“This Horrid Affair”: Friday Afternoon Executions in the Army of the Potomac, Part 4.

September 18, 1863, was a black day for the Army of the Potomac. Recently, courts-martial had finished determining the cases of seven deserters. All of them had received death sentences. Orders went to five divisional commanders, instructing them to carry out the executions between 1 P.M. and 4 P.M. By the end of the day, all seven deserters were dead; however, few of the spectators believed the lives of the condemned men had been extinguished in any sort of humane way.

As mentioned in the previous posts, Friday afternoon executions had become something of a tradition. After every court-martial, the slate of condemned deserters had until Friday to acquire a Presidential pardon or face a firing squad. Although Lincoln had been generous with pardons early in the war, he backed off during the summer of 1863, allowing Union generals to send a clear message to the army’s deserters and bounty jumpers. Desertion was now a capital crime. However, as several of the recent executions had proved, the killing of deserters did not always happen cleanly. The next surge of executions—those of September 18—continued to prove that point.

That day, the men scheduled for death were:

·         Private Albert Jones, Company K, 3^rd Maryland Volunteers

·         Private Cornelius Treece, Company K, 78^th New York Volunteers

·         Private William Smith, Company E, 78^th New York Volunteers

·         Private George Van, Company D, 12^th New York Volunteers

·         Corporal Jacob Wierdain, Company G, 119^th New York Volunteers

·         Private George Layton, Company K, 14^th Connecticut Volunteers

·         Private Edward Elliott, Company I, 14^th Connecticut Volunteers

Friday, September 18, was a wet, blustery day. A rough storm had blown in overnight, making the scene especially grim and dour. At 1:30, Major General Carl Schurz’s division formed three sides of a box just south of its encampment at Catlett’s Station in preparation for the execution of Corporal Jacob Wierdain (sometimes listed as Airdam), a New York City resident who had enlisted on September 5, 1862, and who had deserted twice already. As the troops waited, a sharp rain shower rolled in, soaking them, and they soon broke for cover. After 2 P.M.—when the storm passed—Schurz’s troops returned to the field to carry out the execution. Sometime after 3 P.M., after waiting in agonizing silence for nearly an hour, a brass band approached, playing the “Death March.” A wagon followed. It carried Wierdain, a minister, and his coffin. The wagon unloaded the condemned man at his grave, a rude hole dug along the open side of the square.

Second Lieutenant William S. Moffat of the 143^rd New York stood in the line of troops. Writing to his wife that evening, he described the appearance of the prisoner. He wrote, “I observed that he appeared weak & seemed to stagger a little when he alighted. He was led around the north end to the west side of the grave by the minister & both knelt upon the coffin while he offered a brief prayer which I could not hear.” As Wierdain and the minister completed their religious services, the twenty-four men selected to carry out the execution readied their weapons and formed into two lines. They had less than an hour to finish off the ceremony before the 4 P.M. deadline rolled in. Accordingly, the execution squad did not give Wierdain much time to get a last look at life. Lieutenant Moffat completed his story:

Before the conclusion of the prayer a man came behind him & tied a white handkerchief over his eyes & at its close the minister assisted to turn around and seat himself on the coffin. The minister after shaking him by the hand withdrew and the next moment eleven shots were fired into his breast. He instantly fell backward across the coffin and must have died instantly for he never stirred after he fell. Physicians examined his pulse for a few moments, then his body was lifted by four men and laid in the box, the red blood streaming from his breast and down his sides. The cover was nailed down & the box lowered into the grave; another brief prayer was made, the earth hastily thrown in & heaped upon the grave and within ten minutes from the time he sat there a living man, he was buried and we were gone!

Moffat’s opinion of the execution was especially telling, considering that he had served on the court that condemned Wierdain. (Indeed, Moffat had been the one to pronounce sentence.) When he returned to camp, Moffat penned a four-page letter to his wife describing what he saw. Moffat believed the execution must have served a greater purpose than ending one man’s life. He wrote, “I felt badly at the time [I sentenced him] but there are so many deserting lately that we felt that an example must be made of some of them as a warning & a terror to others.”

Wierdan was not the only soldier to die that afternoon, and because of the foul weather, all the other executions had to be rushed, just as his had been. Over at Raccoon Ford—the encampment of the 1^st Division, 12^th Army Corps—Brigadier General Alpheus Williams made arrangements to carry out the execution of Private Albert Jones, Company K, 3^rd Maryland. Of all the men executed on that fateful day, Jones possessed the longest enlistment, having joined the Union army on November 13, 1861. Apparently a young man, Jones had deserted twice, and after his second infraction, the court threw the book at him. In the early afternoon, Williams formed his division into three sides of a square. Jones’s coffin sat at the open end, and awaiting him were his entire division and about a dozen men assigned to the firing squad.

Apparently, Williams decided not to wait out the storm. He held the execution amid the wind and rain. “It was an equinoctial day,” Williams wrote home afterward, “high wind and cold rain, a regular gale, which howled through the woods and poured in torrents. It cleared up about noon, partially, and I had the unpleasant task of calling out my division to shoot a deserter. It began to poor again in equinoctial torrents as my troops were forming, and the gloom of the weather was in concert with the melancholy duty.”  Williams called forth his provost guard to escort Jones to his coffin. One of the men standing in the 1^st Division’s line, twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Henry C. Morhous of the 123^rd New York, remembered Jones’s appearance. Morhous later wrote, “The young man to all appearance was not over twenty-two years of age, slightly built, with fair face and black eyes—probably the idol of his doting mother at home.”

Unlike some of the other executions carried out on this unpleasant day, Jones’s death went forward without a hitch. The prisoner’s guards marched Jones up to his coffin and sat him down. As Morhous recalled, Jones “cast one long, lingering look at the troops surrounding him, at the beautiful hills way off across the Rapidan, as if fully realizing that it was the last time he should look upon things earthly, and was then blindfolded and seated upon his coffin.” As Williams described it, “The poor fellow sat on his coffin and fell back stone dead at the discharge, like one going to sleep. It was his second desertion. . . . Of course, he had no hope of escape.” With that, Williams instructed his division to form into column and parade past Jones’s corpse. Each man got a good look at him, a reminder of the deadly consequences of desertion.

Jones was lucky in that his execution was quick and painless. The situation was not so fortunate in the nearby camp of the 2^nd Division, 12^th Corps. At midafternoon, Brigadier General John W. Geary’s soldiers carried out the executions of Privates Cornelius Treece and William Smith. Both men belonged to the same regiment, the 78^th New York, and both men had enlisted at around the same time, the winter of 1862. Treece (or Trace or Truss, as he was sometimes listed) was twenty-three-years-old and came from Indiana. Smith was thirty-five-years-old and came from Alden, New York, the oldest of all the deserters executed on September 18. Geary’s recollection of the event emphasized the necessity of the executions. To him, they were a warning to the army’s newly-arrived draftees and substitutes that desertion would no longer be tolerated. Writing home to his wife, Geary aired his feelings:

Yesterday, two soldiers of this Division were executed for the crime of Desertion. They were shot to death by musketry, in presence of [the] entire division drawn up in a hollow square of three sides. The men were killed by a firing party of 12 men after which the entire Division marched past the place of execution, and then the deceased were buried without honors. Such is military life and discipline.

Referring to the nearby execution of Jones, Geary wrote, “There was one man shot for the same crime in the first Division of this Corps, and 16 [sic] within the entire army. Thus you see the crime of desertion will no longer go unpunished, when so many expiate their crimes on the same day.”

Despite Geary’s attempt to defend the executions as a military necessity, some men who witnessed Treece’s and Smith’s deaths complained that the firing parties had not carried out their terminations with any mercy. The wet weather had seeped into their rifles, making it difficult for the executioners to ensure a clean kill on the first volley. One witness, Sergeant Henry Hayward of the 28^th Pennsylvania, wrote to his father with disgust: “we have just come from the place of execution where 2 men from our division were shot for desertion. they did not kill them [on] the first volley. the reserve had to come up. it was an awful sight. after the first volley, one of them was still setting on his Coffin.” Lieutenant George K. Collins of the 149^th New York confirmed the story. Writing years later, he remembered, “The marksmen selected [by Geary], for some reason, did not perform their duty in a skillful manner, and hence one or two subsequent shots were fired to relieve the sufferers from agony.”

Displeasure also appeared at the execution of Private George Van (or Vane), who died by the hands of the firing squad attached to the 1^st Division, 5^th Corps, although, here, the soldiers expressed contempt, not at the manner of death, but that the execution had even gone forward. Private Van, a twenty-four-year-old farmer, enlisted on November 26, 1861, in Buffalo, New York. He served with his regiment until the middle of the Peninsula Campaign, when, on May 13, 1862, he deserted at White House Landing. Although Van’s regiment, the 12^th New York, mustered out a year later, the War Department still held him accountable for the year of service he had dodged. Authorities apprehended him in August 1863 and returned him to his old division. By the thirteenth of the month, a court-martial found him guilty.

By most accounts, Private Van stood his death sentence with bravery. Once again, the execution squads rushed the condemned man to the scene. At 3 P.M.—just one hour from the deadline—near Culpeper Court House, the soldiers of the 1^st Division, 5^th Corps, formed to watch Van die. Captain Francis Donaldson, an officer attached to the 118^th Pennsylvania, remembered the scene vividly:

3 P.M. [our] division paraded to witness execution of a private of the 12^th N.Y. shot for desertion. We occupied a high ground overlooking a valley in which the execution took place. This was a sad affair. The prisoner was a brave man, a very brave man indeed to the last. He walked jauntingly along to the selected spot, refused to have his eyes bandaged, declined the services of the chaplain and stood looking at and facing the firing party. As the volley of musketry rang out in the stillness, a loud Oh! of mingled pity and horror involuntarily burst from the men. No matter what his crime, no matter how guilty, he was a bold, brave fellow, and we all felt sorry for him. . . . We returned to camp in silence.

Of all the executions, the ones that killed Privates George Layton and Edward Elliott produced the most irritation. It took several tries for the ill-prepared firing squad to deliver the killing blow. The two soldiers, Layton and Edwards, had the shortest terms of service of any of the condemned men. Both had mustered into the ranks of 14^th Connecticut on July 18, 1863. Elliott was a twenty-two-year-old draftee and Layton (sometimes written as Laton) was a twenty-year-old substitute who often went by a fake name (either George Joy or Charles Eastman).

Late in the afternoon, the 3^rd Division, 2^nd Corps, formed up to witness Elliott’s and Layton’s deaths. Major General William French, who normally commanded the 3^rd Corps, held temporary command of the 3^rd Division’s execution proceedings. What historians know about the debacle comes from The Valiant Hours, a memoir written by Private Thomas F. Galwey of 8^th Ohio. According to him, the firing squads botched the execution horribly. When all was ready, the two firing parties took position in front of Layton and Elliott. At a command from the provost marshal, the squads pulled their triggers. The first volley struck one of the two deserters (Galwey did not say which one), wounding him slightly. He fell over, bleeding on his coffin. The other condemned man did not receive a scratch. In fact, after he heard the volley, he broke loose from his pinion and snatched the handkerchief from his eyes. Galwey remembered, “A murmur of mingled pity and disgust ran through the division. Most of the pieces had only snapped caps. Here was either wanton carelessness in the Provost Guard or a Providential interposition to save the lives of the men.”

General French fumed at the firing squads’ failure. He ordered the un-wounded deserter rebound and re-blindfolded and instructed the squads to reload. In a few minutes, a second volley rang out, but with no different result. This time, the firing squads wounded the injured man a second time (but did not kill him), and they completely missed the un-wounded man, driving him—as Galwey described it—“into a paroxysm of fear and trembling without even hitting him!” Now, an audible groan passed through the division, revealing the soldiers’ abhorrence of the proceedings.  Galwey narrated the conclusion:

The left-hand squad fired once more, killing the wounded deserter, for he fell back upon his coffin and never stirred again. But the right-hand squad only wounded the unhit man at the next volley. He continued to struggle to free himself of his pinions. The guns had evidently been loaded the evening before and become wet from the rains which fell during the night. The Provost Marshal now brought up his men, one by one, and made them pull the trigger with the muzzle almost touching the unfortunate devil’s head! But strange to relate, they only snapped caps, the victim shivering visibly each time. At last the Provost Marshal himself, drawing his revolver, placed the muzzle at the man’s head and discharged all the barrels of it! This finished the man and he fell over into his coffin and never moved again. General French rode up. As we could plainly see, he was indignant at this clumsy butchery. Artists representing the New York newspapers or magazines made on-the-spot sketches of this horrid affair.

As Galwey’s account made clear, it took several tries to kill the condemned deserters because the wet weather had fouled some of rifles belonging to the execution squads. The killing of these seven deserters had been done in a rush. It was a desperate attempt to complete the killings before the 4 P.M. deadline. Thus, it made for a very horrid affair all around.

 

 

This is an unidentified Union deserter photographed postmortem. Was he one of those killed in the summer of 1863?

 

“The Thought of this Bloody Execution Sickens Me”: A Saturday Afternoon Execution in the Army of the Potomac, Part 3.

Of all the executions conducted by the Army of the Potomac in 1863, there was only one that did not fall on a Friday. On Saturday, August 29, the 5^th Corps executed five men belonging to the 118^th Pennsylvania. Initially, all five were scheduled to face firing squads on the previous day, but due to a prolonged dialogue between Abraham Lincoln and George Meade, the executions were postponed by twenty-four hours.

The men slated for execution were:

·         Private Charles Walter (sometimes listed as Charles Zene), 118^th Pennsylvania

·         Private Emil Lae (sometimes listed as Emile Duffie or Emil Duffe), 118^th Pennsylvania

·         Private George Kuhne (sometimes listed as George Week), 118^th Pennsylvania

·         Private John Rainese (sometimes listed as George Rionese), 118^th Pennsylvania

·         Private John Folaney (sometimes listed as John Folancy), 118^th Pennsylvania

All five men had enlisted that summer, going to the front as substitutes of drafted men. Murmurs of disgust echoed through the army after the rulings of the courts-martial had been issued. Four of the accused did not speak English, none of them had been given defense attorneys (or even been made aware that they could request counsel), and two of the trials were conducted in less than twenty minutes. The executions “ought not to have taken place,” wrote the 118^th Pennsylvania’s chaplain years later.

Although he knew few of the details of the sketchy trials, Captain Francis Donaldson of the 118^th Pennsylvania fretted about the coming execution in a letter to his brother. Clearly divided even in his own opinion, Donaldson could not stand in strong support of the executions, nor in rigid condemnation of them. In the past, he wrote, deserters had always been pardoned, “But now the law is to take its course. . . . My God! What a wretched, horrible predicament they are in. Enough to move the heart of stone. They have our most sincere sympathy, at the same time we approve the sentence. This has been a case of aggravated and systematic ‘bounty jumping,’ and they will be shot like dogs. Awful, most awful. I can write no more, the thought of this bloody execution sickens me.”

Realizing that President Lincoln was their only option for mercy, the five convicted deserters convinced someone to send him a telegram, which arrived at the White House on August 26 at 4:45 P.M.: “We the undersigned sentenced to suffer death for desertion, . . . humbly beg that you exercise your authority to commute our sentence, to imprisonment & hard labor, for any term of years, you may see fit, as we each have wives & children, depending upon us.”

Lincoln was not in the mood to consider their appeal. The next day, he telegraphed General Meade this response: “Walter, Rainese, Faline, Lae, & Kuhne appeal to me for mercy, without giving any ground for it whatever. I understand these are very flagrant cases, and that you deem their punishment as being indispensable to the service. If I am not mistaken in this, please let them know at once that their appeal is denied.” General Meade’s reply, which came a short time later, supported the President’s decision. These five men, Meade explained, would be the first substitutes executed by the army for the crime of desertion, and he considered it vital to make an example of them. He wrote, “They . . .  being the first of this class whose cases came before me, I believed that humanity, the safety of this Army, and the most vital interests of the Country, required their prompt execution as an example.”

Due to the question of the appeal, Meade postponed the execution until Saturday, although he still required it to take place between the hours of noon and 4 P.M. Thus, at 2:30 P.M., August 29, at the 5^th Corps encampment near Beverly Ford, the entire corps formed on a slight rise of ground, and took the shape of a three-sided box with an opening near the five graves. The firing party consisted of eighty men; however, only forty of them possessed live rounds. At 3 P.M., the funeral procession appeared, starting with a brass band playing the “March of Saul,” followed by a provost guard of sixty men, then the five condemned men, then squads of eight carrying the coffins, and three chaplains (one priest, one rabbi, and one Protestant minister). The procession and prayers took about forty-five minutes to complete, and soon, the time approached fifteen minutes until the 4 P.M. deadline. As Captain Donaldson remembered, Major General Charles Griffin’s “shrill and penetrating voice was heard above the awful silence—‘Shoot these men, or after 10 minutes it will be murder. Shoot them at once!’”

Hastily, the sergeant of the guard tied handkerchiefs around the condemned men and the chaplains offered a few last-minute goodbyes. Donaldson narrated the next few minutes:

They hadn’t long to wait. ‘Attention guard,’ in the clear ringing tones called Capt. [James D.] Orne, ‘shoulder arms.’ ‘Forward march,’ and the solid steady tramp of the detail sounded appalling on the ear. Within 6 paces, ‘Halt,’ ordered the Captain. ‘Ready.’ ‘Aim.’ ‘Fire,’ and sixty pieces flashed full in the breasts of the deserters, and military justice was satisfied.

Four of the deserters slammed back on their coffins, upon which they were sitting, and the fifth remained upright. Captain Orne called up a surgeon to ask if the upright man was dead, as he intended to use his pistol on him if the musketry had failed to deliver a mortal blow. The surgeon pronounced the upright man dead, and with that, the burial details began boxing the remains, burying the coffins, and marking the graves. As the 5^th Corps marched off the field, the brass band played a cheery tune, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

The soldiers who witnessed the executions of the five 118^th Pennsylvania deserters tended to disagree on the results of what they had seen. Some confirmed what Donaldson claimed, that the band played merry tunes as the soldiers marched off the field. Others, however, argued that the exit was quiet and depressing. “Silently we viewed the solemn spectacle,” wrote a Massachusetts soldier years later, “and as silently returned to camp—not with cheerful, martial airs, as when a faithful soldier, having met a soldier’s death, is left to his last repose, but with the sad ceremony uneffaced,  and all deeply impressed with the ignominy of such an end.” A Pennsylvania officer expressed a sterner opinion: “Men who sell their blood for money and then desert deserve no sympathy.”

For the first two months, the Army of the Potomac had killed eight veterans who had deserted the cause. Now, five “bounty jumpers” had been added to the pile. They were not the last.

 

 

Of all the Army of the Potomac's executions, the August 29, 1863, execution of the 118th Pennsylvania's deserters was the one most often depicted. This image of the execution appeared in Harpers Weekly.

 

This sketch depicts the procession. Careful examination shows the coffins, the priest, the minister, and the  rabbi.

This sketch by Alfred Waud depicts the execution, although taken from a great distance.

Here's another sketch, but this one emphasizing the firing party.

Here's one more, based on the long shot above, showing the grandeur of the 5th Corps as it watched the five deserters die.

 

 

“The Execution was Openly Condemned”: Friday Afternoon Executions in the Army of the Potomac, Part 2.

On August 1, 1863, the Army of the Potomac settled along the banks of the Rappahannock River. Under orders from the War Department, it ceased its three-week pursuit of Robert E. Lee’s army, a chase commenced after its incredible victory at Gettysburg. As the summer entered its hottest days, the Union army made preparations to bivouac and acquire some much-needed rest. However, that period of inactivity restarted the weekly executions of convicted deserters. For the past few weeks, the generals had been debating what action to take about the rash of desertion spreading through the army. Most agreed that the first federal draft, which had gone into effect during the second week of July, had spawned an unruly class of men known as “bounty jumpers,” enlistees who substituted for drafted men, who took their enlistment bonus and then deserted, leaving the army without recruits and the federal government defrauded out of tens of thousands of dollars.

Eager to send a warning to all arriving draftees and substitutes, the new army commander, Major General George Gordon Meade, signed orders instructing his divisional commanders to carry out executions for recently convicted deserters. This policy was identical to that of his predecessor, Joseph Hooker. However, Meade had to contend with an obstacle that Hooker did not. With the Battle of Gettysburg passed, Abraham Lincoln wanted to return to a lenient policy, pardoning deserters who were under sentence of death. In fact, on July 24, even as Meade’s army skirmished with Confederates near Front Royal, Lincoln issued a stay of execution for six convicted deserters attached to the Army of the Potomac. 

Lincoln wanted Meade to wield a merciful hand, but apparently, Lincoln’s insistence on forgiveness had limits. When flagrant cases surfaced, Lincoln refused to stand in the way of capital punishment. It is a hard to explain why Lincoln involved himself in some cases and not others, and in the end, his policy of leniency is a bit of mystery. But in the end, Meade proved to be the hardliner in the relationship. He advised carrying out the death sentences attached to these flagrant cases, and once again, military justice ran unfettered. The same as Hooker, Meade decreed that every Friday the convicted deserters needed to be shot between the hours of noon and 4 P.M.

Prior to the Gettysburg Campaign, the Army of the Potomac had executed only four men for the crime of desertion—the subject of my previous post. Thus, only the unlucky soldiers of the 1^st and 12^th Corps had the unfortunate distinction of watching capital punishment carried out to its fullest degree. After the Gettysburg Campaign concluded, the soldiers of the 2^nd and 6^th Corps witnessed their first executions. Four more men—Thomas Jewett, Jesse Mayberry, William Hill, and John Smith—joined the growing list.

On August 14, the 6^th Corps executed Private Thomas Jewett of the 5^th Maine. Jewett was a thirty-three-year-old laborer from Rockland, Maine, who deserted his regiment during the Battle of Salem Church, May 3, 1863. Authorities arrested him in Washington, D.C., and on July 17, returned him to his regiment. His court-martial lasted eight days. (Among other items, it determined that Jewett had also deserted the Royal Army before entering into U.S. service. In essence, his execution would serve justice for two countries.) By August 7, with a two-thirds vote, the court found him “guilty” and sentenced him to death by musketry.

At the appointed hour, a wagon bore Jewett and his coffin to the three-sided box formed by the 1^st Division, 6^th Corps, near its Warrenton encampment. The scene was gut-wrenching, so remembered Lieutenant George Bicknell, a member of Jewett’s 5^th Maine. The band, wrote Bicknell, was playing “the most melancholy and soul-depressing piece of music written upon five bars. The whole arrangement was calculated to awe the victim.” Strangely, this downhearted scene seemed to have no effect on the condemned prisoner, who, according to Bicknell, “To all external appearances, at least, . . . met his death calmly.” As Jewett passed his old regiment, he waved his hand cheerfully, saying, “Goodbye, boys!” Indeed, remembered Bicknell, Jewett “seemed to have estimated the necessary amount of nerve which was requisite to carry him through, and prided himself on being able to exhibit it.”

After parading past the entire division, Jewett knelt on his coffin, joined a chaplain in prayer, and when finished, the provost marshal blindfolded him. Then, the provost marshal signaled to the firing party, which consisted of six men, one of whom wielded a weapon with a blank charge. The executioners volleyed into the prisoner, hitting him with all five musket balls. Jewett died instantly. After that, the 1^st Division closed ranks and marched off the field, passing his badly mangled corpse. Bicknell related that it was done so “that all might read the lesson of the results which follow treachery and desertion. It was a most awful sight.”

The scene produced another demoralizing display, one equal in gruesomeness to the executions held on June 12 and June 19, especially since the men of the 1^st Division, 6^th Corps, had never seen anything like it in their lives. Another observer, Surgeon Daniel Holt of the 121^st New York, confirmed that few men could stomach such an inhumane form of death. Although Holt and his men had seen plenty of battle, this kind of death was nothing comparable to it. He wrote home, “It is a sad sight, and I think I shall never again witness such an [sic] one if I can help it. Unlike death in battle, when all is excitement and you are looking for it, here every preparation is made and all the steadiness of decorum marks the whole transaction.”

Seven days later, the parade of executions continued, and another segment of the Army of the Potomac carried on with the Friday killings. This time, the condemned man was Private Jesse Mayberry, 71^st Pennsylvania. Mayberry—a married Philadelphian with three children—enlisted in the Union army on August 20, 1862, when he was twenty-seven-years-old. He did not stay long in the army. After a mere eighteen days, he deserted from his unit while it was stationed at Fort Slocum. Arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced, he too faced death by musketry.

The day of the execution, August 21, the 2^nd Corps was stationed at Morrisville. The procession began at the headquarters of the 2^nd Division, 2^nd Corps. A brass band struck up the “dead march,” and led the cortege: the brass band in front; next, four soldiers carrying the coffin on their shoulders; next, Mayberry came arm-in-arm with his chaplain, who, according to a witness, “never ceased talking consolation and cheer to the victim, who was very pale, yet heroically firm, keeping step to his own dead march.” Next, a platoon of twelve armed executioners marched in column, followed by a squad of twelve guards.

 Sergeant Thomas Meyer described the next few minutes:

The Chaplain offered [a] prayer, then shook his hand, bade him good-bye, asked him to be firm and then stepped aside. The condemned arose, took off his coat, threw it aside; the officer in charge stepped up and blindfolded him with a white handkerchief, seated him on his coffin and stepped aside. All was now ready. The condemned with both hands pulled wide open the front of his shirt, baring his entire breast, holding fast awaiting the leaden bullet. Most agonizing must have been this moment of suspense.

From a distance of ten paces, eight men from the execution squad fired a volley. Mayberry spun half way around and fell, hanging on his coffin, not dead. As had happened at the very first execution—that of Private Woods—the first volley had failed to get a clean kill. Mayberry writhed in pain, violently moving his hands and feet. The provost marshal beckoned to the reserve squad—four men—and two volunteers came forward. They came to within point blank range, placed the muzzles of their guns into Mayberry’s chest, and fired. After that, Mayberry stopped twitching. The attending physician pronounced him dead thirty minutes later. As Sergeant Meyer remembered it, “A deep murmur of disgust swept through the troops in attendance, and the execution was openly condemned.”

If the soldiers of the 2^nd Division, 2^nd Corps, hoped they would never see another botched execution, they were soundly disappointed. One week later, August 28, they had to form again and see the execution of two more men assigned to their division. They were:

·         Private William F. Hill, 20^th Massachusetts

·         Private John Smith, (sometimes listed as Thomas Waters) 1^st Company, Massachusetts Sharpshooters

Private William Hill, age 22, of the 20^th Massachusetts enlisted on July 14, 1862. He was unmarried, but had a 75-year-old father and five brothers and sisters. Although he volunteered for service, he claimed that he had been coerced into signing his name, a recruiter having gotten him drunk shortly before he enrolled. Hill served with his regiment until after the Battle of Antietam, when he deserted from Bolivar Heights, Virginia. He returned to his home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, and remained there until June 1863 when a policeman arrested him.

Private John Smith, age 37, was married but had no children. He enlisted on December 1, 1862, and fought in the Battle of Fredericksburg. In January 1863, he deserted his unit, which was stationed at Falmouth. He returned to Boston, where he lived, but when the draft act came, he decided to return to the army as a substitute, going in the place of a friend who had been drafted, even accepting $300 as compensation. Unfortunately, Smith was assigned to the 19^th Massachusetts, which as it happened, contained his old unit, the 1^st Company, Massachusetts Sharpshooters. (During the summer of the 1863, the Massachusetts Sharpshooter company had been transferred from the 15^th Massachusetts to the 19^th Massachusetts, and Smith had no idea that by re-enlisting he would be confronting his old comrades.) Although Smith gave a false name, the Sharpshooters recognized him and ordered his arrest. By August 27, the courts-martial of both men had turned out “guilty verdicts” and their divisional commander, Brigadier General Alexander Webb, ordered them executed by firing squad on the first available Friday, which was August 28.

At 2:30 P.M., Webb’s division formed for the execution on the road leading to Bealton Station, taking up three sides of a square. At the open edge, a fatigue detail dug two graves and placed two wooden coffins. In the center of the square, a sixteen-person firing party led by Lieutenant Mahlon Black readied its rifles. A corporal’s guard led the two condemned men to the scene of the execution where a chaplain from the 72^nd Pennsylvania conducted religious services. When the prayers ended, Lieutenant Black ordered the two men to kneel in front of their coffins and blindfolds placed over their eyes. Black shook each prisoner by the hand and then stepped to the left, beckoning to the firing party. He ordered, “Ready! Aim!-” At this point, Private Smith raised both hands into the air, exclaiming twice, “Oh, God have mercy upon us!” Before Black could shout, “fire,” all sixteen rifles went off, so one observer wrote, “and in the same instant the two unfortunate men fell forward, Smith on the left and Hill on the right. The former lay motionless on his back, at full length, with arms partly folded over his breast; the mouth opened and shut a few times, a heave and a sigh followed, and he was dead.”

Hill remained still for a moment, but then commenced to writhe in the grass. As had happened at the execution of Private John P. Woods and Jesse Mayberry, the firing squad had failed in its job to get a clean kill. Lieutenant Black called up one of the reserve firing squad, and ordered him to put a bullet through Hill’s head. According to a newspaper reporter who witnessed it, the ball passed through Hill’s skull, “causing the brain to ooze out on the grass.” Still, Hill continued to writhe. Another reserve executioner came up and blasted Hill through the head, and “strange as it may seem,” wrote the reporter, “it was a full two minutes before his life was extinct.”

Regardless of their opinions about the need for the executions, many soldiers disliked the gruesome terminations they had seen. They hoped these few death sentences would be sufficient to end the deserter problem. Captain Henry L. Abbott, an officer who watched the deaths of Hill and Smith, wrote to his father on September 4, saying, “Deserters are shot every Friday, 5 or ten at a time, & I trust the evil will soon be cured.”

 

This was wishful thinking.

 

 

 

“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.