behind AotW

This would have been a familiar view for Stephen H Bogardus and his sons Stephen and Eliphalet (!) who worked together in the family’s saddle and harness shop about a block east on Main Street across from the Gregory House Hotel.

Stephen H Bogardus, Jr. enlisted in April 1861 in the 5th New York Infantry – the famous Duryée’s Zouaves – was promoted to Sergeant by October 1861 then commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the Purnell Legion of Maryland, with whom he saw action at Antietam, where he was at least slightly wounded. He mustered out with the Legion in October 1864 and was briefly Captain of a Company he raised in Poughkeepsie, part of the 192nd New York Infantry, in 1865.

He was a Lieutenant in the Regular Army after the war, to 1871, then briefly back in the leather business in Poughkeepsie. By 1880 and for the rest of his life he was a railroad man with the Santa Fe in New Mexico Territory.

Here’s a fine photograph of him supplied to his memorial by the late Brian Pohanka, taken sometime after he was brevetted Major in 1865 for his war service.

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Notes

The street scene above and the location of the Bogardus shop are from Edmund Platt’s The Eagle’s History of Poughkeepsie: from the earliest settlements, 1683 to 1905 (1905), which is online from the Internet Archive.

The Eagle refers to the local newspaper in which Stephen, Sr. was a frequent advertiser in 1860. Stephen, Jr. wrote often to the Eagle during the war, and those letters were edited and published in 2002 by Joel Craig as Dear Eagle: The Civil War Correspondence of Stephen H. Bogardus, Jr. to the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle.

The Bogardus’ occupation from the 1860 US Census.

Eliphalet P Bogardus (1834-1929) was probably named for his uncle Eliphalet Price Bogardus, who died at age 13 in 1827. Eliphalet and his father were still in business together as S.H. Bogardus & Son in Poughkeepsie to at least 1872.

Here’s the Rosetta Stone to my understanding of Joshua Taylor Kirby‘s varied Civil War military career. It’s his response to a survey of Confederate veterans the state of Alabama undertook in 1907 (and again in 1921 and 1927), now online from the FamilySearch database.

Kirby was a Private in Company K of the 2nd Mississippi Battalion in combat at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862 [more about that]. The battalion gained companies to become the 48th (not 41st) Mississippi Regiment in November 1862, then Company K converted to cavalry in January 1863, as Company F, 8th Confederate Cavalry – Private Kirby’s fourth named unit.

Alfred (1808-1862) and Rachel McNeice (1812-1883) Dulaney married in 1828 in Alabama and had 10 children there and in Mississippi. Except for Henry, the oldest, who died in 1880, they all lived to 1910 or later. Here they are in 1905, probably at Pleasonton, Itawamba County, MS, in a photograph shared by family genealogist S. Lambert to the FamilySearch database in 2016.

left to right, front row, generally in birth order: Tom (1831-1917), John (1833-1910), Sibbie (1836-1914), Caroline (1841-1912), Bill (1838-1917);
back row: Gilbert (1843-1926), Alfred (1845-1918), Joseph (1850-1926), and Mary (1857-1913).

Three of the brothers – Gilbert, William, and Henry – were soldiers together in the 2nd Mississippi Infantry Battalion and later the 8th Confederate Cavalry during the Civi War. Gib and Bill were both at Sharpsburg, MD on 17 September 1862 [more here].

(touch to enlarge)

Transcription:

We the undersigned non Commissioned and Privates of Co K. 2nd Mississippi Battalion, who were in the Battles of Manassas and Sharpsburg do hereby cordially recommend our Second Senior Lieutenant Thomas C. Lipscomb for promotion. Lieutenant Lipscomb has been with us on every occasion and by his courage and good management made our company as effective as possible. As much as we regret losing Lieutenant Lipscomb, yet we feel that his services to the county entitle him to a higher position.

J. [Joseph] A. Matthews, 1st Sergt.
A. [Arthur] C. Halbert, 2 Sergt.
E.D. Beams, 2nd Corpl
L. [Lem] Joiner
J.C. Hopper
B.K. Bullock
Wm. C. Grammer
P.E. Wright
A.J. [Andrew Jackson] Whitley
P. [Peter] Ingle

[back]
J.P. [John Peter] Sartor
Wm. Cockrum
J. [John] C. Stovall
B.F. Winkle
G. [Gilbert] Dulany
W. [William] Dulany
James Strickland, Sergt.
J.T. [Joshua Taylor] Kirby
Green Littleton
R. [Robert] K. Lea

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Notes

Lieutenant Lipscomb probably commanded the Battalion as the senior officer standing by the end of the day on 17 September 1862 at Sharpsburg. And he did get a promotion, to Captain of Cavalry. By late 1864 he was Colonel of the 6th Mississippi Cavalry.

Company K of the 2nd Battalion was converted to cavalry and attached as Company F to the 8th Confederate Cavalry (aka 2nd Regiment, Mississippi and Alabama Cavalry) in January 1863. Most of these men served in that unit from 1863 on.

First Sergeant Matthews, who wrote the petition, was appointed 2nd Lieutenant of Company H of the 8th Confederate Cavalry in April 1863 and was their Captain when he was killed near Columbia, SC in February 1865.

This document is among the papers of First Sergeant Matthews in his Compiled Military Service Record jacket (2nd Battalion/48th Regiment) in the National Archives; it’s online from fold3. He forwarded the petition in a letter to President Jefferson Davis of 9 November 1862.

One of the founding partners of Pittsburgh’s Equitable Meter Company (sometime after 1883) was Civil War veteran Henry Holdship King, who was a cavalry Lieutenant and staff officer in 1862. He came to my attention as the man the mortally wounded Colonel James H Childs, 4th Pennsylvania Cavalry called to his side at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

This is Lieutenant King in August 1862, newly appointed acting Assistant Adjutant General on Colonel W.W. Averell’s brigade staff.

Henry King had a long and successful life, with careers as an oil man, lawyer, and manufacturer, in Denver, CO, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, PA, where he grew up, the son of a similarly-minded entrepreneur.

Here’s his obituary from the New York Times of 4 October 1932 (touch to enlarge).

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The meter face pictured above was offered for sale on Etsy by MetalurgieVintage.

His August 1862 picture is from an Alexander Gardner group photograph of Averell and 3 of his officers, at the Library of Congress.

It’s generally known that at least hundreds, perhaps thousands of Confederate soldiers did not cross into Maryland with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia in September 1862 due to being barefoot. Until now, I’ve not seen documentation of this for a named individual soldier.

Meet Henry M. Adams, Private, Company C, 2nd Mississippi Battalion.

Henry spent most of September, while his unit and the rest of the army were in Maryland, at the depot established for men and equipment at Winchester, VA.

He had enlisted in his hometown of Columbus, MS on 19 July 1861 with Captain Auguston Mizell, later the regiment’s Quartermaster, in what became Company C of the 2nd Infantry Battalion. By January 1863 the Battalion had grown to become the 48th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. He was wounded in May 1863 in action with them at Chancellorsville, VA and was in hospitals and on furlough home to about October 1863. He was in and out of Richmond, VA hospitals from 6 May 1864 with a gunshot-broken jaw, and never returned to his Company. He was retired to Company D, First Battalion, Invalid Corps, PACS in Meridian, MS in February 1865 with no later military record.

The document above, like the rest of the military information about Private Adams, comes from his Compiled Military Service Record file at the National Archives, online from fold3.

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Update: As I scrubbed through the CMSRs for the men of the 2nd Mississippi Infantry Battalion, I found other men of that unit documented as left behind for lack of shoes …

– Pvt George C Boyle, Co. C; afterward listed as AWOL to December 1862 with no later military record.

– Pvt William S. Mount, Co. H; “left at Leesburg bare footed.” Largely absent, sick or wounded through 1863; captured or surrendered in Vicksburg, MS in October 1863 (while on furlough?). Released from Alton Prison, IL on 6 April 1864 after taking oath of allegiance.

In a comment on an earlier post about the cavalry action at Quebec Schoolhouse near Middletown, MD on 13 September 1862, Amy Matzet offered a fascinating story about one of the participants – Thomas Groves Day – a Private in Company E of the 3rd Indiana Cavalry.

The short version is that Private Day lost his carbine during the fight, picked up a Confederate weapon to replace it, but soon after lost that to a Confederate Surgeon under a flag of truce. Amazingly, a young Middletown resident and battle witness had kept that same Confederate carbine since 1862 and happened to meet Day when he visited the area in 1899. Thomas Day took that weapon home to Indiana.

Ms Matzet has the details thanks to a scrapbook of family papers, clippings, and photographs handed down by her grandmother Hester Lucille Day Warfield. Hester was Thomas Day’s granddaughter. Thanks to them, I can show you two excellent artifacts of that story.

His photograph, in 1899, on a visit to Quebec Schoolhouse:

A transcription of an article in the Middletown Valley Register (1899) telling his battle story and events of that visit:

James Wilson Barnett was a Private in the 53rd Pennsylvania Infantry at Antietam in September 1862 but was First Lieutenant and Quartermaster of the 10th Regiment, US Colored Troops by February 1864. In October 1865, then Assistant Inspector General of the First Brigade, 3rd Division, 25th Army Corps at Corpus Christi, TX, he applied to a selection board for a commission in the Regular US Army [touch a page to enlarge]:

Although he did not receive a commission, this letter is an excellent summary of his war service.

Thanks to Ric Thomas for this, from his considerable collection of documents about J.W. Barnett; as a “youngster” Mr Thomas heard stories about Barnett from his daughter Nancy Elder Barnett (1875-1968).

I’ve been through thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of the cards which make up the Compiled Military Service Records (CMSR) for my guys. I’ve never seen a card like this one (transcription below).

It is from the CMSR jacket for Benjamin Franklin Taylor. He rose from Private to Colonel of the 2nd Maryland Infantry, USA from 1861 to 1865. The original CMSRs are at the National Archives. I got this digital copy online from fold3.

There are two possibilities here.

One: some wag (or the subject himself) entered this phony information in the original Regimental Descriptive Book for the 2nd Maryland, and the War Department clerk who created this card simply wrote down what he saw.

Two: the War Department clerk created the fictions himself.

I have not found a digital copy of 2nd Maryland’s Regimental Descriptive Book from the Maryland Archives, the National Archives, or fold3, so I can’t yet verify which is the case. I would not be surprised to learn it has not been digitized – the wisdom is that the fragile paper Descriptive Books have been literally transcribed on cards in the CMSRs, so no one really needs to see them.

Given that at least some of the the information on the card is correct, it’s plausible that this card is a true transcription from the Descriptive Book record. But it seems unlikely that the maintainers of the Descriptive Book – the regimental Adjutants (and there were at least 4 during the war) – would have let such obviously bad information stand.

But it’s equally hard for me to imagine the War Department clerk would insert green skin and blue hair, given the seriousness of his task. And no, screwer is not a legitimate 19th Century occupation. Could it have been momentary giddiness? Boredom? It’s also hard to believe a supervisory clerk didn’t catch it.

In either case, this is one heck of a CMSR card!

Drury Webb, the name at the bottom of the card, was Drury Edgar Webb (1864-1934) from Knox County, TN. According to the Official Register of the United States (for 1891, 1895, 1915) he was a clerk in the Record and Pension Division, US War Department in Washington, DC by 1891. He was in the Office of Auditor of the Post Office by 1895 and to at least 1915, and still a clerk in Government service in Washington at the US Census of 1920, then age 55.

Also, there were 13 Webbs from the Knoxville area in the 2nd (East) Tennessee Infantry (US) during the Civil War, one of them Samuel Webb (1833-1881), Drury’s father; in case you were wondering in which direction his sympathies may have leaned.

Incidentally, a collection of Drury’s c. 1910 photographs of Knoxville are in the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knoxville County, TN Public Library [finding aid]

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Transcription

T | 2 | Md.
Benj. F. Taylor
Co. B., 2 Reg’t Maryland Inf.

Appears on
Regimental Descriptive Book
of the regiment named above.

Description.

Age …. years; height …. feet …. inches.
Complexion green
Eyes grey ; hair blue
Where born On the Ocean, North pole
Occupation screwer

Enlistment
When Sept. 30, 186…
Where Baltimore
By Whom Capt. Brunner; term 3 y’rs.
Remarks …

Drury Webb
Copyist.

________________

National Archives sources:

The Regimental Descriptive Book: NARA Record Group 94: Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Regimental and Company Books of Civil War Volunteer Union Organizations, 1861–1867 (“Regimental Record Books”), Regimental and Company Books of the 2nd Maryland Infantry Regiment (NAID: 6340761) [finding aid].

CMSRs: NARA Record Group 94: Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Volunteer Organizations During the American Civil War, 1890–1912 (“Civil War CMSRs”), [Maryland] Taylor, Benjamin F – Age 23, Year: 1863 – Second Infantry, Af-Wi (NAID: 39425927) [finding aid]

Camp scene taken Alex. Va. 1865; Field, Staff & Line 2nd Md. A photograph among the Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Maryland, posted to flickr; original from the Maryland Historical Society.

Seated: 2nd Lt. Charles H. Boone (Co. A), Quartermaster Thomas H. Marshall, Capt. Frederick W. Heck (Co. K), Col. Benjamin Franklin Taylor, Lt. Col. James H. Wilson, Adjutant John Schwab, Surgeon James H. McCullough;
Standing: Capt. John M. Long (Co. G), Capt. Conrad Boettger (Co. H), Capt. Henry L.E. Premier (Co. D), Capt. James D. Loades (Co. C), Capt. John Sweeney (Co. B), Capt. Henry Sivel (Co. I), Lt. William Thomas (Co. D), Capt. George Hopf (Co. E).