I have an on-going series entitled, “Shot in the [blank].” It profiles
soldiers from the Army of the Potomac who received gunshot wounds to sundry
pieces of their anatomy. In these tales, some of the soldiers died from their
gunshot wounds, while others lived. In this particular tale, the soldier in question
survived his wound—a direct hit to the right lung—but it never healed properly. In fact,
his wound caused him to suffer painfully for another forty-six years.
The soldier who endured this life of perpetual misery was named Samuel
Brackett Wing. He was born in the village of Phillips, Maine, on March 8, 1832.
Devoutly Christian and always sober, he lived a modest existence as a farmer in
Franklin County, northwest of the state capital of Augusta. On August 2, 1857, Wing married
Mary Ann Lufkin, and they moved to a farm along the Aroostook River. Their
first three children—Vesta, Silas, and Mary—were born in 1858, 1859, and 1862.
In the summer of 1863, the Civil War called Wing’s name, literally. In August,
the first federal draft went into effect, and Wing was one of the unlucky men
whose name was pulled from the draft wheel. Too poor to purchase a substitute or to pay
commutation, Wing had only two options: flee to Canada or serve in the Union army. Unwilling to
be labelled a coward, he went to nearby Maysville and reported for duty. By
August 15, he was duly mustered into service. After taking a steamer
from Boston to Alexandria, he and the other drafted men from Maysville joined a veteran
regiment, the 3rd Maine Volunteers, at Manassas Junction. Wing was
assigned to Company H.
After wintering at Brandy Station, Private Wing and the rest of the 3rd
Maine accompanied the Army of the Potomac in its
Overland Campaign across Spotsylvania County. Wing survived the grim fighting that befell the 3rd
Maine at the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864, but he was hit during the May 12 attack
against the Mule Shoe Salient. His
regiment had been involved in the initial pre-dawn assault, and like many Union
soldiers, Wing found himself stuck behind the muddy Confederate
entrenchments when that attack stalemated in the afternoon. Wing received his wound at 2 o’clock. It happened when several
Union officers shouted for the men to cease firing so that a group of Confederate
soldiers could surrender and pass through the lines as prisoners. For a
few minutes, the 3rd Maine’s sector of the battlefield fell silent,
and Wing got up, trying to move to a different place on the line. Before he could
find a better spot to hunker down, the battle erupted again. Bullets whistled
past his head, and one caught him in the right arm near the shoulder, just
above his armpit. Although he did not know it, the bullet angled downward, zipped
into his body cavity between his eighth and ninth ribs, and came to a
stop four inches from his spine, two inches beneath his skin.
Initially, Wing felt no pain, as the bullet’s impact caused numbness in
his right arm. He did not ask for assistance, but tried to crawl off the
field on his hands and knees. However, after creeping for five or ten rods, he
began to feel discomfort. Once out of range of enemy small arms, he stood up
and began walking. Eventually, two men in the rear decided to assist him to a Union field hospital, quite possibly the Harris, Peyton, or Alsop farms, a half mile
distant.
There, at the farm, whichever one it was, the operating surgeons examined Wing’s wound, picking out a few
stray pieces of cloth that had been driven into it by the bullet. Worried that
the bullet had penetrated him deeply, Wing asked where the projectile had
stopped, and they replied, “In the shoulder.” Wing asked them if they intended
to extract the ball. One surgeon replied, “No; you have suffered enough for one
day.”
This answer satisfied Wing, but only slightly. He had a nagging feeling
that the surgeon had misdiagnosed him. Wing worried the bullet had entered his torso,
not his arm. As he later explained:
I told him my shoulder
felt all right, but that I felt very badly in my chest and lungs. He thought
that that must be a sympathetic pain, caused by the nerves running from the
shoulder to the side, and that it would be all right in a few days. I have
always doubted whether he said what he really thought or said these things in
order to keep me from being alarmed.
Whatever the surgeon really thought, he assigned Wing to a tent occupied by a few other wounded men, and there he got some sleep on the straw. The
next morning, May 13, 1864, Wing jotted a few notes in his journal: “At the
hospital about two miles from the fight. Had a hard night of it. (Rainy.) Had a
hard day to-day. Hard for me to breathe.” His shortness of breath alerted him
to the impending danger of his wound. Perhaps it was worse than what the
surgeon had claimed.
The next day, May 14, Union medical staff packed the wounded onto
ambulances for the twelve-mile trek to the general hospital in Fredericksburg.
When Wing was asked if he would walk or ride, Wing chose to walk. Later, he
believed he had made a wise choice.
Just think of the
poor men who had been severely wounded; . . . these poor wounded soldiers were
loaded into ambulances and carried from five to fifty miles over just such rough
and racking roads, as I have described. It was awful. I was on a piece of
corduroy road when an ambulance passed me. It was enough to make one's blood
run cold to hear those poor fellows shriek and moan, as they were jolted up and
down over those logs. And when the wagon left the corduroy, it would often drop
into a mud slough that would almost overturn it. Those were sounds that I will
never forget. I could truly say that I thanked the Lord that he had spared me
from such a fate and had given me strength enough to creep or crawl, instead of
having to ride.
Wing did not remain long at Fredericksburg. He soon boarded a steamship
with dozens of other sufferers to be shipped to Mount Pleasant Hospital in
Washington, DC, arriving there on May 17. The trip up the Potomac River was
anything but pleasant. Wing slept fitfully, and when he awoke one night, “I
could hardly tell whether I was dead or alive. My lungs being so inflamed, the
heat from the boiler had seemed to strike all through me and stuff me up.” Wing
struggled to breathe and he needed a place to stretch out fully. The only place he
could find was a section of floor near where the physicians kept their
implements. Wing prostrated himself there, and although he heard a number of
physicians ask, “What is this man here for?” Wing refused to move.
Bedside manner did not improve at Mount Pleasant, apparently. As Wing’s
wound worsened, he began moaning deep into the night. He recalled, “The first
night or two the hospital steward awakened me several times telling me that I
must not make so much noise as I was disturbing the others. I told him that I
would try not to make any noise, but as soon as I fell asleep again I would
break my promise.” Finally, during the third week of May, Wing began coughing up bloody
mucous. At last, the physicians determined what Wing had already suspected: the
bullet had penetrated his lung.
At the end of June, shortly after Wing lost the resolve to keep
writing in his diary, the army discharged him and sent him home to recuperate. On
July 4, he returned to his hometown of Phillips; however, once there, his
misery only deepened. Pieces of clothing and bone worked their way into his lungs and
he began coughing them up through his windpipe. In September, he coughed up a
sharp piece of bone. One month later, he coughed up a piece of blouse, which
had apparently been driven into the lung by the bullet. In March 1865, he
coughed up a piece of shirt. In January 1866, he coughed up two more pieces of
clothing and a piece of bone nearly one inch long, the largest of the various
objects to come out of him. More awfully, Wing suffered from continuous
coughing spells, painful spasms that caused his lungs to bleed. Between the summer
of 1864 and the winter of 1866 he endured four severe hemorrhages. The last of
these left him bed-ridden for a year. Accordingly, he bled about two or three
times a day, coughing out blood clots, spitting the gory vomit
into a nearby spittoon. He wrote, “In about three weeks I had bled more than it
seemed possible for one person to bleed and live.”
The rest of Wing’s working career droned by miserably. He could work
only a few months out of any given year. His family sold his farm and they moved
to a place near the North Turner Bridge Toll House, where he worked as the
postmaster. Eventually, in 1875, Wing had another severe coughing fit which left him bed-ridden
for the next six years. Every spell happened the same way. He gained in
strength for two or three weeks, but then suffered another coughing attack that
set him back to square one. His lack of
progress gave him a uniquely cynical perspective on life. He opined, “Some
said they did not see why I did not get better, but for my part I could not see
why I did not die.”
Amazingly, Wing outlived his wife, Mary, who died of whooping cough in
1892. After another set of hemorrhages kept him bed-ridden for the next two
years, Wing sought professional help. He contacted Professor W. C. Strong
of Bates College, and on April 16, 1897, Strong performed an X-ray scan on his
chest. At the time, X-ray radiology was a fairly new invention—physicians had
been using it for only two years—but Wing’s X-ray shocked even the most
unflappable practitioners. When Strong and the other observers looked at the
image, they saw the shadow of a full-sized Enfield Rifle Ball! Knowing that he
might be the only physician to use an X-ray on a Civil War wound, Strong wrote,
“That a bullet of such size and weight could be carried for thirty-four years
in the delicate tissues of the lungs has been thought by some impossible. Of
the fact, however, there can be no longer any doubt. Similar cases must be
extremely rare.”
For Wing, this news was more redemptive than joyous. It confirmed
what he had long known. He would literally carry a piece of the Civil War with
him for the rest of his life. He wrote, “For over thirty-two years of my life I
did not know what a sick day was; and now for more than thirty-four years I have
not known a fully well day.”
It’s amazing to think that, after being wounded, Wing had to live another
thirty-four years just so the proper medical technology could be developed
to have his wound properly diagnosed. Even then, nothing could be done to retrieve
the bullet. Wing’s wound presented him with just one choice: live miserably or
die. He chose the former. Wing lived another thirteen years. He died
on November 2, 1910. He was seventy-eight-years-old. He is buried in Evergreen
Cemetery in his hometown of Phillips.
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This image of Private Samuel B. Wing, Co. H, 3rd Maine Volunteers, was taken sometime in the winter of 1863-1864.
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| Between 1864 and 1866, Wing coughed up these pieces of cloth and bone. |
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On April 16, 1897, a Bates College professor took this X-ray of Samuel Wing's chest. The Confederate bullet can be seen clearly.
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