behind AotW

David Brainard Murray enlisted in the 35th Massachusetts Infantry in August 1862 and was wounded at Antietam a month after he mustered into service. He was at hospitals until November 1862 then discharged … not for his wound, but for “incipient phthisis” – early-stage tuberculosis or similar progressive lung disease.

His Surgeon’s Certificate of Disability (thanks his Compiled Service Record file at the National Archives) contains a wealth of information about him, and is the source of the detail about his discharge – without it I would have assumed he was discharged due to wounds.

Murray enlisted again, briefly, in 1864 and survived to have a long life as a clergyman in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Thanks to descendant and author Bill Guerrant for pointing me to Hugh Lindsay Guerrant of the 13th North Carolina and providing this photograph of him in his First Lieutenant’s uniform, from his collection.

Lieutenant Guerrant was apparently close enough to Brigadier General Samuel Garland at Fox’s Gap on South Mountain on 14 September to retrieve the pit from the peach the General was eating when he was shot there. And he later raised a tree from it back home. Some story!

Apparently a number of men of Company C of the 4th North Carolina had their portraits made by the same photographer on the same day. Here’s that of Private Nat Raymer. It is identical in pose and background to the one I found 3 days ago for Alfred Turner.

This photo, from his family, accompanied a collection of Raymer’s wartime letters to local newspapers collected in 2009 in Confederate Correspondent: The Civil War Reports of Jacob Nathaniel Raymer, Fourth North Carolina, edited by E.B. Munson.