behind AotW

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.

Major Walker was Assistant Adjutant General to General Darius Couch (First Division, Fourth Army Corps) in Maryland in 1862 and later with the Second Army Corps to 1865.

He had quite a post-War career, being twice Superintendent of the US Census (1870, 1880), professor at Yale (’72-’79) and the third president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, 1881-1897).

This page from Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (Vol. 2, p. 672; 1884) features two field hospitals shortly after the battle of Antietam, both on Dr. Otho J. Smith’s farm near the Upper Bridge over the Antietam northeast of Sharpsburg.

Mentioned are Doctors Samuel Sexton, 8th Ohio and Anson Hurd, 14th Indiana Infantry – Assistant Surgeon and Surgeon, respectively, of two of the regiments in General Nathan Kimball’s brigade of General William H French’s division. These men, along with other surgeons and staff, treated wounded soldiers on the day of the battle in a barn on the Roulette Farm close to the action and about a mile south of Smith’s, but, being under fire there, moved with their patients back to the main Divisional Hospital here on the Smith Farm late on the 17th or early on the 18th of September 1862.

The pictures in B&L are from two stereo photographs taken about 20 September 1862 by Alexander Gardner:

Keedysville, Maryland (vicinity). Smith’s barn, used as a hospital after the battle of Antietam [Library of Congress]

Keedysville, Md., vicinity. Confederate wounded at Smith’s Barn, with Dr. Anson Hurd, 14th Indiana Volunteers, in attendance [Library of Congress]

This is a considerably post-war engraving of Dr Thomas McEbright, who as Surgeon, 8th Ohio Infantry, established his “operative depot” in the Roulette barn and treated wounded soldiers there after the battle of Antietam.

On 24 September 1862 on Bolivar Heights near Harpers Ferry he wrote a letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper describing the battle and the horror afterward. Notable in the letter is this brief description of Sharpsburg farmer William Roulette during the battle:

Covered by the houses and stone wall, the barn and out houses, the natural features of the ground, the home of Mr, Rulette [Roulette] was the pivot of the field, when our Regiment passed his cellar door the gentleman who had been up to this time cooped in the cellar emerged and with hat in hand I think did some of the tallest one man hollowing and tip-toe shouting I ever witnessed.

Tallest one man hollowing and tip-toe shouting, indeed.

Daughter of the 21st Massachusetts Infantry’s Surgeon Calvin Cutter, Miss Carrie Eliza badgered her father into letting her accompany the regiment as a nurse (hospital matron on the rolls) on the North Carolina expedition of 1861-62. She tended sick and wounded soldiers up to her own death, of “spotted fever” aboard the transport Northener off New Bern on 24 March 1862.

Regimental historian Captain Charles F. Walcott called her “the Florence Nightingale of the 21st” and wrote of her

… aged nineteen years and eight months. Miss Cutter, an intellectual, refined, and delicate woman, the daughter of our surgeon, had embarked on the Northerner with us at Annapolis, and had accompanied the regiment since that time. A blessing to the regiment, she had bravely and patiently endured the discomforts of the crowded steamer – a thousand times greater to her, the only woman on board, than to any of us, and with constant, unremitting devotion had added her gentle, womanly care to her father’s wise and faithful energy in helping and nursing our sick and wounded men.

Her body was carried to Roanoke Island and buried by the side of that of her admired friend, Sergeant Charles Plummer Tidd, the heroic companion of John Brown, whose eyes she had closed so sadly during the battle of Roanoke Island.

This photograph is in the MOLLUS Massachusetts Collection now at the US Army Heritage & Education Center, Carlisle Barracks, PA.

Walcott’s History, source of the quote here, is online from the Hathi Trust.