would be smuggled out of prison and sent north. The rest, as they say, is history.

 

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.