behind AotW

Alexander James Dallas III was at Antietam in 1862, a Captain in the Second Battalion, 12th United States Infantry. He was from a prominent family, as you might guess from these Gilbert Stuart portraits of his grandparents Alexander James Dallas (the First, 1759-1817) and Arabella Maria Smith Dallas (1761-1837). They were “one of the more fashionable couples in Philadelphia during Washington’s administration.”

Alexander I was later President James Madison’s Secretary of the Treasury and was briefly acting Secretary of War and of State.

Captain Dallas’ father Alexander II (1791–1844) was a US Navy Commander, and his mother was the former Henrietta Constantia Meade (1801-1831), older sister of George Gordon Meade. Another son of Alexander I was George Mifflin Dallas (1792-1864), James K Polk’s Vice President.

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Alexander I’s original portrait is at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Arabella’s is at Mount Vernon.

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.