behind AotW

This piece in the Waco Daily Examiner of 8 November 1887 [online from the Portal to Texas History] features an interview with Waco, TX merchant P.M. Ripley. Ripley was formerly First Sergeant of Company E of the 4th Texas Infantry and survived wounds at Second Manassas and Sharpsburg during the war.

His store in Waco can be seen (as #14) on an 1886 birds-eye-view map of the city [from the Library of Congress] seen in a previous post here on behind AotW.

[click to read the whole piece]

The greed alluded to was that of the Novelty Iron Works of Dubuque, IA. See more about them from the Encyclopedia Dubuque.

This lovely bird’s-eye-view map was produced by Beck & Pauli, lithographers in Milwaukee, WI, and is online from the Library of Congress. Use their excellent interface if you’d like to really zoom in. The original has yellowed quite a bit – I’ve adjusted the color.

On Eighth Street, labeled #21 (circled), is the Lehman House – a boarding house and hotel run by Sharpsburg survivor Joe Lehman. He also operated Joe Lehman’s Ice Cream Parlor & Restaurant on Fourth Street.

German-born Lehman was a baker in Waco before the war and was a Private in the 4th Texas when he was wounded at Sharpsburg in 1862. He afterward lost his left arm to amputation at the shoulder, and he finally returned home in June 1863.

Private Michael Sullivan was terribly wounded by 5 bullets at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862, and despite attentive care, suffered for about 7 months before he died of massive infection and other effects of his wounds.

This image is of page 185 in Volume 2, Part 3 of US Army Surgeon General J.K. Barnes’ Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (MSHWR, 1870-88). All 6 books of the MSHWR are online thanks to the National Library of Medicine at NIH in Bethesda, MD.

Private Riley Davison of the 4th Texas Infantry was mortally wounded in combat at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862. He died in US Army General Hospital #1 in Frederick, MD on 3 February 1863 and his burial was recorded by US Army Assistant Surgeon Robert F. Weir (1838-1927), surgeon-in-charge.

See more about USA General Hospital #1 from Terry Reimer at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick. And a brief bio sketch of Dr Weir from the SpringerLink research database.

William H Lessing was a very young Private in the 4th Texas Infantry when he was shot through the left lung at Sharpsburg in September 1862.

I do not know what, if anything, befell then-Judge Lessing as a result of shooting Mr. Quinn in December 1888, but he was still practicing the law and apparently esteemed in his community right up to his death at age 65 in 1910.

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Transcription

FORT WORTH, Texas, Dec. 18  — A special to the Gazette says William H. Lessing, a prominent lawyer of San Angelo, Texas, shot and killed Michael Quinn, a bartender, at Big Springs, this State, this morning. Lessing made no attempt to escape. A disagreement at a gambling table was the cause of the shooting. [in the New York Times of 19 December 1888]

An excellent and expressive photograph from the Lawrence T. Jones III Texas photography collection at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He’s George L. Robertson of Austin, TX, formerly of Company B, 4th Texas Infantry. His father was prominent in Austin before the war as was George in the decades after.

For further reference:

• Historic Resources Survey of East Austin (pdf)
• Local Historic District Application: Robertson/Stuart & Mair Historic District, Austin, Texas (pdf)
• Nomination Form: National Register of Historic Places for the French Legation, Austin (Robertson family home 1848-1949, pdf)
• Reimagining Austin’s French Legation from Preservation Austin (with video tour)

William R Hamby enlisted in 1861 at age 16 as a Private in the 4th Texas Infantry, was wounded at 2nd Manassas and Sharpsburg, and was discharged for disability in November 1862.

Nearly half a century later he was instrumental in raising funds to have an impressive monument to Hood’s Texas Brigade placed on the grounds of the state capital in Austin.

He wrote this letter to Texas State Senator Robert Emmet Cofer (1870-1944) looking for an appropriation of state money to match that already raised privately in an effort to get the project finished. There’s some stirring stuff here:

Although the state provided no funds, after all, Hamby and his committee did get the needed contributions to finish and install the monument in October 1910.

This copy of the letter was sold by Buckingham Books.

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Here are some more Hamby artifacts.

This carte de visite (CDV) is in the Lawrence T. Jones III Texas photography collection at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. There are a couple of interesting things about it, though. He’s in a Captain’s uniform – a rank he did not reach with the 4th Texas. And he looks somewhat older than 17 or 18 years – the maximum age he would have been in uniform.

I’ve found no record of any later war service after his November 1862 discharge, but it’s possible he was in a local militia or other home-front unit. His 1910 bio sketch from the Brigade Association says he “rose to rank of Captain during the war,” but offers no details to narrow that down.

On a side note, it’s curious that all of his military records with the 4th Texas list him as R.W. Hamby, as if he was trying to hide his name – perhaps because he was under age? It’s a mystery to me.

This engraved portrait is from 1888 when he elected to the Texas House of Representatives. It accompanies his biography (pg. 227) in the Personnel of the Texas State Government (1889); online in a PDF from the Milam County Historical Commission.

Here he is again, with other survivors of his Company in November 1897 at the Tom Green Rifles Reunion in Nashville, TN, in a photograph contributed to his Find-a-grave memorial by Sharon Rish King and is from the Confederate Veteran magazine (Volume 5, November 1897).
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Here’s a page from the ledger of the Bell County [Texas] Ex-Confederate Association which was organized in 1888. An original member was Uriah Gould, late Corporal in Company B, 4th Texas Infantry. Born in New York State, he was an early Wisconsin pioneer, Mexican War veteran, Sharpsburg survivor, and with wife Ann Elizabeth the father of 20 children in 21 years.

The ledger is online from The Portal to Texas History courtesy of the Lena Armstrong Public Library, Belton.

A fairly typical example of the kind of confusion you often find in Civil War records is this card for Sergeant David M Martendale, Company A, 4th Texas Infantry from his Compiled Service Records. It was transcribed from Frederick hospital records, and it’s not hard to image how the medical staff heard his name as Martin Dale.

There again is that marvelous term “Vuln Sclopet”, short for the neo-Latin Vulnus Sclopetarium – gunshot wound.

Sergeant Martendale had been mortally wounded at Sharpsburg on 17 September, and died in a Richmond hospital on 12 December 1862.

This is Oberlin graduate and part-time teacher James M. Ginn before he enlisted as a Private in the 7th Ohio Infantry in April 1861. An Antietam veteran, he changed his name to Guinn about 1868 and was later a principal in Anaheim (1869-81) and superintendent of Los Angeles (1881-83) schools in California, and a prolific writer of California histories.

This photograph accompanies an excellent piece about his life from the Sidney Daily News – the original is probably in Guinn’s papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

Thanks to sharp-eyed reader Rina R for the poke to look back into James.