The Tenth Ohio Infantry was a mainly Irish regiment (there were
also two companies of Germans) recruited in and around
Cincinnati. They were a hard-drinking and hard fighting unit,
who were engaged in the Western Theater for the majority of the
conflict. However, it was in the 1861 West Virginia Campaign
that these Irish and Germans first ‘saw the elephant’, a Civil
War expression used to describe men’s first experience of
combat. The Tenth crossed the Ohio River on the 24th June 1861
to take part in the Campaign. On the 10th September they found
themselves part of Brigadier-General William Starke Rosecrans
command as they prepared to attack John B. Floyd’s Confederate’s
at Carnifex Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). It was not to
be an easy introduction to battle. The ‘Bloody Tenth’, as they
were to become known were commanded by Mexican War veteran
Colonel William Haines-Lytle, while their Major was Joseph
W.Burke, an Irish immigrant who had helped to recruit the
regiment. At around 3 o’clock on the 10th