behind AotW

I’ve occasionally found Confederate veterans of the Battle of Sharpsburg who were later captured but were released from prison by taking an oath and enlisting for United States Army service in US Volunteer Infantry regiments – soldiers known also as Galvanized Yankees. Apparently more than 5,000 ex-Confederates served in those units before the end of the war.

Yesterday I came upon a case of galvanizing unlike any of those I’d seen before:

Private David Bailey of Company C, 13th Alabama Infantry was captured at Sharpsburg in 1862 but soon after exchanged and returned to his unit. He was captured again, at Gettysburg in July 1863, and sent to Fort Delaware. The following spring he enlisted there as Landsman, US Navy – a Landsman being an entry-level sailor with no seagoing experience.

He was assigned to the armored monitor USS Saugus by July 1864 and probably served aboard as she operated on the James River near Richmond, VA into 1865. Here’s a lovely photograph of the crew on her foredeck, her massive gun turret behind them.

It is possible that Landsman Bailey is among those sailors. He was described at enlistment in the Navy as a 23 year old carpenter, 5′ 7″ tall, with dark complexion and hair and brown eyes, and a scar on his left arm. Perhaps you can pick him out.

Here’s another look at USS Saugus, with a minesweeping “rake” attached to her bow, on the James in early 1865.

I don’t know how long Bailey was aboard the ship; he was paroled as a Confederate soldier at Montgomery, Alabama in May 1865, and afterward disappeared from (my) view.

The photograph of the crew aboard USS Saugus is from the US National Archives. There’s another photograph, probably taken on the same day from the same location, of the officers of the ship – that photo is in the collection of the Naval Heritage and History Command (NHHC).

As is the side view of USS Saugus.

For much more about USS Saugus and her service, see the ship’s history page from the NHHC.

A paragraph in that history connects USS Saugus to another Sharpsburg veteran, Lewis Powell (aka Lewis Payne), photographed aboard the ship in front of the gun turret on 27 April 1865 by Alexander Gardner: