In My Time of Dying

Every Civil War nerd knows the dying words of Stonewall Jackson. (For the uninitiated, they are, “Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees.”) We know where Jackson died, when he died, and who surrounded him as he breathed his last. Indeed, we might even make an educated guess as to what was on his mind as he expired.

We are often at a loss to do the same for the other 620,000 soldiers who perished. Not all were lucky enough to have their last words recorded. I have, however, found an exception to this rule. His name was Simeon Smith. He died on November 7, 1863.

That day, five regiments from the Union 6^th Corps made a daring attack against Confederate earthworks at Rappahannock Station. Although Smith’s regiment was not involved in the assault, it was close enough to the action to come under fire. During the fighting, a stray shell struck the ranks of Company I, 10^th Massachusetts, mortally wounding two men. One of them was Private Simeon P. Smith, a twenty-two-year-old soldier from Meredith, New Hampshire. The Confederate shell shattered his left knee, which might have meant instant death for him, but Smith had the wherewithal to draw out a handkerchief, tie it around his leg, and then use his bayonet to create a makeshift tourniquet.

Unfortunately, the tourniquet bought Smith only a few hours of additional life. An ambulance carried him to a hospital in town, but the surgeons pronounced him a lost cause. A chaplain from the 77^th New York, Norman Fox, came over to give Smith his final absolution. Fox remembered, “I found a young man of the 10^th Mass. Regiment, with his leg crushed and mangled by a piece of shell. The shock had been so severe that amputation was useless, and he was sinking rapidly. I inquired concerning his religious history. It was the old story,—a bright hope, active church membership, army life and irregularities, and the abandonment of his profession. ‘And now,’ said he, if there can be forgiveness for such a wanderer, pray for me’.”

Chaplain Fox did his sworn duty, to pray for the soul of a dying soldier in his final hour. He noted how the whole scene looked rather bizarre. He felt awkward about lifting up a prayer amid the assorted group of soldiers who stood nearby:

I confess I felt more backwardness than was right. There stood a circle of rough soldiers surveying the solemn scene with morbid curiosity. There stood another group, more educated and refined,—a knot of surgeons, some of whom, I knew, had no belief in God or eternity, and considered my interview with the dying man as at best but amiable uselessness. But there lay the sinking sufferer, and I wore the uniform of a minister of Christ. Bending over the table where he lay, I asked the Good Shepherd to pardon the returning wanderer. Murmured responses throughout the prayer disclosed his own earnestness in the petition; the smothered hope revived again; and faint at first, but growing brighter and brighter, there beamed on him the full radiance of that faith which supports in the stern hour.

As an aside, Smith had a family member at his final bedside. Another young soldier stood by, affectionately smoothing Smith’s hair. Initially, Fox believed he was just a hospital steward. But growing suspicious, Fox asked him, “Is this a friend of yours?”

The soldier replied, “It is my younger brother.” Indeed, Private Smith’s older brother, Corporal Hanniel P. Smith, served in the same company. His company commander allowed the older Smith to accompany Simeon to the field hospital.

At this point, Fox decided to sing a hymn, “Why Should We Start and Fear to Die?” It dated back to the 1830s, but the lyrics later became more well-known when it was incorporated into a popular gospel hymn entitled, “In My Time of Dying,” which, among other things, was commercialized by both Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin. Typically, “Why Should We Start and Fear to Die?” was sung in four verses, although some versions contained as many as twelve. Fox maintained that he got to the fourth verse:

Jesus can make a dying bed

feel soft as downy pillows are

While on his breast I lean my head

And breath my life out sweetly there

At about this point, Private Smith tried to write out a final message, a missive written to some unknown friend. According to Fox, the dying soldier garbled a few words: “There’s—a—silver—pencil—in—pocket.” Fox recalled, “It was with deepest sorrow that he could not speak friendship’s last message. There was but one friend of whom he could speak now.” Smith soon died, although his last words represented something of a bang, not a whimper. Fox explained, “We watched him silently, while he lay for some minutes motionless; I thought all was over; but rousing suddenly, he said—‘Jesus, lover of my soul,—oh, repeat that again!’ My voice choked up so that I could hardly speak. I know not if he heard me, for before I reached the last verse, ‘the storm of life,’ was over, the ‘haven’ was reached, and ‘billows’ had died away in the eternal peace.”

It happened at 10 o’clock, P.M.

If you’re the religious sort, you’ll likely take solace in the fact that faith was the last thing on Private Smith’s mind as he parted this world. If you’re not religious, you can still appreciate this tale. I, for one, find it incredible that the final moments in the life of an ordinary twenty-two-year soldier can be told so thoroughly. How often can we be exactly certain of what a man was thinking as he died? In Simeon Smith’s case, we can be pretty sure.

This is Chaplain Norman Fox, 77th New York, the minister who watched Pvt. Simeon Smith breathe his last.

Speak in Code

Years ago, I had a chance to research an original Civil War diary. It belonged to Lt. James H. Walker, 81^st Pennsylvania. I possessed a keen interest in reading Walker’s diary because his regiment left behind so few primary accounts.

I thoroughly enjoyed Walker’s entries. He wrote with flair and purpose. However, quite aggravatingly, he wrote in code. It was infuriating. What did he do? Check out this odd sentence. He wrote: “I could perceive at once that the lzm vzr gzke bqzyx.”

When I saw this code, I muttered, “Ah, what the hell!” You see, it’s hard enough to read nineteenth-century handwriting. In addition to reading his English script, I had to decode his cypher. Not having any experience in cryptology, I fretted, believing that I would never get the answer. Then, I noticed an odd sentence. Someone (perhaps an archivist) had defaced a single word in the diary. (I’m a bit torn here. I’m not sure whether I should thank the unknown defacer for giving me the key to Walker’s code or chastise him for writing inside this irreplaceable artifact.)

Anyway, one sentence read, “staid awhile and stopped in bgzladqr on my way down.” Above the coded word, “bgzladqr,” the defacer had written the word, “chambers.” Indeed, “chambers” was the correct word, and no doubt the defacer had figured it out from the context of the previous sentence. Using this one word, I did my best to figure out Walker’s cypher. Eventually, it dawned on me. Walker intended each coded letter to refer to the next letter of the alphabet. For instance, if Walker wrote “b,” he actually wanted to write the letter, “c.” Coded letter “d” actually meant, “e,” and so forth. (Coded letter “z” meant “a.”)

Having figured out Walker’s method, I set about decoding his entries.

What kind of information did Walker encode? Believe it or not, he disguised entries about, uh, booty calls, for lack of a better phrase. In March 1864, Lt. Walker returned home to Philadelphia as part of his regiment’s recruiting detail. He was responsible for finding new recruits and forwarding them to the Army of the Potomac’s winter encampment at Brandy Station in preparation for Ulysses Grant’s Overland Campaign. While staying in Philadelphia, he looked up some old girlfriends and had romantic liaisons with them. Most of the decoded material related to these saucy hook-ups.

For instance, on April 24, he wrote this about a girl named Sallie: “[I] Did not go forward [meaning he did not return to Brandy Station]. In [the] evening [I] called for Sallie [and] I went with her to church. [to] Have her to understand how I regarded her. [I] Found that I was not altogether obnoxious.” All of this had been encoded. Each word was incomprehensible until I applied the cypher to it.

Walker really liked Sallie, whoever she was. A week later, he skipped church, presumably to fool around with her. On May 1, he wrote, “In the afternoon [I] went up to see Sallie [and I] did not go to Church. I thought it might be the last afternoon I should spend with the only woman I ever loved.”

Yet, Walker’s most scandalous entries involved a love triangle that involved him, a woman named Lucy McGonigal, and a man named Pendleton. Lucy loved Walker, so it seemed, but she could not shake the unwanted attentions of her other suitor, Pendleton. Here’s what Walker wrote about it.

[I] went down where I had left my baggage & found Ktbx & a number of others waiting staid all night – learned that mia amiga carina con los ojos azul gzc lzmzfdc  sn fds gdqrdke hmsn  cheebtksx  – un muchacho maquinista & cantador en una iglesia methodisto amaba ella y tenia su compromiso de casa pero cuando ese caballero gdzqc sgzs  su carina tenia poco gusto del soldado Ihl gd vzr rdhydc  vhsg z idzkntr ehs zme vdms sn gdq ezsgdq.

Did you figure it out what he said? This one is tricky. Walker injected some Spanish (as if his code was not hard enough.) Here’s what he wrote, if everything is translated into English:

[I] went down where I had left my baggage & found Lucy & a number of others waiting[.] [I] staid all night – learned that my friend and sweetheart with the blue eyes had managed to get herself into difficulty – an engineer and singer at the Methodist Church loved her and had her commitment but when that cowboy heard that my sweetheart had had a little taste of soldier Jim he was seized with a jealous fit and went to her father.

So, in this account, Walker met his “sweetheart with the blue eyes,” Lucy, who had gotten a “little taste” of him, whatever that means, and when Pendleton (the singer at the church) found out about her affection for Walker, he got angry and tattled to her father.

The intrigue got worse, in fact. The next day, Walker attended a party. Pendleton brought Lucy as his date, but Lucy wanted to be with Walker. Lt. Walker described the tense scene that arose. As usual, he wrote his entry in a mix of coded words and Spanish. He wrote, “soon after we arrived Mr. Pendleton came with the first of the fair [meaning Lucy]. I could perceive at once that the man was half crazy. One of the young ladies gave me an introduction & I afterwards drank along with him and the rest of the male members of the party – he seemed greatly excited but had nothing to be angry at me for. – when saying, ‘toast to your good health,’ he told me that, ‘you are a fine looking fellow I must confess though I say it to your face;’ . . . I saw at once that he loved her [Lucy] deeply & thought that she thought more of me than of him.” (Here, I have decoded the coded language and translated the Spanish text.)

Pendleton gave Walker the evil eye all evening. Being a bold man, Walker decided to give her a kiss goodbye, something that Pendleton would not forget. He wrote, “Between one thing and another Lucy felt pretty well worried and her tears were falling fast when I kissed her good bye which operation must have been daggers in the heart of her poor lover.” (The italicized text indicates the encoded portion.)

Walker didn’t remain long in Philadelphia. A few days later, he left for the front and arrived at Belle Plain on May 12. He was wounded at Cold Harbor but remained in the army until February 1865.

After that, I don’t have much to say about the enigmatic Lt. Walker. Probably, he returned to Philadelphia. I wonder if all the romantic drama he left behind in 1864 still troubled him. He took pains to write  about it in code, after all.

Two Brothers, One Face

Recently, I was reading “Dear Pa—and So it Goes,” a collection of letters edited by Gertrude K. Johnston. It’s an old book, known by a few Civil War scholars as the collected letters of the Pardee family, a family of wealthy coal mine owners centered in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. In my personal opinion, it’s a wonderful collection, especially because  it contains plenty of material written by the daughters of the family. (Letters written by Civil War women are, of course, rare finds.)

Anyway, the collection also contains letters from two brothers, Lt. James Boyd Robison and Lt. Isaiah Robison. (These letters are in the collection because the Robisons’ older sister, Anna, married Ario Pardee, Sr., the family patriarch.) Army of the Potomac enthusiasts might recognize the Robison boys because they served in some of the army’s famous campaigns. James Boyd Robison (b. 1838) served with Company G, 10^th Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry from 1861 to 1862. He was wounded in the hand at Second Manassas. The younger of the two, Isaiah Robison (b. 1840), served in Company A, 28^th Pennsylvania, until he was killed-in-action at the Battle of Peach Tree Creek, July 20, 1864. Both brothers served as officers in their respective units.

I was looking at the images of the two men and I noticed something odd.

This is J. Boyd Robison:

This is (purportedly) Lt. James Boyd Robison, Co. G, 10th Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry.

This is Isaiah Robison:

This is (purportedly) Lt. Isaiah Robison, Co. A, 28th Pennsylvania Infantry.

 

The faces of these men look identical.

What’s going on?

Obviously, there are several options to explain this:

1)      The first (and most likely) possibility is that these images depict only one of the two brothers, not both. Someone must have mislabeled one of the images and since then all subsequent historians have perpetuated the error.
 

2)      The second possibility is that the two men are identical twins. All evidence suggests that they were born two years apart, so unless someone recorded their birthdays incorrectly, this possibility is not likely.

3)      It’s also possible that the two brothers looked really, really alike, but I can’t imagine that two men born of the same parents two years apart could appear so identical in facial structure.

Anyway, which of the brothers are we looking at in these two images, Boyd or Isaiah? It is a mystery.

Alonzo Cushing’s Thumb

So, a few days ago, November 6, 2014, we had a big day for Civil War history. President Barack Obama awarded a Medal of Honor to Lieutenant Alonzo H. Cushing. If you’ve been reading my blog religiously, then you know my thoughts on this important event. For those of you who are new to it, or for those of you who are just stopping by, this is my opinion: I approve of the decision.

Unfortunately, in watching Obama’s address, I cringed at something he said. Obama said that, during the Battle of Gettysburg, Lieutenant Cushing burned his thumb to the bone while trying to plug the vent of one of his artillery pieces. This is a famous story, often repeated by historians.

What little we know about Lieutenant Cushing’s actions at Gettysburg comes from three primary accounts, all of them written years after the war, all of them written by enlisted men, and all of them written by veterans of Battery A, 4^th U.S. Artillery. These writers were Private Christopher Smith, Sergeant Frederick Fuger, and Corporal Thomas Moon. The “thumb story,” comes from Moon. Specifically, it comes from this passage: “His [Cushing’s] right thumb was burned to the bone, serving vent without a thumb-pad.”

Thomas Moon's postwar account of Cushing's injuries claimed that his right thumb was "burned to the bone." Here is the controversial passage.

What did Moon mean by this? Whenever a Civil War artillery crew loaded a new round, one man had to “thumb the vent.” This soldier—known as the “Number Three” crewman—placed his thumb atop a small vent that penetrated the breech. He did this because the manual that all Union artillerymen followed (called the Instruction for Field Artillery) required vent thumbing as a safety protocol. One soldier always had to block the vent to prevent air from reaching the gun tube. If air crept inside and burning embers were still present in the barrel, they would be kept aflame and, therefore, might ignite the next round when it got rammed into the tube. If that happened, it could potentially kill the two loaders (known as the Number One and Number Two crewmen). Essentially, this is the same principle as a chimney. If you close the flue, no air reaches the fire, and it goes out. Thus, every time artillerymen reloaded their cannon, someone always “thumbed the vent.” Safety demanded it.

An unlimbered piece of field artillery had a crew of seven. The Number 3 crewman was responsible for "thumbing the vent."

 

This cut-away shows the vent that required blockage.

 

 

However, if someone were to place his bare thumb atop a recently fired artillery tube, the super-heated iron would instantly sear his flesh. (After all, the gun had just been fired.) To prevent injury, the Number Three crewman wore a leather strap around his thumb called a “thumb stall.” Thus, he could plug the vent without burning himself.

This is a Union artilleryman's "thumb stall." This one is made of buckskin.
 

So, here is what Moon suggested. There were no enlisted men left with Battery A on July 3 who could operate as the Number Three crewman. Cushing handled that position himself. Lacking a thumb stall, he placed his bare flesh atop the vent, burning his thumb to the bone.

Baloney. There is no way that story is true. Consider these points and judge for yourself:

First, Thomas Moon’s account is full of suspicious claims. For instance, at one point, Moon claimed that he went to sleep on the night of July 3, slumbering atop Cushing’s mangled body, as if it were a mattress! Certainly, there is no way that statement is true. I’ve never slept upon a dead person, but I’d imagine that a bloody corpse cannot possibly be more comfortable than a grassy field. If Moon had been so callous as to attempt what he claimed, I’ll bet other members of the battery (and there were three who accompanied Moon to the Second Corps hospital) would not have allowed him to treat the corpse of their fallen commander in such a disrespectful way. And finally, although the time of Cushing’s burial is unknown, there is a distinct possibility that the corpse was already buried in the ground by the time night fell, and thus, Moon’s statement might not be true. This is just one doubtful piece of Moon’s narrative. A number of other equally suspect statements suggest that Moon rooted his account more in exaggeration (or fantasy) than in reality.

Second, if a Civil War artilleryman happened to be missing his thumb stall, he could always use something else in a pinch. Any strip of leather would do, and artillerymen had them in abundance. All they had to do was un-hitch their belt (or the belt of a dead or wounded soldier) and use that in place of the thumb stall. (In one account, two artillerymen who were caught in the middle of a harrowing battle simply tied a rock to the top of the tube, blocking the vent, while they loaded. They did this because all the other members of their crew had been killed or wounded.) When Cushing was serving his guns on July 3, the area around him would have been littered with debris, including hundreds of castaway leather belts. In fact, we know that Cushing wore a belt on July 3. This belt is still in existence, owned by the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg. (Interestingly enough, the belt has several dark marks on it. Is that where he pressed the belt against the vent?) If Cushing could not find anything in his immediate vicinity that might have served in place of a thumb stall, he must have been royally stupid.

Third, it is just about impossible for a person to hold his or her fingers to a hot metal object for too long. (Moon and all the historians who have repeated the “thumb story” have never been burned, apparently.) The brain contains a reflex action that prevents the hand from grasping a scorching hot article. If you’ve ever accidentally grasped a hot frying pan, you know that your brain will cause you to release it involuntarily. This is no matter of opinion; this is just simple physiology. A person might be able to condition himself or herself to endure heat—by, say, repeatedly sticking his or her hand over an open flame—but that takes practice, something that Cushing, I’m sure, did not have. In short, there’s no way that Cushing’s brain let him press down his thumb on a heated cannon vent for too long.

Some critics might say, “Well, Tim, Cushing had been severely wounded. Adrenalin had kicked in, so he couldn’t feel any pain.” All right, I’ll concede that such a circumstance might have happened. Perhaps adrenalin might have allowed him to press his bare flesh to a hot cannon barrel, but if so, he could only have done it for a short time. If he had done it long enough, his brain’s reflex function would have kicked in eventually, overturning the absence of pain. Cushing could not have left his thumb on the barrel long enough to let it burn down to the bone. That would have been impossible. Also, in a philosophical sense, if—and I stress the word, “if”—adrenalin had kicked in, why mention the thumb story at all? If Cushing felt no pain, then pressing his thumb to the vent was no big deal for him. When we consider Cushing’s heroism at Gettysburg, do we not prefer to focus on the fact that he gritted his way through the agony of several awful wounds, remaining at his post to the bitter end? Dismissing his pain by saying that he had so much adrenalin that he felt no pain at all defeats the point, I think.

So, my plea is this: Please kill off the Cushing “thumb story.” At long last, he has a Medal of Honor. Mission accomplished. We need not continue to mangle this poor officer’s body in our imaginations to prove a point. We have awarded him the highest honor we can give. Let sober history once more return to the story of Alonzo Cushing at Gettysburg.

 

Here is Lt. Alonzo H. Cushing, photographed with the 2nd Corps staff in 1862. I'm sure his right thumb was just fine on July 3, 1863.

The Language of Combat

I’m always on the lookout for vivid descriptions of Civil War combat, an experience not easily imagined. (In my opinion, the legions of yearly reenactments and badly-directed Hollywood motion pictures cannot do it justice.) For soldiers who fought in the war, the task of describing the graphic scenes they witnessed—fluid, swift-moving, jarring, dehumanizing—using only written words became an undertaking too difficult to manage. In short, words failed them. Many letter-writers came up short. They told their audience that nothing they could write could give a reasonable picture of what they had seen. Today, we live in a vastly different world, where combat can be imagined, even by those who have never experienced it. We have photographs and streaming videos of combat, all easily accessible. Even if veterans cannot give their audience an accurate description of combat, twenty-first-century technology paints a picture for us. Civil War veterans had no such advantage. They had only their language to describe the experience, and far too often, it could not rise to the occasion.

Of course, there were a few exceptions. Some writers—aging veterans, mainly—managed to summon the vernacular necessary to give readers a taste of the scenes of combat. The war had seared their souls, and after years of suppressing painful memories, they could no longer contain them. They just had to write about combat and its bone-chilling tableaus in order to come to grips with what they had seen. Corporal George Kimball was one such veteran. In 1883, he published a serial memoir in a privately-run Boston newspaper called, The Bivouac. When Kimball narrated his experiences with the 12^th Massachusetts at the Battle of Antietam, he wrote a wonderful account of the combat that occurred just south of the D. R. Miller cornfield. The following passage is a spell-binding piece from that narrative. It offers readers a taste of what it was like to experience Civil War combat as a soldier in an infantry line-of-battle:

How terrible was the shock and how our men went down! What screams and groans followed that first volley! We loaded and fired at will as rapidly as we could. Our officers cried, “Give it to them, boys!” and the men took up the cry, too. There was a pandemonium of voices, as well as a perfect roar of musketry and a storm of bullets. Shells were bursting among us, too, continually. In the wild excitement of battle, I forgot my fear and thought only of killing as many of the foe as I could. . . . My ramrod was wrenched from my grasp as I was about to return it to its socket after loading. I looked for it behind me and the lieutenant passed me another, pointing to my own, which lay bent and unfit for use across the face of a dead man. A bullet entered my knapsack just under my left arm while I was taking aim. Another passed through my haversack, which hung upon my left hip. Still another cut both strings of my canteen and that useful article joined the debris now thickly covering the ground. Having lost all natural feeling, I laughed at these mishaps as though they were huge jokes and remarked to my nearest neighbor that I supposed I should be relieved of all my trappings. A man but a few paces from me was struck squarely in the face by a solid shot. Fragments of the poor fellow’s head came crashing into my face and filled me with disgust. I grumbled about it as though it were something that might have been avoided. My supply of cartridges was exhausted and I sought for more among the cartridge boxes of the dead. Many others were doing the same and nearly everybody had had experiences similar to mine. There were but few of us left now. The enemy’s line, which had looked so magnificent when we opened fire upon it, seemed as ragged as our own. We had fulfilled General Hooker’s prediction. We had “held it.”

You’ll notice how Kimball’s narrative moved from topic to topic, without transition, mimicking the quick, unpredictable flow of battle. His description, although masterful, gives us an answer to help explain why so few veterans could adequately describe the sights and sensation of battle, even if they had participated in it to its fullest extent. Words were incapable of meeting the task. Language, by definition, is organized; battle, by nature, is not.

This illustration by Winslow Homer was originally entitled, "Infantry Rifle Drill." It gives the viewer a sense of the confusing nature of infantry combat.

“Life was Not Given for us to Manage so as to Prolong it.”

Many years ago, I read an article in the New York World written in 1861. It quoted a Union soldier named Edmund Blunt. Private Blunt had written a letter to the newspaper, which the editors subsequently published. In it, Blunt explained his reasons for joining the Union army.

Blunt said, “You know one cannot live always, and that life was not given for us to manage so as to prolong it, but to do our duty, even if in so doing we lose it.”

I’ve always found this quote incredibly interesting. Here, a Civil War soldier tells his readers that life was not meant for living, but for dying. It shows us how differently the Civil War generation considered the stern realities of death. Compared to our own mortal goals, his vision appears extraordinarily selfless. We always say that we strive to live “a long and happy life.” Blunt tells us that his generation did not think that way; to him, a long life was a wasted life.

I’ve long thought about Blunt and what happened to him. My instinct was to assume that he must have fulfilled his promise to himself, to lose his life doing his duty to his country. However, I always knew that he could not have lost his life so early in the war. Blunt had joined a three-month militia regiment, one that did not see any action. I thought to myself: Perhaps he re-enlisted in a regiment that eventually saw combat? I wondered and wondered. Eventually, my curiosity gnawed at me. I decided to do a little sleuthing.

Here is what got. As it turned out, Edmund Blunt was Edmund March Blunt, Jr., age nineteen. He was the son of a famous hydrographer who lived in Brooklyn, New York, and he was the youngest of six brothers and sisters. In April 1861, he joined the 12^th New York State Militia, Engineer Company. The 12^th N.Y.S.M. was one of the first New York regiments to leave the city. On April 21, just six days after Abraham Lincoln called up the state militia, it headed for Washington D.C. Sometime in May, it established an encampment at Franklin Square called Camp Anderson and a photographer took this shot of the engineer company.

This group of soldiers belonged to the 12th N.Y. State Militia. This photograph was taken in May 1861.

Civil War buffs have probably seen this image many times before. In fact, it contains a few famous faces. Some of you might recognize Frederick T. Locke, who later became a staff officer in the 5^th Corps. He can be seen holding an order book. James A. Scrymser, who later became the A.D.C. to Maj. General William F. Smith, is seated on a chair at right, wearing no hat. And finally, Lt. Francis Channing Barlow, who famously commanded divisions in the 11^th and 2^nd Corps, is seated at the far right. Undoubtedly, he is this photograph’s most famous subject.

But Edmund Blunt is here too. He’s the soldier seated on the box. Here is a close up:

This is Pvt. Edmund M. Blunt, Jr., the soldier who told readers that life was not given to humans so that they might prolong it.

So, what happened to him? Blunt stayed with the 12^th New York throughout its three months of service. It saw no action; the regiment missed the affair at Bull Run. Eventually, it returned to New York City and mustered out on August 5. Blunt did not re-enlist in a new regiment, not right away. He tried to go back to school, but with the war going on, he could not sit still. In May 1862, Lincoln again called up the state militia and New York’s regiments responded. On May 25, 1862, Blunt went to the front a second time, but with the 7^th N.Y.S.M.—the famous “Dandy Seventh”—and he helped his new regiment patrol the streets of Baltimore. Once again, he saw no action, but upon muster out three months later, he applied for a commission in a three-year volunteer regiment. The governor obliged him, and in October, Blunt became a second lieutenant in Company M, 5^th New York Cavalry. He served with this regiment for the rest of the war, mustering out with it on July 19, 1865.

Understandably, I was a little shocked to learn that Blunt survived the fighting. But, his survival did not come for lack of trying. Admittedly, his first two assignments were easy, but Blunt saw heavy fighting with the 5^th New York Cavalry. That regiment followed the Army of the Potomac through all of its bloody campaigns in the East. In the end, it was baffling to me to think that a young man so willing to live a shortened life for his country never could catch a bullet, not even in the lead-filled air of the Civil War.

After the war, Blunt returned home to Brooklyn and started a manufacturing company. He died at his home, 159 Front Street, on January 24, 1894. He was fifty-one-years-old.

I wonder if, in his middle-age, Blunt remembered that assertion he made in his youth, that life was not given to him to manage in order to prolong it. After all, the New York World had printed that bold pronouncement for all to read. Did he change his opinion about the meaning of life as he aged, or did he always regret missing his opportunity to offer his last full measure of devotion? Like all of my posts, I do wonder.

“He Fell in the Advance”: The Promotion of Gustavus W. Town, Part 4.

In the previous posts, we learned about the contested promotion of Gustavus W. Town. Here, we end the story by discussing his death.

In late July 1862, Gustavus W. Town received his promotion to colonel, backdated to June 28, 1862. This news brought instant cheer from Philadelphia’s Republican newspapers. The Press commented: “We are satisfied that Philadelphia can be content to leave its fame in the hands of the ‘Ninety-Fifth,’ if allowed to remain in charge of its present able commander.” 

No doubt, Colonel Town felt vindicated. His superiors had accused him of being too young to command. His soldiers, his fellow officers, and his city’s newspapers had come to his defense and won him his promotion. Now, he needed to prove that he was worthy of their trust.

He continued to lead the 95th Pennsylvania throughout the war, participating in the Battles of Crampton’s Gap, Antietam, and Second Fredericksburg. On May 3, 1863, during the Battle of Salem Heights, Colonel Town was killed at the head of his command, while 218 of his officers and men were killed, wounded, or captured all around him.

One soldier, G. Norton Galloway, described Town’s death:

Ammunition now running low, our men began to fall back; quickly our line of battle sprang to its feet to confront the swarms of rebels which now poured out of the woods line upon line, firing and yelling with demoniacal fury as they advanced. Bravely our two little regiments, under Col. Town, strove to resist the overwhelming torrent which now overlapped our right and threatened total annihilation. Finally, after a desperate struggle, which scarcely lasted ten minutes, we were forced to give way[.] . . . Almost 200 of the Ninety-Fifth were left weltering in their gore upon the bloody plain. Among the first to fall was our brave Col. (Town), shot through the head, killed almost instantly.

At every battle since Gaines’s Mill, Town set out to prove himself, and like many other Civil War officers who felt the same way, he led from the front and paid for it with his life. As Civil War veteran St. Clair Mulholland remarked in his book, Heroism of the American Volunteer, Town’s  “splendid Philadelphia regiment held an advanced position where the fighting was desperate and severe.”  Town’s new brigade commander, Brigadier General David A. Russell, lamented the loss of such a talented field officer, remarking in his after-action report, “The Ninety-Fifth Pennsylvania sustained a great calamity in the loss of its colonel, Gus. W. Town, a most efficient, meritorious, gallant, and daring officer. He fell in the advance, while urging on his men against the enemy.”

It is not much of a stretch to say that the conditions necessary for Town’s death had been set into motion ten months earlier. Generals Franklin, Newton, and McClellan had cast their doubts upon him. Although Town had won the colonelcy in spite of their misgivings, the prideful Philadelphian could not forget the meaning of their deception. They preferred a second lieutenant’s leadership to that of his own. How could Town not ruminate on that truth? As so often happens in life, the doubts of others led to self-doubt. Town felt uncertainty. He wondered if the Democratic generals were correct. Was he really too inexperienced? His men had faith in his capabilities, but after the contested colonelcy, Town was not sure what to think. It might be said that his death at Salem Heights was caused just as much by the Democratic generals in the 6^th Corps as it was by the Confederates. Truly, the doubters of the world wield incredible power in shaping history.

Presently, Town is buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia.

Here is Col. Town wearing his eagles.