“The Way of the Transgressor is Hard”: Friday Afternoon Executions in the Army of the Potomac, Part 1.

In 1863, between June and December, the Army of the Potomac executed thirty-three men for the crime of desertion. These were the first deserters executed by the Union’s most illustrious army, and their deaths represented an important turn in its storied history. If the Yanks did not know it before, by the end of December, they understood clearly the message their commanders wanted them to receive. The Civil War was serious business, serious enough to end the mercy informally doled out to those men who swore Oaths of Allegiance and then backed out before seeing them through.

Of course, military executions were not entirely unknown to the bluecoats. They had been utilized by U.S. forces since the founding of the country, and during the first two years of the war, April 1861 to April 1863, the War Department sanctioned the execution of twenty-seven Union soldiers. However, all of these men were charged with crimes other than desertion: murder, theft, mutiny, and rape. Even so, of these twenty-seven executions, only five of were conducted by the Army of the Potomac. To see a soldier killed by his comrades as a matter of military justice was a rare thing for that particular army.

That is, until June 1863.

It was a low point for Abraham Lincoln, who normally approached matters of military justice with a kind, merciful hand. In the past, accused deserters who faced the death penalty usually received a Presidential pardon through a hand-written appeal. (In fact, even as late as June 4, Lincoln pardoned three deserters belonging to the 146^th New York who were scheduled to be shot to death.)

However, the summer of 1863 changed Lincoln’s optimistic demeanor. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign was stalled, the Army of the Potomac was reeling from its defeat at Chancellorsville, and the Copperheads were mounting a tour-de-force in the coming state elections. With a manpower draft set to go into effect in July and desertions daily on the rise, Lincoln decided to take a step back, yielding to pressure from his generals who urged him not to the pardon the next batch of convicted deserters. The army had to show its enlisted ranks that, once sworn to service, they could not back out.

Thus, in June 1863, as the Army of the Potomac unexpectedly made its way north in pursuit of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the men in the ranks witnessed something that they had never seen before: soldiers executed for the crime of leaving the army at will—abandoning their comrades in arms—before their term of service had expired.

This and the next five posts intend to examine six clusters of executions. The first “batch” of condemned men consisted of four privates executed in mid-June. The executions occurred on two successive Fridays: June 12 and June 19. On these two days—and for the remainder of the war—the Army of the Potomac executed its condemned men on Fridays only—and only in the afternoon.

The first man to face capital punishment for desertion was Private John P. Woods of Company F, 19^th Indiana. Woods was a likely candidate, considering that he had deserted twice within the previous six months, and when he was arrested for the second time, Union soldiers apprehended him while he was wearing an enemy uniform.

 

Woods faced his first court-martial after the Battle of Fredericksburg; he had fled his regiment and did not return to it until January 31, 1863, an absence of seventy-four days. At his trial, he presented a capable defense, one that flummoxed the prosecution, and after several hours of testimony, he found was “not guilty.” However, Woods did not escape prosecution after his second arrest. Before the Battle of Chancellorsville, he again fled his regiment, procured a Confederate uniform, and after the battle, he attempted to turn himself in to Union pickets by claiming to be a Confederate deserter seeking asylum. His story made little sense to the Union officers who interrogated him, and it wasn’t long until they identified him as a deserter from the renowned Iron Brigade. Woods faced his second court-martial on May 29. He pleaded “guilty” but begged for mercy based on conscientious principle:

I cant fight. I cannot stand it to fight. I am ashamed to make the statement, but I may as well do it now as at any other time. I never could stand a fight. I never could bear to shoot at any body. I have done my duty in every way but fight. I have tried to do it but cannot. I am perfectly willing to work all my lifetime for the United States in every other way but fight. I have tried to do it but cannot. . . . I am willing to do all I could for my country. I like it as much as anybody does. I was always willing to try to fight for my country, but I never could. I am willing to try to fight for it again. I am ashamed of my conduct and will always try to do better hereafter.

Woods’s contrition did not sway the court, and after due deliberation, it declared him guilty and sentenced him to be “shot to death with muskets” at a time and place approved by the army commander, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. Upon receiving the summary of the conviction, Hooker immediately returned an order that instructed the divisional commander, Maj. Gen. James Wadsworth, to carry out the execution between the hours of noon and 4 P.M. on Friday, June 12.

As it turned out, Wadsworth’s division happened to be on the move when that day came along. At the time, the division was traveling along the road between Bull Run and Deep Run. When 2 P.M. came, Wadsworth ordered the column to halt, and he instructed the Iron Brigade to form into square and conduct the execution. The brigade formed three sides of the square and put a firing party of eight men in the middle. A sergeant’s guard conducted Private Woods—who had been sitting atop his own coffin, which had been carried inside an ambulance for the past five days—to the open side of the square. The sergeant shackled him and then turned over the proceedings to Lieutenant Clayton Rogers, the divisional provost marshal, who applied the blindfold.

The swiftness of the whole affair caught one observer off guard. Chaplain Joseph H. Twichell, who normally belonged to the 3^rd Corps, had been traveling with Wadsworth’s division for the past few days. He recollected that, at the time of the execution, Woods had been without a minister of the faith. (Apparently, the chaplain assigned to him—who was from the 7^th Wisconsin—could not be found.) Twichell wrote, “I had by this time perceived to my amazement that no clergyman was with the man. . . . Yet to me it seemed hard that the poor fellow was left to pass through the fearful trial alone—that some friend should not have been with him to sympathize with him, at least, during his last earthly day, and help him meet his fate like a man.” Despite his misgivings, Twichell could not force himself to intervene or offer up any sort of final prayer: “Still I had no thought of visiting him myself, because he was not of my own part of the army, and I felt my blood chill at the bare idea.”

At the insistence of the corps commander, Maj. Gen. John Reynolds, who wished to “have the affair hurried up,” Lieutenant Rogers delivered the commands, “Ready, Aim, Fire!” and eight muskets went off. Four balls struck Woods, toppling him over onto his coffin. Despite the damage caused by the lead projectiles, Woods survived the first volley. (As we will see in future posts, this problem repeated itself over and over as the year went on—failure to kill the accused quickly and cleanly.) Lieutenant Rogers called two members of the reserve firing party to advance to within three feet of Woods. On his command, they shot him in the head, blasting his skull into fragments. At that, the surgeon pronounced him dead. One officer remembered, “We left the men digging his grave and resumed the march as if nothing had happened.”

The soldiers of the Iron Brigade felt mixed emotions about what they had seen. Although some approved the execution as a necessary recourse, few of them felt good about it. Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Dawes, who, incidentally, had been ordered to select the eight men assigned to the firing squad, wrote to his fiancée, “The men, I assure you, dislike to be called upon for such a duty. . . . All fire at the dropping of a white handkerchief, each, in mercy, aiming at a vital part and each hoping that his is the blank cartridge with which one musket is charged.”

Although Woods’s death was the most infamous of the summer executions, his was not the only one to happen during the Gettysburg Campaign. A lesser-known set of executions occurred on June 19 at Leesburg, Virginia. The condemned men were:

·         Private William Grover, Company A, 46^th Pennsylvania

·         Private William McKee, Company A, 46^th Pennsylvania

·         Private Christopher Krubart, Company B, 13^th New Jersey

Like Woods, all three men were veteran soldiers. The two men who deserted from the 46^th Pennsylvania, Grover and McKee, had deserted together. Grover was eighteen-years-old when he enlisted on August 21, 1861. McKee was nineteen-years-old when he enlisted five days later, on August 26. Grover was a butcher and McKee was a shoemaker. Both men lived in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. Although they had fought with their regiment for almost two years, they deserted it near Stafford Court House on June 4, 1863. They purchased civilian clothes in an attempt to fool Union scouts, but they were caught and arrested near Aquia Creek. In only a few hours, their courts-martial found them guilty and sentenced both to death. Major General Hooker approved the sentencing on or about June 7. The third soldier, Krubart, who was thirty-six, had deserted his regiment in 1862, and although he could have availed himself of President Lincoln’s blanket pardon for deserters issued back in April 1863, Krubart refused to come forward. Authorities arrested him near his home in New Jersey and sent him back to the army. Once there, a court-martial found him guilty and sentenced him with death. According to Hooker’s orders, Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, the commander of the 1^st Division, 12^th Corps, to which all three men belonged, had to carry out the execution between the hours of noon and 4 P.M.

When the appointed hours arrived, it was clear and sunny. According to orders, Maj. Gen. Henry Slocum called out the entirety of the 12^th Corps. He decreed that all 9,000 men had to witness the executions. According to Williams, he selected the spot well, a piece of land that resembled an amphitheater. The burial detail dug all three graves on a slight depression, two feet apart, facing a gentle swell where the observing troops could stand and watch the proceedings with no obstructions. According to an observer, the execution grounds were on a plot where the Edwards Ferry Road intersected with the Alexandria Pike. As the Iron Brigade had done one week earlier, the 12^th Corps formed into a three-sided box, facing the graves. Three firing squads of eight men each faced the condemned.

According to all accounts, the execution went flawlessly. The chaplain of the 60^th New York remembered: “They were instantly killed, each having been pierced by several balls. Their bodies were then placed in the coffins, and the troops marched past, in column by platoons, giving all an opportunity to view the corpses. These men were really not such great criminals as many others who had deserted earlier in the war, and who, on account of laxity of discipline, escaped punishment. Having, however, disobeyed orders, and deserted, and hereby incurred the penalty, desertion had become so frequent, that it had become absolutely necessary to enforce it.”

Brig. Gen. John Geary, another observer, wrote home: “It was certainly a solemn scene, and one never to be forgotten. Justice to the living requires some punishment for such crime, ‘Verily, the way of the transgressor is hard.’” As the Union troops marched North, heading to their date with destiny at Gettysburg, no doubt all of them hoped they would never see such a terrible scene repeated ever again.

As we will see in future posts, they were dead wrong.
 

 

 

This sketch, which appeared in Harper's Weekly, depicts the executions of Grover, McKee, and Krubart, the three deserters executed by the 12th Corps at Leesburg on June 19, 1863.

 

An Apology to the World: The Career of Henry Prince, Part 3.

For the past two posts, I’ve taken a look at the story of General Henry Prince, a Civil War officer ignominiously removed for failures incurred during the Mine Run Campaign of 1863. Today, I’m going to tell the tale of his death. In short, he did not die happily. At age eighty-one, Prince committed suicide in London, far from his home. Like a large minority of people who commit suicide, he left behind a note explaining why he decided to end his own life. For him, it was an “apology to the world.”

First, it’s best to summarize Prince’s lengthy military career, which spanned forty-eight years. He graduated from West Point in 1835, and during his first combat action, he battled the Seminoles in the winter and spring of 1836, receiving two minor wounds during the Battle of Camp Izard. Prince stayed with his regiment, the 4^th U.S. Infantry, rising to the post of adjutant. On September 8, 1847, he was badly wounded fighting the Mexican Army at the Battle of Molino del Rey, a wound that required a three-year leave of absence. Prince spent the 1850s operating as an army paymaster, and in 1862, he received a brigadier general’s commission. He participated in only a handful of engagements, including Cedar Mountain (in which he was captured), Wapping Heights, and Payne’s Farm. After Mine Run, he was removed from divisional command, and spent the rest of the war as a garrison commander. After the war, he returned to the paymaster’s department, holding that post until his retirement fourteen years later, on December 31, 1879.

Prince’s wounds never left him. As he aged, the Mexican War injury continued to cause him pain and discomfort. Eventually, he traveled to Europe to seek medical advice, which, in the end, failed him. In September 1889, while bathing in Baden, Germany, his wound reopened, and the next month, he went to Switzerland to have surgery to repair it. He was seventy-eight-years-old. During his recovery, which lasted several years, Prince moved into Morley’s Hotel, a massive structure that occupied the eastern side of Trafalgar Square in London. While there, Prince was diagnosed with Bright’s Disease, a painful swelling of the kidneys. In the summer of 1892, a London physician, Dr. Samuel Mills, began treating him for his new ailment.

For six weeks, Mills regularly visited the hotel and consulted with Prince. The visits rarely ended in optimistic talk. Prince repeatedly stated his belief that it might be better if he simply died, for it would cease all the pain he felt, both in his kidneys and from his Mexican War wound. Several times, he asked Dr. Mills for a sedative that could put him to sleep forever. Mills tried to convince Prince that life was worth living, but during their last meeting, Prince told him that he was so old and in so much pain, that he thought it better if his life were at an end. Mills once again rejected the idea of giving him a death-dealing sedative. In response, Prince told Mills not to call upon him again. For whatever reason, the London doctor failed to tell the hotel staff to keep an eye upon Prince, who was clearly depressed.

On August 17, Prince walked over to a nearby firearm dealer, Harrison Gun-makers, and purchased a revolver and cartridges, claiming that he needed to wear a weapon for protection. Apparently not knowing about Prince’s talk of suicide, the gun salesmen sold him whatever he wanted. On the evening of August 19, 1892, Henry Prince shot himself. The time of death was not exactly known. On the morning of August 20, Lizzie Faust, the chambermaid at Morley’s Hotel, found Prince dead with a bullet wound to the head, apparently self-inflicted. The bullet had fractured Prince’s skull above the right temple, embedded itself into his brain, and deeply lacerated all of the surrounding tissue. Investigators found three letters in Prince’s room, one of them unsealed. The unsealed letter, his unsigned suicide note, read this:

To all friends:

Morley’s Hotel, Trafalgar Square

When life has run its cycle, and become a waste of nature in the body, overwhelming its natural and physical qualities with weakness and pain to an intolerable degree, it may with all propriety be removed. Such being the case with the life of the writer, his apology to the world is by these terms made through his most beloved and most intimate friends, who, he trusts, will appreciate the relief to him of the ceaseless distress which ought, in his opinion, to be brought by the physician, who is summoned with his drugs surely for the purpose, when not to cure.

It is hard to envision a tough old soldier like Henry Prince killing himself. He had endured the horrors of the Seminole War, perhaps one of the last alive to remember the sight of the Dade Massacre. He had marched with Winfield Scott’s army during the campaign to take Mexico City. He had suffered half a year in Libby as a prisoner of war. He had fought with the Army of the Potomac during the fall campaigns of 1863 only to be removed in disgrace. In his final moments, he wrote out an apology to the world—to his friends, his colleagues, and to us future historians—to absolve him of his final crime, taking his own life.

Prince was buried in Hillside Cemetery in his hometown of Eastport, Maine.
 

 

This photograph depicts Brig. Gen. Prince during the Civil War. When he committed suicide nearly thirty years later, wounds and disease had ravaged his countenance.

 

This postcard depicts Trafalgar Square. Morley's Hotel, the place where Prince committed suicide, is the large building at middle distance.

 

 

“Prince from the House of David”: The Career of Henry Prince, Part 2.

In the previous post, I introduced readers to the tale of Lieutenant Henry Prince, an officer from the 4^th U.S. Infantry, who, in February 1836, marched with the column that discovered the remains of the infamous Dade Massacre. Today, I’m going to talk about Prince’s Civil War experience. In this tale, the fifty-two-year-old general marched at the head of a far less successful column, the failure of which resulted in his removal from the Army of the Potomac and the tarnishing of his long, illustrious career.

In general, Prince did not have a fun time in the Civil War, serving in combat rarely and often bearing the stigma of being too slow-moving and methodical. His Civil War days began on April 20, 1862, when the War Department decided to raise him to the rank of brigadier general and assigned him to command a brigade attached to Major General Nathaniel Banks’s corps. On August 9, 1862, at Prince’s first battle, Confederate troops captured him. Just as the sun set at Cedar Mountain, Prince was walking his horse through a smoky cornfield, unaware that hundreds of soldiers belonging to the 23^rd Virginia were moving through the stalks, encircling him. They leveled their muskets, and thus, Prince spent five unhappy months at Libby Prison.

The War Department did its duty, negotiating Prince’s parole and exchange, but upon his return to service, he didn’t last long in the field. He first rejoined Union forces in the tidewater, but had to request medical leave in April 1863. Later that summer, Prince returned to service yet again, transferring to the Army of the Potomac. On July 8, only a few days after the Battle of Gettysburg, Major General Andrew A. Humphreys, commander of the 2^nd Division, 3^rd Corps, became the Army of the Potomac’s chief-of-staff. Two days later, on July 10, the War Department appointed Prince as Humphreys’s replacement. On July 23, Prince led the 2^nd Division against Confederate forces at Wapping Heights, a battle in which he exhibited noticeable caution.

However, the unfortunate event that called everyone’s attention to Prince’s conservative approach to combat occurred a few months later during the Mine Run Campaign. Prince’s corps commander, Major General William H. French, assigned him a critical role by putting him in at the head of the Union foray across the Rapidan River. This movement formed part of Major General George G. Meade’s grand plan to put the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan at two places, Jacobs’s Ford and Germanna Ford. Major General Gouvernor K. Warren’s 2^nd Corps was supposed to lead the way across the latter and then advance west along the Orange Turnpike, holding the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in place. Meanwhile, Major General French’s 3^rd Corps was supposed to cross at Jacobs’s Ford and hit the Confederate line from the north. Nothing went as planned. Prince’s division, which led the 3^rd Corps to Jacob’s Ford, failed to cross in a timely manner, and even when it did, it failed to navigate its way through the woods and rendezvous with the 2^nd Corps at Robertson’s Tavern. Much of the delay and poor navigation stemmed from Prince’s lackluster leadership.

Here’s how it happened. On November 26, 1863, the day of the operation, Prince received orders to lead the 3^rd Corps to the ford. General French had left detailed instructions about when to proceed, how to cross the river, and which roads to take to reach Robertson’s Tavern. For whatever reason, Prince failed to heed his superior’s advice. The march was supposed to begin at 5:20, but by 7:45, the 2^nd Division had advanced only one mile beyond its starting point. What caused this slow movement? First, Prince could not be found by the 3^rd Corps staff officers. Although Prince had carried out the prepatory order (the order to get his men ready to march), he did not receive his execution order until an hour after the planned start time. Second, when he finally received it, Prince moved too slowly. He received the order to advance at 6:30, but his column did not set out until 7:30. The delay infuriated General French, who wondered why the column was stuck on the road. Days later, after French had conducted an investigation of the problem, he laid the blame on Prince, by writing, “By this it will be seen . . . that although he [Prince] received the prepatory order in due time, he lost an hour from the time he received the order of execution, for which loss he has assigned no reason.”

Then, once the head of Prince’s column reached the ford, it did not cross quickly. His men encountered Confederate scouts, causing Prince to halt the column and deploy skirmishers. After his infantry cleared the banks, Prince ordered them to move off the road and make way for the engineers who planned to lay pontoons. More time passed, since Prince had taken no precaution to have the pontoons readily available. The 3^rd Corps did not get across the Rapidan River until 4:00 P.M. The rest of the corps completed the crossing by 7:00 P.M., a whole day wasted.

From there, the situation only got worse. The next morning, November 27, Prince’s 2^nd Division followed the road from the ford south, but had to pause at a place where the road split. The right fork headed back to the river near the Sisson Farm, the left fork headed south to the Morton’s Ford Road. Unaware that he might have to navigate his way through several confusing road intersections, Prince halted his command, sending a message back to headquarters that he now needed guide. Meanwhile, he deployed several regiments as skirmishers, sending them down each fork, hoping they might bring back proper intelligence. As Prince explained later: “Being in command of the advance, and having no guide, I conceived it to be my duty to exert my judgment as to the route, and by reconnoitering to clear up the way if I could. This I succeeded in doing by always holding the forks of roads which I came to, and reconnoitering away from them, always reconnoitering with the most strength toward the enemy.”

After due deliberation, Prince led his column down the left-hand fork. Coming upon a second fork, it became clear he had taken the wrong road. The column should have gone right, through the Sisson property, where it could have met a route to the Raccoon Ford Road, the most direct way to the tavern. Now lost, Prince paused his column yet again, holding it still for another two hours, reconnoitering both forks. As Prince’s men mingled amid the forest known as the Wilderness, they could hear the sound of Warren’s 2^nd Corps fighting near Robertson’s Tavern. Clearly, the 3^rd Corps had missed its important rendezvous. A disgruntled New Jersey officer assigned to Prince’s division later wrote, “A good deal of amusement arose from the fact that Genl. Prince became lost. Some say that ‘Prince of the House of David was lost with his children and wandered about the Wilderness.’ It was a hard sorry time for us.”

As the sun neared its zenith, General French finally became concerned with the sluggishness of the 3^rd Corps’ forward movement. He sent a staff officer to Prince with an inquiry: “The general orders that you move on by the Robertson’s Tavern road [meaning the road that connected Robertson’s Tavern to Raccoon Ford], and he wants to know what you are going to do.” Apparently confused as to where he was and which road French meant, and lacking a better response, Prince replied, “I shall first take the road, and having obtained possession of it, shall reconnoiter and act according to circumstances.”

By late-morning, the column finally got underway, heading in the right direction. It back-tracked to the Jacobs’s Ford Road and began moving south. Sadly, the delay was fatal to Union success. A Confederate division under Major General Edward Johnson had already moved south along the Raccoon Ford Road, alarmed at the sound of the fighting started by Warren’s 2^nd Corps. As it moved to the sound of the guns, it drifted into the path of Prince’s oncoming federals. At the intersection of the Jacob’s Ford Road and the Raccoon Ford Road, Prince’s two leading brigades slammed into the tail end of Johnson’s column, and a fight developed on the land owned by Madison Payne. It took hours for French to bring up the next division and come to the aid of Prince’s embattled troops. Three hours later, both sides had racked up 1,400 casualties, and neither army had driven the other from the field. Although Meade assembled his command and probed the Confederate line over the next three days, his best chance at hammering Lee’s army may have lapsed on November 27.

The aftermath of the dismal battle spelled an end to Prince’s career with the Army of the Potomac. General Warren wanted to know why the 3^rd Corps had hung him out to dry, and General French—who himself was on the hot seat for accusations of being drunk at the battle—cast all the blame on his elderly division commander. In French’s mind, Prince’s tardiness had caused the debacle. French wrote: “In connection with his [Prince’s] habitual slowness of movement, as exhibited in his preparation for crossing the ford, and the want of a guide after crossing the ford to conduct the column upon the route which was subsequently followed, . . . are the causes to which are attributable the inability of the Third Corps to arrive at Robertson’s Tavern sooner than it did.”

When the Army of the Potomac downsized its command structure in the spring of 1864, it deleted several billets, including French’s and Prince’s. The crime of getting lost in the woods was bad enough, apparently, to keep Prince from ever seeing combat again.
 

 

This photograph depicts Brig. Gen. Prince in the late summer of 1863. He is surrounded by the staff of the 2nd Division, 3rd Corps.

This is Maj. Gen. William H. French, the commander of the 3rd Corps, the superior officer who insisted that Prince botched the march from Jacobs's Ford to Payne's Farm.

 

“I Came to the Scene of a Massacre”: The Career of Henry Prince, Part 1.

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 2^nd Division, 3^rd 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 3^rd 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 2^nd and 3^rd U.S. Artillery and the 4^th 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 4^th 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.

Shot in the Lung

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 3^rd Maine Volunteers, at Manassas Junction. Wing was assigned to Company H.

After wintering at Brandy Station, Private Wing and the rest of the 3^rd Maine accompanied the Army of the Potomac in its Overland Campaign across Spotsylvania County. Wing survived the grim fighting that befell the 3^rd 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 3^rd 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.
 

This image of Private Samuel B. Wing, Co. H, 3rd Maine Volunteers, was taken sometime in the winter of 1863-1864.

 

Between 1864 and 1866, Wing coughed up these pieces of cloth and bone.

 

On April 16, 1897, a Bates College professor took this X-ray of Samuel Wing's chest. The Confederate bullet can be seen clearly.

 

Three Incidents in the Life of an Iron Brigade Officer

At 2:30 P.M., August 30, 1862, Brig. Gen. John P. Hatch’s division made its assault against the Deep Cut, the unfinished railroad embankment defended by Stonewall Jackson’s Confederates. The Iron Brigade led the way. (Of course, this was the real Iron Brigade, the five regiments belonging to Colonel Timothy Sullivan’s 1^st Brigade, 1^st Division, McDowell’s Corps, not the collection of black-hatted western regiments who stole the nickname later.) The 24^th New York Volunteers, which hailed from Oswego and Jefferson Counties, formed the Iron Brigade’s first line. When it reached the edge of the cut, it engaged the enemy. After some forty-five minutes of heavy combat, the regiment streamed to the rear with the rest of the retreating division. In that short time, the regiment lost sixty-seven officers and men killed or mortally wounded. One piece of the regiment, Company K, brought forty-five officers and men into the battle, and it lost all but nine of them. The other thirty-six were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Even Company K’s commander, Captain John Pawling Buckley of Belleville, age twenty-six, lay among the piles of dead.

Not much is known about Captain Buckley, except for a few simple facts: he graduated from Union College in 1859. He had a younger brother, Corporal Americus Vesp Buckley, age twenty-two, who died from disease on May 5, 1862, in a U.S. military hospital in Alexandria. Presently, I cannot offer any particulars about Buckley’s death, nor can I find a photograph of him. I presume he died on the field and was buried in an unmarked grave.

However, I know this about about Captain Buckley: he wrote often to a local newspaper, the Utica Morning Herald, with some regularity. He never signed his name, but closed with these four letters: “JEAN.” He had an active, discerning mind and loved to give his readers a window into his innermost musings. Three incidents from the autumn of 1861 stand out to me. They tell us aplenty about John P. Buckley, the man. I may not know much about how he died, but I know how he lived.

 

Incident, the First:

On September 16, 1861, while the 24^th New York was encamped at Upton’s Hill, Major Jonathan Tarbell ordered Lieutenant Buckley (he did not receive his promotion to captain until December 19) to take three volunteers and patrol the far reaches of the regimental picket line. It was night, and his soldiers had jittery nerves as they moved into the dangerous area between the hostile lines. The men’s anxiety was almost palpable. Buckley wrote, “During all this time scarcely a word had been spoken, and nothing above a whisper. Whispers! How they fall on one’s ears on such an occasion! As though the soul were loaded with some dark secret that it does not utter audibly.” By this, you can see how Buckley loved to set the stage with colorful, emotional language.

Throughout the night, nearby pickets kept delivering alarms, reporting nearby skirmishing at Munson’s Hill. Every hour, Buckley had to wake up and stand at his post, getting little sleep. Prior to dawn, after Buckley had been asleep for nearly an hour, when one of his men, Private George W. Durffee, touched him softly, and beckoned him to listen. Buckley heard footsteps approaching. He awakened the other men and he later wrote, “We four were soon wide awake; the trampling sounded nearer; a body of the enemy were coming; this we marked as certain. Our rifles looked through the bushes in that direction, and come what might, we resolved to count their number if we could.” When the figures grew more distinct, one of his men, Private Myron Whitney, said his gun was “getting mighty anxious.” Buckley gave orders for each of his soldiers to select a target. At his command, they would volley and drop four of the intruders in the first blow.

But something didn’t seem right. For an unexplained reason, Buckley withheld the order to fire. As the figures got closer, they stepped into a beam of moonlight. What Buckley saw shocked him. He beheld a band of escaped slaves, all seeking asylum within Union lines. He wrote:

And what was our chagrin when a sudden flame of moonlight revealed a dozen dark faces, of all ages, sizes and sexes. They each had bundles on their backs and under their arms, and the velocity with which they were moving inclined them forward at an angle of about forty degrees. The first knowledge they had of our presence was such a grim ‘halt’ from one of the boys, as seemed to straighten their forms and turn their hair white. The foremost one was a tall, bony woman, who reached one hand down to hurry along a little girl, while the other embraced a bundle. She stood speechless, while the other women and men cried out—‘Lord, massas, don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’

Buckley and his soldiers listened to their story and let them pass. He breathed a sigh of relief, elated that he had not acted rashly. Had he ordered his men to fire, they might have killed four innocent freed-people. In recollecting the incident, Buckley remembered the face of the tall, bony woman. He wrote, “But were I a sculptor or a painter and could reproduce in marble or on canvass that tall, dark woman, I’d call her the Giant Goddess of Sorrow.”

An air of gentleness surrounded Buckley; it guided him through this tense incident.

 

Incident, the Second:

 

Ten days later, on September 26, 1861, Lieutenant Buckley sat down to write to the Utica Morning Herald. It was lovely day, so he reflected, and he saw no sign of combat on the horizon. Commenting with a characteristically reflective pen, Buckley described how the calm morning made him feel: “The tide of war seems lulled to a deep repose. Not a rumor of advancing foes or of midnight hurryings forth to battle, any longer disturbs our dreams, or ruffles the surface of our thoughts.”

More importantly, at least to him, September 26 was a national day of fasting and prayer, and it gave Buckley a chance to reflect upon his commitment to the cause. Although he had seen the scourge of slavery first-hand just ten days earlier, his letter focused on the necessity of preserving the Union. Glad that the President had declared a national day of prayer, Buckley reflected, “When the loyal States began this War, they had no serious thoughts beyond a few dollars and a few men. They expected in a few days the rebellion would be among the things that were, and the Union would be the stronger for the effort.” However, the defeat at Bull Run had killed off that naïveté. “The Union is a costlier ornament than [we] thought,” he wrote. “It is to be purchased by a war which will touch every man and every interest of the Nation. The whole people must feel that we are actually at war—that there is a tide of battle rolling to and fro over the land, the bloodiest, perhaps, the world has ever seen.” Getting to the heart of the matter, Buckley reminded readers of the apocalyptic consequences for the nation if the Confederacy achieved independence, and further, he pointed out how the sacrifice of a million lives would be a small price to pay to restore the Union. Defending his belief in the righteousness of the cause, Buckley wrote:

In a few days more the army of the Potomac must try its strength again. . . . It may be defeated—what would be the consequences? Let every one ask himself ‘what would be the consequences?’ It is a serious question, and one that concerns all. Would the people rally again to the standard, or would they let the Union drift asunder to become countless petty States, and spread civil war broad cast along the line of centuries? Who can tell where dissolution would stop? Who can tell what endless misery awaits those who live to see one State go out of this Union, and become free and independent? It may be that God is going to ask countless sacrifices for the restoration of the Union to its former prosperity and greatness. Are the people ready? A million lives were a small price, could the Union be firmly established by that sacrifice, and handed down to our posterity as our fathers gave it to us. It would strengthen the heart and hand of every soldier now in the field, to have the people say that, come what may, ‘the Union must and shall be preserved!’

No gentleness surrounded Buckley here. He harbored a stoic, even bloodthirsty dedication to the Union’s cause. If he’d been in charge, he would have sacrificed a million people to save it.

 

Incident, the Third:

 

On October 23, Lieutenant Buckley and a friend, Captain William D. Ferguson, procured passes from General Erasmus Keyes and visited the nearby village of Falls Church. The town did not impress him. He called the village “particularly uninteresting.” He wrote, “One could scarce imagine a spot where there would be less for the poet’s imagination or the historian’s pen.” Buckley was about ready to turn back when he and Ferguson spotted a small farm house. For whatever reason, the two officers elected to visit it. They contrived an excuse—to get a drink of water—and knocked at the door. A woman and her two “rather interesting looking daughters” answered. Unexpectedly, they invited the officers inside and politely asked them to take seats in the parlor. The two daughters—ages sixteen and twenty—decided to entertain the officers with some music, which greatly delighted Lieutenant Buckley. Apparently excited by the novelty of it all, Buckley later wrote:

It was the first time I had indulged in the luxury of sitting in a private parlor, imbued with the magic of woman’s presence, since we came this side of the river, the 22d of July. The field and staff officers, and rank and file of our regiment, left home prepared for every hardship and every privation, and no ladies in ‘the latest’ are met sweeping majestic the spacious avenues of our camp. In our promenades in the evening moonlight, we are forced to link arms with some burly whiskered companion, and talk of tactics and military evolutions, and the most improved mode of field fortification. The old themes—love and moonlight and authors—come only in dreams out of the chambers memory or hope. Imagine us two, then, yesterday, after this rugged, masculine companionship, brought in contact with ladies who boast of an education in the society of Washington!

Buckley tried to make friends with Mattie Shiere, the twenty-year-old. Overly concerned with the propriety of the scene, he tried to devise an icebreaker, but for some reason, his wits failed him. He went over to the table where she was sitting, leafing through an album. He stared at her for a while and said nothing. Naturally, it got awkward. He wrote, “I looked at her and she looked at me, (or at least I thought so), but nothing was said.” Buckley and Shiere stood there in silence. “I couldn’t endure this,” he continued, “Something must be said, but what? I thought of war, but it wouldn’t do. There was no way of beginning it. I thought of the rebels, but they wouldn’t answer, for she might have a brother, or a father, or a lover, in the rebel army. O, Doesticks! O, Dickens, why didn’t you come to my relief?” Eventually, as Mattie turned the pages of the album, Buckley recognized a name within it, which broke loose his tongue. Pointing out that they a common acquaintance, he managed to get the conversation going. “This was a huge beginning,” he wrote. “My voice faltered, and I almost broke down in the middle of the sentence. But the ice was broken  . . . and Mattie . . . and I were no longer at a loss for words and themes for conversation.”

The two officers stayed at the Shiere’s house all afternoon and eventually, the women invited them to stay for dinner. Quite possibly, it was an awkward dinner, since the two officers learned that the women had relatives in the Confederate army; however, for Buckley the whole experience was more pleasant than uncomfortable, and he appeared to have won over Mattie’s affections, if only slightly. After dark, the two officers returned to camp. Buckley wrote, “It was late at night before we brought up at camp, well satisfied with the quiet adventures of the day.”

Interesting, no? Buckley was erudite, confident, and resolute, but even he got tongue-tied. When confronted with a pretty face, he nearly lost his nerve.

Captain Buckley concerned himself with the complexities of life. He didn’t mind describing his innermost feelings about such monumental issues as preserving the Union, or even narrating such inconsequential issues as his trivial flirtations with women. Quite literally, he didn’t shoot first and ask questions later; he patiently observed. To him, life was a beautiful bouquet of introspection and conversation. He once wrote, “One’s mind is [often] called away from war and tumult, to the times, and places, and friends which bind the heart and win the recollection.” Having surveyed these three incidents, I’m still not entirely sure what Buckley was looking for in life, but I hope he found it before everything ended for him at Dogan Field, August 30, 1862.

This painting depicts the Union assault against the Deep Cut, August 30, 1862.

Captain John Pawling Buckley's grave is probably unmarked; however, his family memorialized him on this monument in Freeport Cemetery, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania.

In Memory of Colonel Frisby’s Boots

In the last post, I profiled the death of Gorton Thomas, the commanding officer of a two-year regiment from New York, who was killed at Second Bull Run. In this post, I’m going to profile another commander from a two-year New York regiment, Colonel Edward Frisby. Unlike Thomas’s death—which cast a dark cloud over Keeseville, New York—Frisby’s death brought out tremendous positivity. Citizens of Albany and the survivors of the battered 30^th New York may have grieved for him, but the death of a commander emboldened soldiers to new heights of courage. In fact, they recaptured Frisby’s boots, which became a source of pride.

What’s this about his boots? Read on and I’ll get to them. First thing’s first. Who was Colonel Frisby?

Edward Frisby was born on August 3, 1809, in Trenton, New York, a village north of Utica. At age seventeen, three years after his father died, Frisby moved to Albany and became an apprentice hatter, and after learning that trade, he began his own business, making and selling hats. At age twenty-four, he married, and eventually raised seven children (including one child adopted from his sister-in-law).

Undoubtedly, the most pronounced aspect of Frisby’s life was his attachment to the New York State Militia. For whatever reason, the thrill of militia service appealed to him. At age eighteen, he joined an Albany-based militia company and was elected corporal. He stayed in the militia for thirty-three years (!!), moving from regiment to regiment, eventually rising to the rank of colonel, commanding the 25^th N.Y.S.M. (At one point, he even commanded the 11^th Brigade.) In the autumn of 1860, at age fifty-one, after more than three decades of service, he finally resigned his commission.

 

Of course, when the Civil War broke out one year later, Frisby worried he had resigned too hastily. In April, when Abraham Lincoln called up New York’s militia regiments for ninety days, Frisby could not go with them; the colonelcy of  his former regiment had been given to another man. Nevertheless, Frisby offered his services to Governor Edwin Morgan, telling him that he was ready to take the field again. If Morgan should raise any new regiments, Frisby wanted to command one of them. When Morgan called up thirty-eight two-year regiments that summer, he offered Frisby a position. On June 20, 1861, Frisby accepted the colonelcy of the 30^th New York Volunteer Infantry, a regiment raised in Lansingburgh, Troy, Schenectady, Saratoga Springs, Poughkeepsie, Hoosick Falls, Eagle Bridge, and Kinderhook.

 

As a regimental commander, Frisby loved to drill, much to the displeasure of his men. One of his soldiers, Private John G. Morrison of Company A, hated him for it. After Frisby drilled the men in a blinding rainstorm, Morrison noted in his diary, “The old colonel has sunk below zero in my estimation. I can bear as much as any man, but I don’t like to be bored to death with nonsensical drill. It only makes the men sullen and discontented.” In September 1861, Major General George McClellan issued an order, instructing his regimental commanders to do nothing on Sundays, except those tasks absolutely necessary to keep the army functional. Calling battalion drill a “necessity,” Colonel Frisby continued to train his regiment in defiance of the spirit of McClellan’s order. On the 15^th, the corps commander, Major General Irvin McDowell, discovered this contraception and put a stop to it. Private Morrison wrote: “The old colonel was disappointed awfully. I could see it on his face. . . . Frisby does love to drill.”

 

If the soldiers hated Frisby’s mind-numbing drill, Frisby didn’t seem to notice. He loved his men and he hated to be away from them. In July 1862, while the 30^th New York was encamped at Falmouth, Virginia, Frisby became deathly ill with fever. Knowing that he might perish, he wrote to his wife, Mary, asking her to come see him. She went to the front, and found her husband lying low in an army hospital. She nursed him at his bedside, hoping to recover his strength. While he was lying on his cot, General McDowell’s corps (to which the 30^th New York belonged) received orders to join Major General John Pope’s army, which was embarking on a campaign in northern Virginia, and the men had to leave Colonel Frisby behind. According to a biographer, “never did a father feel worse at parting with his children than did Col. Frisby at parting with his officers and men. He would lie upon his bed, the tears streaming down his cheeks, and exclaim: ‘Oh, my poor boys! My poor boys!’”

 

Convinced by his wife that he must return to Albany, Frisby acquired a leave of absence. He and his wife boarded a boat and they traveled up the Potomac River, but upon reaching Washington, Frisby had second thoughts. Claiming that he felt better, he bid his wife goodbye and turned course for Culpeper, where General Pope had concentrated his army. Within two weeks, Frisby was back in command of the 30^th New York and led it into the Battle at Bull Run.

The 30^th New York fought on all three days of the battle, but it suffered its heaviest losses on the third day, August 30. A member of the regiment remembered, “The morning of the 30^th broke clear and beautiful as if smiling on the harvest of death.” Operating under orders from Pope, the division commander, Brigadier General John Hatch, stacked up his fifteen regiments into a column. Hatch’s division (and another division under Brig. Gen. Daniel Butterfield) had orders to puncture the center of the Confederate line near an unfinished railroad cut. It took all morning to get the men in position, it being nearly noon when the generals declared the assaulting column ready to move out.

 

Colonel Frisby’s 30^th New York occupied the first line of the column, and few soldiers were happy about the scene that stood before them. A wide, rocky plain called Dogan field—about 600 yards across—stretched out in front of the column. It ended atop a massive ridge where the unfinished railroad passed through a deep cut. Leroy Stafford’s Louisiana Brigade held the cut in force. “All enthusiasm was gone,” wrote Private John Bryson of Company A, “and it was with hopeless step that we advanced again upon the enemy’s works, the old railroad embankment, or hell-hole as it was called.” For two hours, the regiment hugged the ground behind a farmer’s fence near the Groveton-Sudley Road, as Confederate artillery pounded the earth around them. At one point, one of the shells nearly killed Colonel Frisby. He had just dismounted his horse, handing the reins to an African American clerk, when a shell struck the pommel of his horse’s saddle, bounced upward, and sliced off the head of the unfortunate man.

At 2:30, Pope could wait no longer, and he sent orders to get his men into the fray. The Union attack surged forward, with Butterfield’s division on the left and Hatch’s division on the right. The 30^th New York formed the lynchpin of Hatch’s attack wave. General Hatch rode up to Colonel Frisby, announcing the assault by waving frantically: “Colonel Frisby! Take your men in there! The rebels are in there thicker than hell!” Frisby called out: “Attention, men! Forward! Charge!” Private Bryson recalled, “We sprang over a fence in front of us into the woods, and up the slope in face of death we went with a cheer.”

As the men passed over the deadly ground at the double-quick, a bullet struck Colonel Frisby in the lower jaw, passing through his face. Amazingly, he remained in the saddle. Noticing Frisby’s wound, Major Morgan H. Chrysler rushed to his side. Stating the obvious, he said, “Colonel, you are hit.” Blood streamed from Frisby’s shattered jaw, but he managed to say: “Major, to your post!” He brandished his sword and reared his horse. Then, as an Albany newspaper recounted: “Scarcely had he uttered the words of command, when he was struck on the top of the head with another ball, which passed through and came out on the opposite side, killing him instantly. He dropped from his horse, and the remnant of his regiment, which had been in the hottest of the fight, was forced to fall back, leaving the remains of their heroic commander on the field of battle.”

 

The attack of Hatch’s division was a costly failure. The 30^th New York took 341 officers and men into the charge, losing sixty-six killed and mortally wounded. Many of the wounded and dead lay on the field, falling into Confederate hands when Pope’s army retreated. A captured surgeon who belonged to the 22^nd New York buried Frisby’s corpse on the spot where it fell, marking the place with a wooden headboard. When that surgeon was released from Confederate custody, he informed Major Chrysler where he had buried the body. Together with Colonel John W. Harcourt (a member of Frisby’s old militia regiment), Chrysler passed through the lines and recovered the body on September 9. By September 11, Harcourt had returned the remains to Albany Rural Cemetery, where the corpse was laid to rest.

 

As happened with many cities and towns who lost popular officers, the populace of Albany broke into mourning, using the death of Colonel Frisby as a means of memorializing the war dead. One newspaper stated, “The citizens of Albany will deeply regret the loss of so gallant a soldier and so worthy a citizen, and will offer their warmest sympathy to his family in their bereavement.” Likewise, the Albany Evening Journal wrote:

No one of our citizens was better or more favorably known than Col. FRISBY. He has for more than twenty years, been identified with the military organizations of the city—having passed through every grade from Lieutenant to Brigadier General. He held this latter position when the war broke out, and surrendered it to take the Colonelcy of the 30^th. He was a thorough disciplinarian, a kindhearted man and a brave soldier. His regiment is one of the very best in the service; and his death will be lamented by the men for whose welfare he labored, by his country, for which he gave his life, and by his family and friends who knew his patriotism and worth.

 

Poignantly, Mary Frisby received letter upon letter from fellow and former officers who lamented Frisby’s death. After all, Frisby had been a soldier for a long time. Perhaps she already knew this, but her husband left a lasting influence on New York’s infantry officers. One grieving mourner referred to himself as “one of his military family.” A deeply-saddened Lieutenant Colonel William M. Searing wrote to Frisby’s widow:

But, alas! my heart aches, my eyes become blinded, and my head is dizzy, when thinking of that awful field of carnage and death. O, God! that I could blot from my memory the scenes of that most unfortunate encounter. I cannot give you a detailed account of that battle, or of the part taken by any one. I can only say your husband, our beloved colonel, fought in the thickest of the fight, and died at his post of duty.

 

Another man, Charles Brintall, the 30^th New York’s former lieutenant colonel, wrote to Mary Frisby, telling her that his men would always remember him:

 

I have said that Col. Frisby was my friend during all my association with him. I have found him to be such, and therefore I mourn his loss as a friend. Of course, I cannot mourn that loss as you do. But there is one thing that I can do. I can bear truthful and uncontradictory testimony to his moral worth as a man; to his honesty and usefulness as a citizen; to his devotion as a patriot, and his steadfastness as a friend. May the bright example, which he has so disinterestedly bequeathed to his posterity, never be forgotten by any of them.

 

Another officer, Major Richard Bentley, a friend in the 63^rd New York, told Mary Frisby this:

None knew Col. Frisby, outside his family, as I knew him. Our military connection commenced when I was so young, and lasted so long, that I had come to look to him, as a son toward a father. I knew his inmost thoughts, so far as military matters were concerned, and could almost read in his face the thoughts passing through his mind. Amid the excitement of the battle field, and the tediousness of long marches, I have not fully appreciated that he is gone—that I shall never see him more; but during the past week, partially confined to my chamber by a wound, the fact has appeared to me in all its force, and I realize that I have lost a dear friend who loved me, and that the service has sustained an almost irreparable loss, in the sphere in which he moved.

Then came the honor bestowed to Frisby’s boots. Three days after his corpse was laid to rest, on September 14, the soldiers of the 30^th New York found themselves about to charge up Turner’s Gap at South Mountain, Maryland. Apparently aware of which Confederate units defended the gap, Colonel William Searing announced, “Boys, the men who killed your Colonel at Manassas are now in front of you, let us charge and avenge his death!” After the battle, Lieutenant James M. Andrews, Jr. of Company D found a dead Virginia officer wearing top boots that once belonged to Colonel Frisby. The name, “Colonel Edward Frisby, 30^th NYV” was written on both of them. The regiment sent the boots home to Frisby’s widow. Andrews announced that the regiment’s vengeance had been satisfied.

Colonel Frisby had been a militiaman for a long time. In a time of peace, he was a dedicated and vigilant officer. Having given the best years of his life to New York’s militia, he need not have challenged himself by facing the terrible challenges of war. He was in his early fifties when the rebellion broke out. Recently retired from militia service, he need not have gone to the front. In July 1862, when he was ill with fever and likely to be discharged, he need not have accompanied his regiment to the Bull Run battlefield. Why, then, did he go back? Why did he insist on being in the danger zone? If I had to guess, Edward Frisby knew of no other place he would rather be. He had been a soldier for so long, he could not imagine himself in any other role. He loved to drill, he loved to march, and he loved to be among his soldiers. After thirty-three years, peacetime militia service had yet to give him a chance to die like a soldier. When the Battle of Second Bull Run came along, tearing out a piece of his jaw, he made sure that he stayed on the field and died like one.

 

The story of the recovered boots makes me smile. Whether they loved Frisby or hated him, the soldiers of the 30^th New York had to have taken solace in the fact that they extracted a sense of justice from an awful, bloody war. That’s how every story of a soldier’s death should end.

This is Colonel Edward Frisby. I can only assume he is wearing the top boots in question.