"The Sergeant Has Halted."

On September 10, 1862, Colonel James Clay Rice (44^th New York Infantry) walked into a hospital in Washington, D.C. (He never specified which one, but probably it was either Armory Square Hospital or Finlay Hospital.) As Rice later explained, “It was perhaps ten days after the second battle of Manassas, that I visited one of the hospitals near Washington, for the purpose of ascertaining if any of the disabled of my own command had been borne there, and if so, of speaking to them a kind, cheerful word, always so grateful to a wounded soldier.”

While passing through one of the wards, two strangers—a sister and an aunt of a wounded man–accosted Rice, asking him if he would stand by the couch of their relative while a surgeon amputated his limb. Rice recalled, “They were both weeping, but the wounded soldier, although suffering intensely, met me with a smile and saluted me. I sat down by his couch, and took his hand in mine.”

Rice never mentioned the name of the soldier, but details from his account render it certain that he met twenty-five-year-old Sergeant William B. Hogeboom (Company K, 5^th New York Infantry). Hogeboom’s regiment, the 5^th New York Zouaves, had been decimated at Second Manassas, losing 297 officers and men. By mid-September, the hospitals in Washington were choked with wounded Zouaves.

Sergeant Hogeboom was in rough shape. He had received a gunshot wound on Saturday, August 30, but had not been removed from the field until Wednesday, September 4. That day, a surgeon dressed his wound and put him on an ambulance to Washington. The next day, Hogeboom endured his first surgery, the physicians deciding it necessary to amputate the damaged limb. When Rice encountered him, it was five days later, and the arteries had commenced to slough away. The surgeons decided that a second amputation was needed.

Hogeboom regaled Rice with the tale of his survival on the field of Second Manassas. He said:

 

[I] remained where . . . [I] fell . . . , with no food save a few hard crackers left in my haversack; and no water, except that which God gave me from heaven in rain and dew, and which I caught in my blanket.  . . . You know, Colonel, how God remembers us wounded soldiers with rain, after the battle is over, and when our lips are parched and our tongues are burning with fever.

 

At this point, Hogeboom paused in telling his story, and Rice “noticed that his voice was weaker and his face more pale and deathlike.” Looking to the floor, Rice observed blood trickling down from the rubber poncho on which the sergeant was lying. Clearly, the wound had hemorrhaged. He called a surgeon to the bedside. After a short examination, consulting with other surgeons in attendance, the chief physician told Rice that re-amputation would be useless, saying that, in all probability, Hogeboom would not survive the hour. Rice explained the situation to Hogeboom’s aunt and sister. He remembered, “Tears filled their eyes, and they sobbed bitterly; but their grief was borne as Christian women alone can bear such sorrow. . . . The sister, wiping away her tears, and taking a prayer book from her dress, asked me if I would tell her brother how soon he must die, and if I would read him ‘the prayer for the dying’.”

Rice attempted to talk to the sergeant one last time, but he found it difficult. Hogeboom had grown delirious and seemed to think that he was still on the march. To communicate, Rice pretended to issue orders to the dying sergeant. Rice related:

I went to the couch, and stood beside the dying soldier. “Sergeant” I said, “we shall halt soon—we are not going to march much further today.”

“Are we going to halt, colonel,” said the sergeant, “so early in the day? Are we going to bivouac before night?”

“Yes sergeant,” I replied, “the march is nearly over—the bugle call will soon sound the ‘halt’.”

The sergeant’s mind wandered for a moment but my tears interpreted to him my words.

“Oh! colonel,” he said, “do you mean that I am so soon to die?”

“Yes, sergeant,” I said, “you are soon to die.”

“Well, colonel, I am glad I am going to die—I want to rest—the march has been so long that I am weary—I am tired—I want to halt—I want to be with Christ—I want to be with my Saviour.”

Rice recited the prayer, and then Hogeboom began saying his goodbyes. He took off a ring, kissed it, telling his sister that he must give it to their mother. He said, “Tell my mother, sister, that this is for her, and that I remembered her and loved her, dying.” Then, taking a second ring from his hand, he kissed it, and said, “Sister, give this to her to whom my heart is pledged, and tell her—tell her to come to me in heaven.” Finally, addressing Rice, Sergeant Hogeboom said, “And colonel, tell my comrades of the arm—the brave army of the Potomac—that I died bravely, died for the good old flag.”

According to Rice, “These were the last words of the dying soldier. His pulse now beat feebler and feebler, the blood tickled faster and faster down the bed-side, the dew of death came and went, and flickering for a moment over the pallid face, at length rested—rested forever. The sergeant has halted. His soul is now in heaven.”

Of course, we historians must be a bit skeptical of Rice’s account. He was a religious man and deeply dedicated to his country, so his version of what Hogeboom said in his final moments might not have been word-for-word the truth, but what Rice preferred to hear. However, we have no reason to doubt that this incident occurred. Rice watched a wounded soldier die, that much is certain. I have every reason to believe that Rice remembered this moment for the rest of his life. When he died from a serious gunshot wound two years later—the subject of my next blog post—he met his end the same way as Hogeboom, on the floor of a field hospital, comforted by a superior.

It must rip out a piece of a soldier’s soul to watch a fellow soldier die. But sometimes, watching a brave man die can provide a lifetime of emotional fortitude.

Sergeant Hogeboom was laid to rest at Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut.

 

Colonel James Clay Rice, shown as commander, 44th New York Volunteers.

 

Marched to Death

On June 17, 1863, the Army of the Potomac’s 5^th Corps trudged along a dusty road that connected Centreville to a small village called Gum Springs (modern-day Arcola).  It was a tough march, one that lasted twelve hours. That day, the 5^th Corps started out in Manassas Junction. Thus, it covered seventeen miles. Balmy weather slowed the pace of the march and the soldiers suffered intensely under the penetrating rays of the sun. One of the participants, Captain Francis Adams Donaldson, wrote, “We suffered dreadfully on the march to this place for water and the intense heat. We have lost a dozen men or more in the brigade from sun stroke, and yesterday Lt. Col. Gleason of the 25^th New York was overcome and died from the sun’s effect, and as soon as we halted, was buried in a little church yard hard by.”

Donaldson’s account is typical. Without fail, the 5^th Corps soldiers who wrote about the June 17 hike mentioned the corps’ most famous sunstroke casualty, Lieutenant Colonel Shepard Gleason, age twenty-five. No doubt, it was shocking for them to learn that a regimental commander might die from heat exhaustion. Unlike the enlisted men, Gleason rode his horse and did not have to burden himself with a rifle or tenting equipment. Yet, even that did not save him from death—testament to the intensity of the heat endured on that awful day.

Even more amazing is the fact that Gleason was only nine days short of mustering out. The 25^th New York was a two-year regiment. It had left New York City in the summer of 1861 under the promise that it would muster out on June 26, 1863. Recently, the regiment had been lightly engaged at Chancellorsville, but that proved to be its last battle. Probably, the New Yorkers expected to wait out the remainder of their service while in bivouac, but Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia during the second week of June roused the defeated bluecoats from their encampments along the Rappahannock River. The entire army—all 90,000 of them—went ahead with a series of exhausting marches during one of the hottest weeks of the year. That urgency—the need to move quickly after the fall of the Union garrison at Winchester—killed Gleason, and it did so as his enlistment was about to expire.

What baffles me most is the fact that no one made any effort to transport Gleason’s remains back to his home in Rochester. Logic dictated that the regiment could have easily boxed up his corpse and shipped it north. Members of the regiment knew that the army did not intend for the 25^th New York to participate in the remainder of the grueling campaign, chasing the Confederates into Pennsylvania. In fact, the order detaching the 25^th New York arrived on June 20, three days after Gleason perished. At first, the officers in his brigade considered packaging Gleason’s body, but then decided against it. Writing to the New York Herald, one soldier explained: “In my last letter I mentioned the death of Lieut. Col. Gleason from sunstroke. It had then been arranged to send his remains home; but subsequently it was decided to bury him in this place, and his remains now lie in the graveyard of the old church here.”

The day after the corps arrived at Gum Springs, Maj. Gen. George Sykes issued orders to halt and not resume the march until June 19, when the weather cooled. Amid a terrible rainstorm, the soldiers of the 25^th New York formed up to say goodbye to their fallen commander. So continued the soldier who wrote to the Herald, “His burial was an impressive scene: for no more gallant, efficient and popular officer was ever in this corps. Although raining violently, there was a large attendance of officers, besides the entire regiment, attended by the Second United States infantry band. . . . The deceased,  . . . by his talents, which were of a high and brilliant order, and his gallantry, shown in every action, rose to the position he held at the time of his decease. Excepting at Shepherdstown, he took part in every battle in which this army has participated. His name and services, high accomplishments and courtesy will ever remain green in the memory of his old comrades in arms.”

Eulogistic words from the nineteenth-century often brushed over the complexity of a person’s personality, but it is safe to say that Gleason was a popular officer. Few others could boast so meteoric a rise. Back in 1861, Gleason enlisted as a private in the 13^th New York Infantry. In October, he transferred to the 25^th New York, mustering in as a second lieutenant in Company K. His promotion to lieutenant colonel came on May 9, a few days after his regiment returned from the Chancellorsville battlefield. Thus, he rose from private to lieutenant colonel in less than two years. On June 26, an alumnus from Rochester Collegiate Institute, Robert Wilson, wrote to his favorite professor, informing him of Gleason’s death:

My dear professor:

You will, of course, remember Mr. Gleason who was a member of your class in 1856, when we were reading Cicero. Yesterday’s paper has the announcement of his death from exhaustion or from sun stroke during the late march of his regiment, the 25th N. Y. V. His death was sudden and quite unexpected by his fellow soldiers. He was found dead on the morning of last Thursday. I saw the Colonel under whom he served (Johnson) and he seemed much affected by the death of one for whom his fellow officers and men entertained so much respect and esteem. I have spoken to several of the officers and men of his regiment, and they all, without exception, speak in terms of unbounded praise, not only of the brilliancy and efficiency as an officer, but speak of him also as a true man and courteous gentleman. One of them said to me to-day, that had Mr. Gleason lived, he must certainly have risen to a position of eminence; for in him were displayed those rare qualities of mind, temper and manner, which go to make up the chivalrous soldier and the able officer.

When I learned two years ago that he had enlisted as a private in the old 13th Regiment of Rochester, I could not but feel sad, while I volunteered the prediction that he would not be long in the ranks. I was not disappointed. His talents raised him through all the grades of Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Major, till, at his death he held the responsible and honorable position of Lieut. Colonel. I am told also that only his modesty forbid him from going another step higher, having refused the position of Colonel but a few weeks since.

I like to remember and keep track of the old members of the Collegiate, and I always consider it a treat when I see one. Among them all there is not one for whom my respect and affection is more profoundly sincere than for Shepherd Gleason [sic]. During our acquaintance in Rochester as fellow students I loved to admire the many noble qualities of his nature, and have always felt proud in being a sharer in his courteous and generous friendship. I feel that in his decease the United States army has lost one of its best officers and the community one of its best citizens.

Sed ne longum sit [Latin for, “Indeed, let me speak briefly.”]: You will pardon me if I have taken too much of your attention with this scribble, for I could not withhold my tribute of respect to the memory of one for whom my affection is equaled only by the exalted opinion I have ever held for his manly excellence and various genius.

Currently, a small gravestone sits in Riga Cemetery, Monroe County, New York, honoring Gleason’s death. If his earthly remains are buried there, then, at some point, friends from Rochester journeyed to Gum Springs to claim them.

The whole story leaves behind some unanswered questions. First, why did the officers of the 5^th Corps choose to leave Gleason’s body, leaving it buried in the graveyard of an old Virginia church? Second, which church was it? (None of the accounts say.) Third, how did Gleason’s family manage to recover the remains? I do wonder about the answers.

Regardless, I grimace whenever I contemplate the grueling seventeen-mile march of June 17, 1863, a trek that killed seventeen men in the 5^th Corps. One of them, Gleason, had only to survive nine more days in order to go home. Rather than accept the fact that his regiment would be of no practical use in the upcoming campaign, the army chose to march him to death.

 

Lt. Col. Shepard Gleason

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.