behind AotW

Tompion: a plug pushed into the muzzle of a rifle to keep out dirt and water.

This example, probably for an English-made Enfield model of 1853, made of brass and cork, was sold by the Horse Soldier in Gettysburg.

The soldier’s culpable negligence in failing to remove the tompion before firing, resulted sometimes in the bursting of the piece; sometimes in the projection of the tompion with sufficient force to penetrate, within short range, a man’s body; almost always, unfortunately, in more injury to others then to himself. The following is one of those cases …

Private George Meyers of the 13th New Jersey Infantry was accidentally wounded by a comrade’s tompion at Antietam on 17 September 1862 and he died in a hospital in Philadelphia about a month afterward.

Here are the woodcut illustrations which accompany the description of Private Meyer’s somewhat unusual case in the Army Surgeon General’s Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1870-1883).

It occurs to me that the outcome might not have been much different if the man in the rank behind poor George had removed his tompion …

17 year old farm boy Thomas E Sims enlisted as a Private in the Orange Guards – Company G of the 27th North Carolina Infantry – in March 1862. Which is probably when this photograph was taken.

He survived the terrible combat at Sharpsburg in September that year but was mortally wounded in a little known skirmish at Gary’s Farm near Richmond, VA on 15 June 1864. Captain John Sloan of Company B later described the action there:

Our brigade, as yet, in the swamps of the Chickahominy, was almost daily employed in skirmishes with the enemy’s cavalry. On the 15th of June we came across a large force of cavalry at Gary’s farm. They had met a small force of our cavalry and had been driving them. When we arrived they dismounted and sent their horses to the rear, formed their lines and showed fight. After a sharp struggle their lines gave way, and we pursued them some distance through the woods. Their sharpshooters were armed with seven shooters, and they used them against us on our advance with telling effect. When they reached their horses they quickly remounted and were soon beyond our reach.

Young Thomas was taken to the Camp Winder hospital in Richmond and died there the next day, 19 years old.

This compelling photograph of him is from the Vanatos Archive, shared to his memorial on Findagrave.

John A Sloan’s narrative, based on his wartime notes, was published in his Reminiscences of the Guilford Grays, Co. B, 27th N.C. Regiment (1883).

In 1882 one-legged Sharpsburg veteran Willie Thomas Patterson was appointed Bursar of the University of North Carolina, and served in that post for most of the rest of his life, to 1909.

He was raised the 5th of 7 children by wealthy parents James Newton (1806-1865) and Lucy Hawkins Couch Patterson (1808-1848) on their large plantation at Durhamville in Orange County (now Durham, Durham County), North Carolina.

He was of the 5th generation on the place, all born in North Carolina. His great-great-grandfather John B Patterson (1717-1787) first owned and farmed there before 1770, followed by John Tapley Patterson (c. 1743-1781), who had slaves working the land by 1781, then Mann Patterson (1772-1835), his grandfather.

John B Patterson

In 1850 Willie’s father James owned 63 slaves, the second largest number in the county, and by 1860 had 112, 6 of them in trust for his children. The US Census that year reported the value of those people at $77,000 (equivalent to about $3 million in 2024). His real estate holdings were worth $26,500, by way of comparison.

Soon after the start of the war in 1861, 20 year old Willie and his orphaned cousin James Newton Faucette, who lived with the Pattersons, enlisted in the Orange Guards, who became Company G of the 27th North Carolina Infantry. They first saw combat together at Newberne, NC in March 1862.

Willie was seriously wounded in the leg at Sharpsburg in September 1862, captured there, and lost his leg to amputation. He returned home in 1864.

His life was very different after the war: in 1870 he was an unemployed “cripple” living with his brother John, a physician in Chapel Hill, though by 1880 he was a bookkeeper in Durham making his own way. He never married.

His picture here from University President Kemp P. Battle’s History of the University of North Carolina (Vol. II, 1907), online from the Internet Archive.

Family details from genealogies and the Population and Slave Schedules of the 1850 and 1860 US Census.

The 1968 photo of the Patterson Plantation house, now called Holly Rock Farm, is online from Open Orange; original by the Durham Herald Sun.

The portrait of John B Patterson is of unknown provenance, shared to the FamilySearch database by Glen Robert Cary.

John Tapley Patterson’s 1781 will is also in that database.