behind AotW

Private George Washington Reaves, 13th Georgia Infantry was about 30 years old when he was wounded in a most frightful way at Sharpsburg in September 1862. He later described it in his application for a Confederate veteran’s pension in 1896 (click to enlarge).

This helpful document is online from Georgia Archives Virtual Vault.

Wilbur Fiske Pope, a 20 year old private in Company A of the 13th Georgia Infantry was killed at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

In a 17 November 1862 letter to her niece Martha Parks, his stepmother Susan Atkinson Pope, who had raised him from an infant, wrote:

… since my dear Wilbur’s death everything looks sad and gloomy. how hard it is to give him up, such a lovely youth. he was everything that a Mother’s heart could wish or desire. none knew him but to love him.

Capt. Mitchell wrote such a pretty letter after his death. I read two letters from William Gwynn telling how he was killed; said Wilbur was on his left side just in the act of caping his gun when the fatal ball struck him through the centre of his forehead. he fell forward on his side. said he looked right straight in his face the most imploringly, in a few moments he ceased to breathe. Billy said he never should forget the look that Wilbur gave him. said there was no doubt about his being fully prepared to die, oh that he could have died in my arms. the last letter i received from him was the very day that he was killed …

[I’ve added punctuation to make it a little easier to read]

A full transcription of this letter was posted to Facebook by Michael Parks for the Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp 1441, Midland, TX. The location of the original letter was not given.

In March 1862 22 year old Private John Barnett Mathews of the 13th Georgia Infantry wrote the Confederate President Jefferson Davis asking for appointment to a more important position so he could better help support his newly widowed and “nearly destitute” mother and 7 younger siblings back home in Heard County, GA.

Private Mathews may have felt deserving of special treatment because he had attended medical school and was a school teacher before the war. He’d enlisted as a Private in June 1861 but, as he wrote the President,

My qualifications I think, sir, render me capable of filling a station that would better enable me to relieve myself of the embarrassment [the poverty of his family] of which I have spoken.

The letter was received in the office of the President on 25 March, and was apparently answered (those may be the President’s initials at top right), but the reply in not Mathews’ file. In any case, no new position was immediately forthcoming. Instead, he was elected by his Company to Junior 2nd Lieutenant in September 1862, and was their Captain by 1864.