The other day, for a random reason, I had to concern
myself with the life and times of Brig. Gen. Henry Prince, a Union officer who
served for about six months with the Army of the Potomac. Following the Battle of
Gettysburg, the War Department appointed Prince to command of the 2nd
Division, 3rd Corps. At the time, the army needed to replace Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys, who was
transferred to the Army of the Potomac’s headquarters staff. Prince led his
division through the next few battles: Wapping Heights, Bristoe Station, and
Mine Run. Civil War historians don’t think much of Prince. His indecision at
Mine Run complicated George Meade’s bold plan to strike at Lee’s army south of
the Rapidan, and over the winter, Prince topped a list of dismissals that
ultimately spelled an end to the 3rd Corps as an official
organization.
Hardly a luminary among his peers, Prince was, at the time, probably eager to leave
the army. Ever since April 1863, he suffered from blinding headaches.
Further, his health had been ruined by five months’ incarceration in Libby, a Confederate
prison. (On August 9, 1862, Prince was captured at the Battle of Cedar
Mountain, taken into custody by Confederates belonging to Stonewall Jackson’s corps.) In
addition, Prince was also nursing a grim wound he had received at the Battle of
Molino del Rey some sixteen years earlier. After the war, Prince carried on as an
army paymaster, but he frequently complained of irritableness and headaches.
Eventually, his medical complaints led to his retirement from the army on
December 31, 1879, at age sixty-eight.
At first glance, it would seem that Prince had a miserable,
uninteresting career. He was barely involved in the Civil War, and the few
actions in which he participated garnered him little, if any, respect. For much of
his life, he was grumpy and short-tempered, constantly complaining of
physical ailments, real or imagined. Probably, I might have dismissed him as an
inconsequential figure, until I discovered there was more to Prince’s story
than I realized. His career dated as far back as 1831, when he entered
West Point as a cadet, and his first military action took him into the midst of
the Second Seminole War. Indeed, when he was only twenty-four-years-old, Lieutenant
Prince was among the contingent that discovered the remains of the infamous
Dade Massacre!
What was the Dade Massacre, you ask? Easily, the Dade Massacre was the
defining event of the Second Seminole War. It was one of the most lopsided
Indian-U.S. engagements in American military history, that is, until Custer’s debacle at the Little Bighorn in 1876 eclipsed it.
Here’s what happened:
On December 23, 1835, Major Francis Langhorne Dade led a contingent of
seven officers and 110 enlisted men—a mix of soldiers from the 2nd
and 3rd U.S. Artillery and the 4th U.S. Infantry—from
Fort Brooke, Florida, on mission to resupply nearby Fort King. Five days into
the mission, Dade’s men encountered 180 Seminole warriors led by Osceola and
Alligator in a pine grove east of the Withlacoochee River. The battle went
poorly for the U.S. soldiers. In about four hours, the Seminoles surrounded
Dade’s detachment, killing all but two of them. The lucky survivors were Private
Ransome Clarke and Private Joseph Sprague. Clarke suffered five wounds, and
lived long enough to flee to Fort Brooke; however, his wounds eventually
killed him. The other soldier, Private Joseph Sprague, managed
to return uninjured.
Although the two shocked survivors had a chance to tell their story,
not everyone at the fort believed them, and rumors swirled concerning the fate
of Dade’s command. Prince kept a diary that reported on the daily changing news
about what happened. On January 15, 1836, he wrote, “Heard that Maj. Dade’s
command was cut off attempting to march from Tampa to Ft. King.” The next day, he
elaborated, “I learn that only part of Maj. Dade’s comp’y is lost. The greater
portion having been left at Tampa Bay.”
For nearly a month, the U.S. Army remained in the dark. But not long
after the disappearance of Dade’s command, the truth came out. On February 13, Lieutenant Prince accompanied an
expedition led by General Edmund P. Gaines to reinforce Fort King with 1,100
men. Along the way, about one week into the expedition, the column came across the
site of the massacre. Prince noted the moment in his diary: “Started about
sunrise & at 8 ½ o’clock came to the scene of a massacre. A dreadful scene
it was.”
Prince understated it, to be sure. The ground was littered with dead. For the past fifty-four days, the human remains had been decomposing in the warm Florida sun. Many of the corpses had already turned into skeletons,
but more than few still had flesh clinging to bones and rotting garments
swarmed by flies. The smell was horrible and the sight nightmarish. It formed a memory too difficult to forget. Lieutenant Prince
described it in detail:
The scene can hardly
be effaced from the memory of those who beheld it. The skeletons of the slain
lay where they were shot. As the flesh was decayed it was difficult to decide
whether they had been scalped. The ground was favorable to the troops being
thickly timbered with pine trees without underbrush. The bodies of the officers
were identified. Maj. Dade was found stripped between the adv. Gd. & hd. of
the column. Capt. Frasers near him. From the position of the body and a rope
near it, it was presumed that he was tied. It was recognized by a breastpin in
his bosom containing a beautiful miniature of himself painted by a brother
officer. Lt. Mudge lay by a tree, two soldiers near him. It was recognized by
the figure 3 on his cap—a ring on his finger and his 5 gold pieces.
As an aside, Prince’s diary provided a detail that is worth explaining. He
pointed out that Captain Upton S. Fraser’s corpse was found tied to a tree, which caused some
of the officers from Gaines’s command to speculate that the Seminoles had
ritualistically executed him after the battle had ended. Indeed, the sight of
the dead was not the only thing that haunted the soldiers. They had to go
to sleep envisioning the final moments of Major Dade and the other officers who
might have been tied up and killed.
Prince and his companions did not have long to wait before they met the
same Seminoles who butchered Dade’s command two months earlier. On February 28, the warriors emerged from their hideout in Withlacoochee Cove and engaged the U.S.
troops in what has since been known as the Battle of Camp Izard. One of the
most surprising aspects of this engagement involved the Seminoles’ pre-battle war
calls. For nearly an hour, the warriors intimidated the U.S. soldiers with their singing. Probably, the whooping had an
effect because Prince spent time describing the unearthly sound. He wrote, “The first syllable was shrill long & glided down the
octave. the second was a short bass guttural [noise] sounded simultaneously by
the whole tribe as if struck by one prodigious instrument. The word appeared to
be kirrr—wough! Kirrr—wough! Kirrr-wough! Wough! Wough! Wough!”
The battle went on for two days. On February 29, Prince was involved in
three hours of combat during which time he was hit by two spent balls, one in
the back and one in the hip. At one point, soldiers on both sides of Prince
were hit by gunfire, one through the cheek and the other through the wrist. The
Seminole attack failed to dislodge the U.S. troops from their position along
the river, although they kept up desultory attacks for the next two weeks, forcing
the soldiers to smell the unburied dead and eat roasted horse flesh for
survival. Later on, in March, Prince and his regiment, the 4th U.S.
Infantry, returned for Fort Brooke, and he lamented the failure of the campaign
to pacify the Seminoles. He wrote, “Thus, backs out a baffled army. Baffled not through
want of numbers or the true spirit or a good leader—but for want of means &
by the seduction of a subtle enemy.”
Nowadays, when I look at General Prince, I don’t merely see an aging,
dyspeptic, lackluster general. I also see a young lieutenant who, during his
first campaign, saw piles of dead from his own regiment. I wonder if the
nightmares from the Seminole War ever surfaced when Prince took his men into
action in 1863.
 |
| This image depicts the soldiers of the 4th U.S. Infantry discovering the remains of the Dade Massacre. |
 |
| This is a modern-day painting of what the Dade Massacre might have looked like. |
 |
| This image comes from Lt. Prince's diary. He drew out the battlefield as he saw it. |
 |
| This is Brig. Gen. Henry Prince, ca. 1863. |
