Washington – Page 2 – 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers (2024)

Well before the outbreak of America’s devastating Civil War, the concept of Thanksgiving was on the minds of the nation’s founding fathers. Among those who grasped the importance of inspiring shared feelings of unity and gratitude between residents of the United States was Samuel Adams, who drafted the nation’s first Thanksgiving proclamation, which was then officially issued by the Continental Congress on 1 November 1777:

“FOR AS MUCH as it is the indispensable Duty of all Men to adore the superintending Providence of Almighty God; to acknowledge with Gratitude their Obligation to him for Benefits received, and to implore such farther Blessings as they stand in Need of: And it having pleased him in his abundant Mercy, not only to continue to us the innumerable Bounties of his common Providence; but also to smile upon us in the Prosecution of a just and necessary War, for the Defense and Establishment of our unalienable Rights and Liberties; particularly in that he hath been pleased, in so great a Measure, to prosper the Means used for the Support of our Troops, and to crown our Arms with most signal success:

It is therefore recommended to the legislative or executive Powers of these UNITED STATES to set apart Thursday, the eighteenth Day of December next, for SOLEMN THANKSGIVING and PRAISE: That at one Time and with one Voice, the good People may express the grateful Feelings of their Hearts, and consecrate themselves to the Service of their Divine Benefactor; and that, together with their sincere Acknowledgments and Offerings, they may join the penitent Confession of their manifold Sins, whereby they had forfeited every Favor; and their humble and earnest Supplication that it may please GOD through the Merits of JESUS CHRIST, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of Remembrance; That it may please him graciously to afford his Blessing on the Governments of these States respectively, and prosper the public Council of the whole: To inspire our Commanders, both by Land and Sea, and all under them, with that Wisdom and Fortitude which may render them fit Instruments, under the Providence of Almighty GOD, to secure for these United States, the greatest of all human Blessings, INDEPENDENCE and PEACE: That it may please him, to prosper the Trade and Manufactures of the People, and the Labor of the Husbandman, that our Land may yield its Increase: To take Schools and Seminaries of Education, so necessary for cultivating the Principles of true Liberty, Virtue and Piety, under his nurturing Hand; and to prosper the Means of Religion, for the promotion and enlargement of that Kingdom, which consisteth ‘in Righteousness, Peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost.’

And it is further recommended, That servile Labor, and such Recreation, as, though at other Times innocent, may be unbecoming the Purpose of this Appointment, be omitted on so solemn an Occasion.”

Nearly twelve years later, on 3 October 1789, President George Washington also urged Americans to come together to express their gratitude, and proclaimed that that year’s celebration would be held on 26 November:

“By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor — and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be — That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks — for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation — for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war — for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed — for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted — for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions — to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually — to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed — to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord — To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us — and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

George Washington

Nearly three quarters of a century later, Pennsylvania’s Civil War governor, Andrew Gregg Curtin, urged his fellow Keystone State residents to pray that God would “bestow upon our Civil Rulers, wisdom and earnestness in council and upon our military leaders zeal and vigor in action, that the fires of rebellion may be quenched, that we, being armed with His defense, may be preserved from all perils, and that hereafter our people living in peace and quietness, may, from generation to generation, reap the abundant fruits of His mercy; and with joy and thankfulness praise and magnify His holy name.”

A year later, President Abraham Lincoln penned the following words as part of his own sobering, yet hopeful proclamation:

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”

So, with our common heritage in mind, and as an expression of deep gratitude for the ongoing support of our many wonderful readers and volunteers who have helped us build a loyal following for 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story, we present this collection of links to our most popular Thanksgiving-related content. With our best wishes from “our house” to yours, wherever you reside in this our United States of America, may you have a peaceful, bountiful and joyous holiday season. And in the New Year to come, may we all, finally, embrace the belief that one’s ability to show kindness and compassion in the face of adversity is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Thanksgiving Post Collection — 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story

• A Thanksgiving Message from the Past (Andrew Gregg Curtin): Text of the “Proclamation of a Day of Thanksgiving” issued by Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin, 1862;
• A Thanksgiving Message from the Past (Abraham Lincoln): Text of “By the President of the United States of America: A Proclamation” issued by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, 3 October 1863;
• Henry D. Wharton’s Thanksgiving Letter to the Sunbury American: Scroll down to entry for 23 August 1863 for image, and link to the full text of, C Company Musician Henry Wharton’s Thanksgiving letter to his hometown newspaper; and
• Snyder Family Recipes: Turkey, Filling and Gravy (Thanksgiving and Christmas).

Sources:

1. Basler, Roy P., editor, et. al. Collected works, Vol. 6. The Abraham Lincoln Association/Springfield, Illinois. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

2. Curtin, Andrew Gregg. “Proclamation of a Day of Thanksgiving – 1862,” in Pennsylvania Archives: Fourth Series, Vol. VIII: “Papers of the Governors, 1858-1871,” Samuel Hazard, John Blair Lynn, William Henry Egle, et. al., editors. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Wm. Stanley Ray, State Printer, 1902.

3. “Snyder Family Recipes: Turkey, Filling and Gravy (Thanksgiving and Christmas),” in 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story. Snyder Family Archives: © 2017-present. All rights reserved.

4. “Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1863: A primary source by Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Nast.” New York, New York: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of History, retrieved online 1 November 2017.

5. “Thanksgiving Proclamation 1777 By the Continental Congress: The First National Thanksgiving Proclamation.” Plymouth, Massachusetts: Pilgrim Hall Museum, retrieved online 4 November 2019.

6. “Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789,” in “Education — Primary Sources.” Mount Vernon, Virginia: George Washington’s Mount Vernon, retrieved online 4 November 2019.

7. Wharton, Henry D. “Letter from the Sunbury Guards: Key West, Fla., 23 August 1863” (Henry Wharton’s Thanksgiving Update, 1863). Sunbury, Pennsylvania: Sunbury American, 5 September 1863.

“[T]he impact and meaning of the war’s casualties were not simply a consequence of scale, of the sheer numbers of Union and Confederate soldiers who died. Death’s significance for the Civil War generation derived as well from the way it violated prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end — about who should die, when and where, and under what circ*mstances.”

— Drew Gilpin Faust, Ph.D., President Emeritus and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University and author, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War

Less than a month after leaving the great Keystone State for the Eastern Theater of America’s shattering Civil War, the members of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry encountered their most fearsome foe — the one they would consistently find the most difficult to defeat throughout the long war — disease.

It was an enemy, in fact, that turned out to be the deadliest not just for the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, but for the entire Union Army as it fought to preserve the nation’s Union while ending the practice of slavery across the United States. Per The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, sixty-two percent of all Union soldiers who died during the American Civil War were felled by disease, rather than by the shrapnel-spewing blasts of Confederate cannon or the accurately targeted minié balls of CSA rifles.

Surprising as this may seem to this century’s students of American History, it shouldn’t be, according to infectious disease specialist Jeffrey S. Sartin, M.D.:

“The American Civil War represents a landmark in military and medical history as the last large-scale conflict fought without knowledge of the germ theory of disease. Unsound hygiene, dietary deficiencies, and battle wounds set the stage for epidemic infection, while inadequate information about disease causation greatly hampered disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Pneumonia, typhoid, diarrhea/dysentery, and malaria were the predominant illnesses. Altogether, two-thirds of the approximately 660,000 deaths of soldiers were caused by uncontrolled infectious diseases, and epidemics played a major role in halting several major campaigns. These delays, coming at a crucial point early in the war, prolonged the fighting by as much as 2 years.”

With respect to the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, the two diseases which wreaked such devastating havoc early on were Variola (smallpox) and typhoid fever.

Variola

Variola, more commonly known as “smallpox,” was an acute infectious disease that, even in the mildest of cases in 1861, was highly contagious. Notable for the high fever it caused, it also produced individual, boil-like eruptions across the human body. Known as “pocks,” these eruptions would quickly become fluid-filled pustules — even with the weakest strains of the disease — that would, if sufferers survived, eventually burst, leaving them badly scarred.

If, however, the soldier contracted the most virulent form of the disease — Variola confluens — as happened with at least one member of the 47th Pennsylvania — the suffering and likelihood of death was much, much greater. Far more severe than the strain that would have typically sickened the average child or adult during the mid-1800s, Variola confluens produced patches of pustules, rather than individual pocks. Forming on the face in such large swaths, the skin of the soldier who had been unfortunate to contract this strain of the disease would have appeared to have been burned or blistered. In addition to the horrific facial disfigurement, that soldier would also likely have experienced hair loss, severe pain and damage to his mucous membranes, mouth, throat, and eyes as the fever ravaged his body and continued to climb. If the disease devolved into the hemorrhagic phase prior to his death, the pocks on his face and mucous membranes would then also have begun to bleed.

Most likely exposed to the disease sometime while they were encamped in Virginia with their regiment, the first of the 47th Pennsylvanians to contract Variola would not initially have noticed any symptoms during this disease’s ten to fourteen-day incubation period. The first symptoms they would have experienced would have been due to rigor (sudden chills as the onset of fever began, alternating with shivering and sweating). As this primary fever increased, their temperatures would have risen to 103° or 104° Fahrenheit or higher over a two-day period, quickening the pulse and causing intense thirst, headache, constipation, vomiting, and back pain. As their conditions worsened, they might also have experienced convulsions and/or a redness on their abdomens or inner thighs — markings which might have appeared to be a rash of some sort or the beginnings of scarlet fever, but which were, in fact, a series of small, flat, circular spots on the body caused by bleeding under the skin and known as “petechiae.”

It would only have been on roughly the third day, post-incubation period, that these same men would have noticed that their faces were erupting with boils, but even then, they might have missed this sign because such pocks typically appeared as a single patch of redness on the sufferer’s forehead, near the roots of the hair. Within hours of this first eruption, however, the soldiers would most certainly have realized that something was wrong as they began scratching to relieve the itching on patches that had spread across their faces and bodies — particularly when the pocks began to fill with fluid and swelled to pea-sized bumps.

Likely sent to the regiment’s hospital sometime around this time, these 47th Pennsylvanians would have been transferred to the eruptive fever hospital on the Kalorama Heights in Georgetown before the week was out because, by day eight or nine, their skin would have become inflamed and swollen as the fluid in the pocks changed from clear to yellow, began to smell, and spread to their mouths, throats, noses, and eyes, putting their breathing and vision at risk. Increasingly hoarse, despite the increase in saliva they were experiencing, their bodies would then also have been overtaken by secondary fever, followed possibly by delirium and then coma.

If they somehow managed to survive until the disease’s latter phase, the pustules would have eventually dried up (typically on the twelfth day, post-incubation); if they didn’t, death most likely would have ensued due to myocardial insufficiency caused by the weakening of their heart muscles.

Typhoid Fever

Often confused with the insect-borne typhus fever, typhoid fever is caused by bacteria. Poorly understood well into and beyond the mid-19th century, despite having sickened countless numbers of individuals since the time of Hippocrates, according to American University historian Thomas V. DiBacco, typhoid fever’s method of transmission remained unidentified until 1856. That year, it finally dawned on scientists that fecal matter contaminated with Salmonella typhosa, one of the strains of bacteria now known to cause food poisoning, was at the root of the “persistently high fever, rash, generalized pains, headache and severe abdominal discomfort,” and intestinal bleeding of the patients physicians were failing to save.

Spread by the unsanitary conditions so common to the close living quarters shared by America’s Civil War-era soldiers, as well as by their respective regimental company cooks who were often forced to prepare meals with unclean hands when their regiments stopped briefly during long marches, the typhoid fever-causing Salmonella typhosa bacterium would typically enter a soldier’s body “through food, milk or water contaminated by a carrier,” but might also have been contracted just as easily via a bite from one of the many flies swarming around a regiment’s latrine facilities or horses.

And, because the “worst manifestations” of the disease did not appear until two or three weeks into an individual’s illness, according to DiBacco, typhoid fever was able to spread like wildfire not just during its incubation period, but even when soldiers were aware that others within their respective companies were ill because “typhoid victims were disposed to think the malady less serious as time went by.”

It is this latter fact alone that, perhaps, explains why outbreaks of typhoid fever continued to plague the 47th Pennsylvania throughout the duration of the war when Variola did not.

The First ”Men” to Die

The first “man” to die from the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry was John Boulton Young, a 13-year-old drummer boy who was known affectionately as “Boulty” (alternatively, “Boltie”). A member of the regiment’s C Company, he served under Captain John Peter Shindel Gobin, but was known to, and beloved by, the majority of the roughly one thousand men who served with the 47th.

Born on 25 September 1848 in Sunbury, Pennsylvania as the second oldest son of Pennsylvania natives, Michael A. and Elizabeth (Boulton) Young, Boulty was still in school at the time of his enlistment for Civil War military service in his hometown on 19 August 1861. He clearly lied about his age on military paperwork that day, indicating that he was 14, rather than 12 — a fiction which was maintained by Gobin and his fellow C Company officers throughout the boy’s tenure of service.

* Note: According to historians at the American Battlefield Trust, “For most of the war, the minimum enlistment age in the North was legally held at 18 for soldiers and 16 for musicians, although younger men could enlist at the permission of their parents until 1862. In the South, the age limit for soldiers stayed at 18 until 1864 when it was legally dropped to 17.”

Just four feet tall at the time of his official muster in at the rank of Musician (drummer boy) at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg on 2 September, Boulty was so small that his superiors needed to customize both his uniform and his drum to make it easier for him to function as a member of the 47th Pennsylvania.

After completing basic training and traveling by train with his regiment to the Washington, D.C. area in mid-September, Boulty subsequently endured several long marches, including at least one undertaken in a driving rain. By late September or early October of 1861, Boulty had contracted such a challenging case of Variola (smallpox) that regimental surgeons ordered his superiors to ship him from Virginia, where the 47th Pennsylvania was encamped as part of the Army of the Potomac, to the eruptive fever hospital on the Kalorama Heights in Georgetown, District of Columbia.

Diagnosed by the physicians there with Variola confluens, the most virulent form of the disease, he died at that hospital on 17 October 1861. His body was then quickly prepared and transported for burial. Initially interred in Washington, D.C. at the Soldiers’ Asylum Cemetery (now known the United States Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home Cemetery), his remains were disinterred in early 1862, and returned to Pennsylvania for reburial at Penn’s Cemetery in his hometown of Sunbury.

To learn more about Boulty’s life before and during the Civil War, as well as what happened to the surviving members of his family, read his biographical sketch, The First “Man” to Die: Drummer Boy John Boulton Young.

Alfred Eisenbraun

The second “man” from the 47th Pennsylvania to die was also a drummer boy — 15-year-old Alfred Eisenbraun, who served with the regiment’s B Company. A native of Allentown, Pennsylvania who was born in June of 1846, he was a son of Johann Daniel Eisenbraun, a noted Frakturist and tombstone carver who had emigrated from Württemberg, Germany to the United States in 1820, and Lehigh County, Pennsylvania native Margaret (Troxell) Eisenbraun.

Unlike “Boulty,” however, Alfred Eisenbraun had already left his studies behind, and had joined his community’s local workforce in order to help support his family. Employed as a “tobacco stripper,” he separated tobacco leaves from their stems before stacking those leaves in piles for the creation of cigars or chewable tobacco. As he did this, he likely would have been “breathing foul air, in rooms bare and cold or suffocatingly hot”, possibly “in a damp basem*nt, musty with mould [sic] or lurking miasma,” according to Clare de Graffenried, a 19th-century U.S. Bureau of Labor employee who researched and wrote extensively about child labor.

So, it comes as no surprise that a boy in Eisenbraun’s situation would have viewed service with the military as a vast improvement over his existing job — especially if the pay was higher — which it most certainly was. Just barely 15 when he enrolled for Civil War service in his hometown on 20 August 1861, Eisenbraun officially mustered in at the rank of Musician (drummer boy) with the 47th Pennsylvania’s Company B at Camp Curtin on 30 August. Military records at the time described him as being 5’5″ tall with black hair, black eyes and a dark complexion. His commanding officer was Captain Emanuel P. Rhoads.

Like Boulty, Eisenbraun completed basic training, traveled by train with his regiment to the Washington, D.C. area in mid-September, and then endured several long marches, including the same one that was undertaken in a driving rain. And, like Boulty, Eisenbraun also fell ill in late September or early October.

But unlike Boulty, Eisenbraun was felled by typhoid fever. According to regimental historian Lewis Schmidt, the teen “had been sick almost from the time the regiment left Camp Curtin” in mid-September. After initially receiving treatment from regimental physicians through at least mid-October, he was sent back to the Washington, D.C. area to receive more advanced care. Per Schmidt, two of Eisenbraun’s fellow B Company members “visited Alfred at the fort on the 21st … and found him getting better, pleased to see them, and happy to engage in some conversation.”

But on Thursday morning, 24 October, after Captain Rhoads headed over to the fort’s hospital nearby, he was informed that Eisenbraun “and all the other sick men had been moved to the General Hospital in Georgetown.” Assuming that Eisenbraun’s condition had improved, since he’d apparently been deemed well enough to travel, Rhoads returned to his camp site, confident that he’d see the boy again — but he was wrong.

Eisenbraun, it turned out, had been transported to the former Union Hotel in Georgetown, which had been converted into one of the U.S. Army’s general hospitals. He died there from typhoid fever on 26 October 1861. Like Boulty, he was laid to rest at the Soldiers’ Asylum Cemetery in Washington, D.C.; unlike Boulty, however, his remains were never brought home.

To learn more about Alfred’s life before and during the Civil War, read his biographical sketch, Alfred Eisenbraun, Drummer Boy – The Regiment’s Second “Man” to Die.

The Third to Die: Sergeant Franklin M. Holt

Franklin M. Holt had already distinguished himself before becoming the first “true man” from the 47th Pennsylvania’s rosters to die. The regiment’s third fatality, he was also one of a handful of non-Pennsylvanians serving with this all-volunteer Pennsylvania regiment.

Born in New Hampshire in 1838, Frank Holt was a son of Cambridge, Massachusetts native, Edwin Holt, and Mont Vernon, New Hampshire native, Susan (Marden) Holt. A farmer like his father, he left his home state sometime around the summer of 1860, and took a job as a “map agent” in Monmouth County, New Jersey. But by the spring of 1861, he had relocated again, and had adopted the Perry County, Pennsylvania community of New Bloomfield as his new hometown.

That same spring, when President Abraham Lincoln issued his call for 75,000 volunteers to help defend the nation’s capital following the fall of Fort Sumter to troops of the Confederate States Army, Holt enrolled with Company D of the 2nd Pennsylvania Infantry, completing his Three Months’ Service from 20 April to 26 July 1861 under the leadership of Henry D. Woodruff.

Realizing that the fight to preserve America’s Union was far from over, Holt re-enlisted in the 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry’s D Company, which was also commanded by Captain Woodruff. Following his re-enrollment on 20 August in Bloomfield, he then re-mustered at Camp Curtin on 31 August at the rank of sergeant and, like drummer boys John Boulton Young and Alfred Eisenbraun, completed basic training before traveling with the regiment to the Washington, D.C. area for service with the Army of the Potomac.

Enduring a climate of torrential rain and pervasive, persistent dampness during his early days of service, Holt ultimately also fell ill with Variola (smallpox) and, like drummer boy Young who had also contracted the disease, he was transported to the eruptive fever hospital on the Kalorama Heights in Georgetown, District of Columbia, where he was treated by at least one of the same physicians who treated Boulty. Despite having apparently been diagnosed with a less severe form of the disease (according to military records which noted that Holt was sickened by Variola rather than the Variola confluens that felled Boulty), Sergeant Holt died at Kalorama on 28 October 1861.

“Kind, gentlemanly courteous, and honest in all his transactions,” according to the New Bloomfield Democrat, Holt had also “won for himself the esteem of all who knew him” prior to his untimely death. Like the two young drummer boys before him, he too was buried quickly at the Soldiers’ Asylum Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Although his remains were also never returned home, Holt was ultimately honored by members of his family, who erected a cenotaph in his honor at the Meadow View Cemetery in Amherst, New Hampshire.

To learn more about Frank’s life before and during the Civil War, read his biographical sketch, Holt, Franklin M. (Sergeant).

To learn more about Civil War Medicine, in general, as well as the battle wounds and illnesses most commonly experienced by members of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, please visit the Medical section of this website.

Sources:

1. Affleck, M.D., J. O. “Smallpox,” in “1902 Encyclopedia.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th and 10th editions (online), 2005-2019.

2. Alfred Eisenbraun (obituary). Allentown, Pennsylvania: Lehigh Register, 30 October 1861.

3. Alfred Eisenbraun (obituary), in “Gestörben.” Allentown, Pennsylvania: Der Lecha Caunty Patriot, 6 November 1861.

4. Allen Eisenbraun (death notice), in “Deaths of Soldiers.” Washington, D.C.: The Evening Star, 28 October 1861.

5. Barker, M.D., Lewellys Franklin. Monographic Medicine, Vol. II: “The Clinical Diagnosis of Internal Diseases,” p. 431 (“Variola confluens”). New York, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916.

6. Bates, Samuel P. History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: B. Singerly, State Printer, 1869.

7. Burial Ledgers (Eisenbraun, Alfred; Holt, Franklin M.; Young, J. Bolton), in Records of The National Cemetery Administration and U.S. Departments of Defense and Army (Quartermaster General), 1861. Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

8. “Casualties and Costs of the Civil War.” New York, New York: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

9. Civil War General Index Cards (Eisenbraun, Alfred and Eisenbrown, Allen), in Records of the U.S. Department of the Army. Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and Fold3: 1861.

10. Civil War Veterans’ Card File, 1861-1865 (Eisenbraun, Alfred; Holt, Franklin M.; Young, J. Bolton). Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Archives.

11. “Death of a Young Soldier” (obituary of John Boulton Young). Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania: Star of the North, Wednesday, 30 October 1861 (reprinted from the Sunbury Gazette).

12. “Deaths of Soldiers” (death notice for John Boulton Young). Washington, D.C.: The National Republican, 18 October 1861.

13. de Graffenried, Clare. “Child Labor,” in Publications of the American Economic Association, Vol. 5, No. 2. New York, New York: March 1890 (accessed 22 March 2016).

14. DiBacco, Thomas V. “When Typhoid Was Dreaded.” Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 25 January 1994.

15. “The Drummer Boy’s Monument” (monument erected to John Boulton Young). Sunbury, Pennsylvania: Sunbury American, 6 February 1864.

16. Fabian, Monroe H. John Daniel Eisenbrown, in “Pennsylvania Folklife Book 62,” in Pennsylvania Folklife Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 2. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: 1975.

17. Faust, Drew G. “The Civil War soldier and the art of dying,” in The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 3-38. Houston, Texas: Southern Historical Association (Rice University), 2001.

18. Holt Eulogy. New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania: New Bloomfield Democrat, 1861.

19. Inkrote, Cindy. “Civil War drummer boy was different kind of hero.” Sunbury, Pennsylvania: The Daily Item, 4 October 2009.

20. Letters of John Peter Shindel Gobin, 1861-1900. Various Collections (descendants of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers, et. al.).

21. “Registers of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-1865: 47th Regiment” (Companies B, C, and D) in Records of the Department of Military and Veterans’ Affairs (Record Group 19, Series 19.11). Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Archives.

22. Sartin, M.D., Jeffrey S. “Infectious diseases during the Civil War: The triumph of the ‘Third Army,’” in Clinical Infectious Diseases, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 580-584. Cary, North Carolina: Oxford University Press, April 1993.

23. Schmidt, Lewis. A Civil War History of the 47th Regiment of Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers. Allentown, Pennsylvania: Self-published, 1986.

24. U.S. Census. Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania (Allentown and Sunbury, Pennsylvania; Amherst, New Hampshire; Monmouth, New Jersey): 1840-1930.

25. U.S. Registers of Deaths of Volunteers, 1861 (Eisenbraun/Eisenbraum, Alfred; Holt, Franklin/Frank M; Young, J. Bolton/Jno. B.). Washington, D.C.: United States Army and U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

As the days of September 1861 rolled away and summer turned to fall, the 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, which had been founded by Colonel Tilghman H. Good on 5 August 1861, and had been trained in Hardee’s Light Infantry Tactics as its men mustered in by company at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg from mid-August through mid-September, was finally given its first official assignment — to defend its nation’s capital, which had been threatened with invasion by troops of the Confederate States Army.

Roughly 70 percent of the 47th Pennsylvania Infantry hailed from the Keystone State’s Lehigh Valley, including the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton and surrounding communities in Lehigh and Northampton counties. Company C, which had been formed primarily from the men of Northumberland County and was led by Captain John Peter Shindel Gobin, was more commonly known as the “Sunbury Guards.” Companies D and H were staffed largely by men from Perry County. Company K was formed with the intent of creating an “all German” company comprised of German-Americans and German immigrants. In actuality, the majority of 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers were men of German descent — a noteworthy fact when considering the significant role played by German immigrants and German-Americans prior to, during, and after the American Civil War. Curriculum developers at Boston’s WGBH Educational Foundation, which produced the 1998 PBS television series, Africans in America, note that:

“As early as 1688, four German Quakers in Germantown near Philadelphia protested slavery in a resolution that condemned the “traffic of Men-body.” By the 1770s, abolitionism was a full-scale movement in Pennsylvania. Led by such Quaker activists as Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, many Philadelphia slaveholders of all denominations had begun bowing to pressure to emancipate their slaves on religious, moral, and economic grounds.

In April 1775, Benezet called the first meeting of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully held in Bondage at the Rising Sun Tavern. Thomas Paine was among the ten white Philadelphians who attended; seven of the group were Quakers. Often referred to as the Abolition Society, the group focused on intervention in the cases of blacks and Indians who claimed to have been illegally enslaved. Of the twenty-four men who attended the four meetings held before the Society disbanded, seventeen were Quakers.

Six of these original members were among the largely Quaker group of eighteen Philadelphians that reorganized in February 1784 as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage (commonly referred to as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, or PAS). Although still occupied with litigation on behalf of blacks who were illegally enslaved under existing laws, the new name reflected the Society’s growing emphasis on abolition as a goal. Within two years, the group had grown to 82 members and inspired the establishment of anti-slavery organizations in other cities.

PAS reorganized once again in 1787. While previously, artisans and shopkeepers had been the core of the organization, PAS broadened its membership to include such prominent figures as Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, who helped write the Society’s new constitution. PAS became much more aggressive in its strategy of litigation on behalf of free blacks, and attempted to work more closely with the Free African Society in a wide range of social, political and educational activity.

In 1787, PAS organized local efforts to support the crusade to ban the international slave trade and petitioned the Constitutional Convention to institute a ban. The following year, in collaboration with the Society of Friends, PAS successfully petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature to amend the gradual abolition act of 1780. As a result of the 2000-signature petition and other lobbying efforts, the legislature prohibited the transportation of slave children or pregnant women out of Pennsylvania, as well as the building, outfitting or sending of slave ships from Philadelphia. The amended act imposed heavier fines for slave kidnapping, and made it illegal to separate slave families by more than ten miles.”

Although the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s influence had begun to wane by the early 1800s, men and women of German descent helped to reinvigorate support for the abolition of slavery in the lead-up to and during the Civil War. According to Kenneth Barkin, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Riverside, “it is increasingly evident that German immigrant opposition to slavery was so pervasive that it may have been a crucial, albeit, ignored factor in the victory of Union forces.”

“Of the 1.3 million German immigrants in the United States before 1860, approximately 200,000 either volunteered for or were drafted into the Union Army. They produced a considerably higher percentage of Union soldiers per hundred thousand immigrants in the U.S. population than either the British or the Irish. About 24 percent of Union troops were born outside of the United States, and 10 percent of all Union soldiers were of German origin. There were several battalions with German soldiers and officers in which the German language was used for communication.”

In the case of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, many of the men who were of German heritage and their families still spoke German or “Pennsylvania Dutch” at their homes and churches more than a century after their ancestors emigrated from Germany in search of religious or political freedom.

The 47th Pennsylvania was also noteworthy because it attracted males of diverse ages. Its youngest member was John Boulton Young, a 13-year-old drummer boy from Sunbury, Pennsylvania; its oldest was Benjamin Walls, a 65-year-old, financially successful farmer from Juniata County who would, at the age of 68, attempt to re-enlist after being seriously wounded while protecting the American flag in combat. They and their comrades were initially led by Colonel Tilghman Good, Lieutenant-Colonel George Warren Alexander, and Major William H. Gausler.

On Friday the 13th, there were frequent bouts of inspiration among Harrisburg residents, rather than of superstitious worry, as 3,000 men from the 47th Pennsylvania and other volunteer regiments from the Keystone State marched in an impromptu parade from Camp Curtin through the city’s main streets.

The next day, members of the 47th Pennsylvania marched forth again — this time to welcome the arrival of their Regimental Band, which was led by the “Father of Band Music in America,” Professor Thomas Coates, and was comprised primarily of musicians from the Easton-based ensemble known as Pomp’s Cornet Band, as well as members of the Allentown Band. Later that evening, the band performed for Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin.

With the majority of the regiment’s officers and enlisted men mustered in by 19 September 1861, the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry was ordered to head south for Washington, D.C.

A Journey of Heroes Begins

Their epic journey began on 20 September 1861. Directed to begin packing at 5:00 a.m. so that they would be ready for a 7:00 a.m. departure by train, the men of the 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry pulled their gear together and assembled in formation at Camp Curtin. They were then presented with the Pennsylvania State Battle Flag (shown at the top of this article). Also known as the First State Color, it had “a field of 34 white stars, one for each state both north and south, on a blue background in the upper left corner in the shape of a rectangle covering approximately 19% of the flag’s total area, with 17 stars above and below the state emblem, which consisted of two white horses, eagle, seal and inscription,” according to regimental historian Lewis Schmidt. “The remainder of the flag was composed of 7 red and 6 white alternating horizontal stripes, and the whole was fringed with gold braid. The unit designation was painted in gold on the center red stripe to the right of the bottom of the blue field. As battle citations were awarded each unit, they would be painted on the red stripes in gold lettering.”

This flag would ultimately be carried by regimental color-bearers between the fall of 1861 and 11 May 1865 into Confederate States of America-held territories of the United States, as well as throughout multiple U.S. territories that were recaptured by Union troops, and would also serve as a rallying point during the intense, smoke-filled battles fought by the 47th Pennsylvania Infantry in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Virginia in 1862 and 1864.

Marched to the train station in Harrisburg, they boarded cattle and hog cars on a Northern Central Railway train, and then did what military men have done throughout the ages. They waited — and waited. By the time of their 1:30 p.m. departure, a crowd “had gathered and lined both sides of the track, all the way from the depot to the other side of the bridge which crosses the Susquehanna River,” according to Schmidt. “Everyone was cheering, flags were flying, and the men were hanging from the cars, all in a great state of excitement. Many railroad friends of the Easton contingent that had been part of the 1st Regiment during earlier service, turned out to see them off with their new unit, having transported them to the seat of war on earlier occasions.”

Traveling by way of York, Pennsylvania, they finally reached the Bolton Depot in Baltimore, Maryland, where they disembarked, refilled their canteens with water, lined up behind their Regimental Band, and marched with their loaded rifles across the city to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Station. Once there, they clambered aboard “glorious to tell, real genuine passenger cars” and departed for Washington, D.C., according to Captain Gobin, who added that the “lateness of the hour did not prevent the appearance, at a great many windows, of white robed fair ones, who had evidently risen from their beds to greet and cheer us as we passed.”

Just outside of Baltimore, according to Schmidt, “the troop train had to ‘switch off’ for a short time, as the regular passenger train passed.” Consequently, the 47th Pennsylvanians did not arrive in the nation’s capital until 9:00 a.m. on 21 September. Disembarking after the train came to a stop, they were granted a brief respite at the Soldier’s Rest there, according to C Company Musician Henry Wharton, who later penned a recap of their travels for his hometown newspaper, the Sunbury American:

“After a tedious ride we have, at last, safely arrived at the City of ‘magnificent distances.’ We left Harrisburg on Friday last at 1 o’clock A.M. and reached this camp yesterday (Saturday) at 4 P.M., as tired and worn out a sett [sic] of mortals as can possibly exist. On arriving at Washington we were marched to the ‘Soldiers Retreat,’ a building purposely erected for the benefit of the soldier, where every comfort is extended to him and the wants of the ‘inner man’ supplied.”

Gobin, who was Wharton’s direct superior, added that, when they arrived at the Soldier’s Rest, “we found the Union Relief Association had provided ice water in abundance for us, while hot coffee could be obtained for three cents a cup. I indulged in several of the latter.” Schmidt later uncovered these additional details about their brief period of respite:

“At 9 AM, the regiment arrived in Washington and Col. Good left to find a place for the men to camp and get some rest, while Lt. Col. Alexander busied himself seeing to the problem of procuring some cooked rations for the troops. The first building that they saw when they arrived was a very large structure near the railroad which displayed a sign with prominent letters that read ‘The Soldier’s Rest’, a place they intended to head for at the first opportunity. Lt. Col. Alexander returned shortly thereafter and instructed the Captains to take their companies, two at a time, to another building conveniently in view in the distance, and identified by its large sign with letters in bold relief advertising ‘Soldier’s Retreat’, where the men were served cooked beef, bread and coffee. The soldiers satisfied their hunger with this excellent meal, and ‘partook that which sticks to your ribs’, before settling down and enjoying a few hours rest and free [time], after which they washed up and had their pictures taken.”

Afterward, according to Wharton, they “were ordered into line and marched, about three miles” to “Camp Kalorama” on the Kalorama Heights near Georgetown — just two miles from the White House.

“So tired were the men, that on marching out, some gave out, and had to leave the ranks, but J. Boulton Young, our ‘little Zouave,’ stood it bravely, and acted like a veteran. So small a drummer is scarcely seen in the army, and on the march through Washington he was twice the recipient of three cheers.”

Union General George B. McClellan on Horseback (Harper’s Weekly, January 1862, public domain).

The length of that march was, in fact, closer to four miles, and was “considerably more difficult,” according to Schmidt, “since the men had not had any sleep the night before and they were marching in the warmest part of the day with a strong, bright sun in their faces the whole way.” That march also turned out to be a noteworthy one for an entirely different reason, according to Wharton:

“We were reviewed by Gen. McClellan yesterday [21 September 1861] without our knowing it. All along the march we noticed a considerable number of officers, both mounted and on foot; the horse of one of the officers was so beautiful that he was noticed by the whole regiment, in fact, so wrapt [sic] up were they in the horse, the rider wasn’t noticed, and the boys were considerably mortified this morning on dis-covering [sic] they had missed the sight of, and the neglect of not saluting the soldier next in command to Gen. Scott.”

The weary 47th Pennsylvanians finally arrived at Camp Kalorama around 5:00 p.m. on 21 September, and immediately began to erect their white soldiers’ tents — an activity they continued to engage in even as the region’s rainy weather began to increase in intensity.

The next day, as Wharton was penning his 22 September recap to the Sunbury American, he described Colonel Tilghman Good as “an excellent man and a splendid soldier” and “a man of very few words” who continually attend[ed] to his duties and the wants of the Regiment,” and added that C Company’s William Hendricks had been promoted to the rank of regimental sergeant-major. “He made his first appearance at guard mounting this morning; he looked well, done up his duties admirably, and, in time, will make an excellent officer.” Gobin observed that their new home was “a very fine location for a camp…. Good water is handy, while Rock Creek, which skirts one side of us, affords an excellent place for washing and bathing.”

Within short order, several 47th Pennsylvanians were given passes to the city, including members of Company D who “climbed to the top of the unfinished Capitol,” and B Company’s Corporal Henry Storch and Private Luther Mennig, who were sent to the Washington Arsenal on regimental business. On 24 September 1861, the 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry finally became part of the Union Army when its men were officially mustered into federal service. Members of the regiment dressed in the standard dark blue wool uniforms worn by the regular troops of the U.S. Army.

Three days later, the regiment was attached to the Army of the Potomac, and assigned to Brigadier-General Isaac Stevens’ 3rd Brigade, which also included the 33rd, 49th and 79th New York regiments. By that afternoon, the 47th Pennsylvania was on the move again, ordered onward by Brigadier-General Silas Casey.

Marching behind their Regimental Band, the Mississippi rifle-armed 47th Pennsylvania infantrymen reached Camp Lyon, Maryland on the Potomac River’s eastern shore. At 5:00 p.m., they joined the 46th Pennsylvania in moving double-quick (165 steps per minute using 33-inch steps) across the “Chain Bridge” marked on federal maps, and continued on for roughly another mile before being ordered to make camp.

The next morning, they broke camp and moved again. Marching toward Falls Church, Virginia, they trudged into Camp Advance around dusk. There, about two miles from the bridge they had crossed a day earlier, they re-pitched their tents in a deep ravine near a new federal fort under construction (Fort Ethan Allen). They had completed a roughly eight-mile trek, and were situated fairly close to General W. F. Smith’s headquarters. Under Smith’s leadership, their regiment and brigade would help to defend the nation’s capital from the time of their September arrival through late January of 1862 when the men of the 47th Pennsylvania would be shipped south.

Once again, 47th Pennsylvanians took pen to paper to recap their regiment’s activities, including Privates George Washington Hahn, David Huber and Frederick Scott of E Company who sent this letter to the editor of the Easton Express:

“Most likely you have already published the letter from the headquarters of the company, but it may also be interesting to some of your readers to hear from the boys.

We left Harrisburg at 1-1/2 p.m. on Friday last, and after a ride of about twenty-four hours in those delightful cattle cars, we came in sight of the Capitol of the U.S. with colors flying and the band playing and everyone in the best of spirits. After waiting a few minutes, we were provided with an excellent dinner of bread, beef and coffee, and then proceeded to Camp Kalorama, near Georgetown Heights and about three miles from Washington. We have one of the best camps in the Union; plenty of shade trees, water and food at present; we have had no ‘Hardees’ [hardtack] yet in this camp, but no doubt we will have them in abundance by and by. But we can cook them in so many different ways, they are better than beef. We soak them overnight, fry them for breakfast, stew them for dinner, and warm them over for supper. Who wouldn’t be a soldier and get such good living free gratis?

We are all happy boys. The way we pass our time in the evening is as follows: first, after supper, we have a good Union song, then we read, write, crack jokes and sing again. We are ‘gay and happy’ and always shall be while the stars and stripes float over us.

We have one of the best regiments we have yet seen, and no doubt in a few months, it will be the crack regiment of the army. We have a noble Colonel and an excellent Band, and the company officers throughout are well drilled for their positions. Our boys are well and contented; satisfied with their clothing, satisfied with their rations, and more than all satisfied with their officers, from Captain to the 8th Corporal. Our boys will stand by the Captain till the last man falls. We had the pleasure this morning of meeting an old Eastonian, Major Baldy. He looks well and hearty and says he is ready for action. His men are in the rifle pits every night and think nothing of facing the enemy.

This morning we took a French pass [leave without authorization] and visited Georgetown Heights; we stood on top of the reservoir and from there had a fine view of the Federal forts and forces on the other side of the Potomac. It looks impossible for an enemy to enter Washington, so strongly fortified is every hill and the camps connect for miles along the river. We saw General McClellan and Professor Lowe taking a view of the Confederate army from the balloon. The rebels are now only four miles from here. But we are afraid we have taken too much of your room. You may expect to hear from us again soon.”

Company C Musician Henry Wharton then noted via this 29 September letter to the Sunbury American that the 47th had changed camps three times in three days:

“On Friday last we left Camp Kalorama, and the same night encamped about one mile from the Chain Bridge on the opposite side of the Potomac from Washington. The next morning, Saturday, we were ordered to this Camp [Camp Advance near Fort Ethan Allen, Virginia], one and a half miles from the one we occupied the night previous. I should have mentioned that we halted on a high hill (on our march here) at the Chain Bridge, called Camp Lyon, but were immediately ordered on this side of the river. On the route from Kalorama we were for two hours exposed to the hardest rain I ever experienced. Whew, it was a whopper; but the fellows stood it well – not a murmur – and they waited in their wet clothes until nine o’clock at night for their supper. Our Camp adjoins that of the N.Y. 79th (Highlanders)….

We had not been in this Camp more than six hours before our boys were supplied with twenty rounds of ball and cartridge, and ordered to march and meet the enemy; they were out all night and got back to Camp at nine o’clock this morning, without having a fight. They are now in their tents taking a snooze preparatory to another march this morning…. I don’t know how long the boys will be gone, but the orders are to cook two days’ rations and take it with them in their haversacks….

There was a nice little affair came off at Lavensville [sic], a few miles from here on Wednesday last; our troops surprised a party of rebels (much larger than our own.) killing ten, took a Major prisoner, and captured a large number of horses, sheep and cattle, besides a large quantity of corn and potatoes, and about ninety six tons of hay. A very nice day’s work. The boys are well, in fact, there is no sickness of any consequence at all in our Regiment.”

According to G Company Private George Xander, after their initial arrival at Camp Advance/Fort Ethan Allen, the 47th Pennsylvanians immediately began building “defensive works” that “were thrown up with logs, in front of which a ditch eight feet wide and eight feet deep was dug. A powder magazine was also built.” On 28 September, the regiment was ordered to relocate yet again. After marching two more miles, they re-pitched their tents along a hill at the back of the fort, becoming part of the 4th Provisional Brigade, along with the men from Colonel Cosgrove’s 27th Indiana Volunteers, Colonel Leasure’s Roundheads, Colonel McKnight’s Wildcats, and Colonel Robinson’s 1st Michigan Volunteers.

The military action described by Wharton above in which “our boys were supplied with twenty rounds of ball and cartridge” actually began at 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, 28 September in response to intelligence received by senior Union Army officials that Fort Ethan Allen was likely to be attacked by Confederate forces that night. After making their way inside the fort at 10:30 p.m., the 47th Pennsylvanians formed battle lines “against the breastworks where they remained until 2 AM, when they were relieved by the 33rd New York Regiment and told to rest and sleep on their arms,” according to Schmidt. Around 4:00 a.m., they were then “ordered to march ‘double-quick for about three miles to Vandersburg Farm, where encountering no officers with instructions, Col. Good decided to advance another mile…. Here he found Gen. Smith who ordered the 47th into position in reserve. Many ambulances were coming up the road with the dead and wounded, and there were dead horses and broken gun carriages lying all about. It was reported that there were about 17 killed and 25 wounded.”

Although the 47th Pennsylvania was later reported to have been involved in the fighting, they were not. They had narrowly missed being ensnared in a “friendly fire” incident between the 69th and 71st Pennsylvania Volunteers, and instead had been ordered to return to their campsite on the hill after having completed their guard duties inside the fort. Finally able to enjoy a hearty breakfast that Sunday morning, the regiment then participated in the Sunday religious services which were being presented by Chaplain Rizer of the 79th New York Highlanders. The sermon was delivered by Rizer in German out of respect for the significant number of men in the 47th Pennsylvania who were German immigrants or were German-Americans who spoke “Pennsylvania Dutch.”

That evening of Sunday, 29 September, Simon Cameron, a native of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania who was serving as President Lincoln’s Secretary of War, officially welcomed the 47th Pennsylvania Infantry to Washington.

The month then closed with the men of 47th’s B and D Companies marching four miles away from the camp to perform a 48-hour stint of picket duty, beginning on 30 September 1861.

Exactly two months later, the sentiments of Civil War-era soldiers regarding their assignment to picket duty was eloquently evoked by a 30-something, female poet and short story writer in the “The Picket Guard.” Penned by Ethel Lynn Beers, the poem was initially published in the 30 November 1861 edition of Harper’s Weekly. It was then later set to music, and became more commonly known as “All Quiet Along the Potomac To-night”:

“ALL quiet along the Potomac to-night!”
Except here and there a stray picket
Is shot, as he walks on his beat, to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
‘Tis nothing! a private or two, now and then,
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost, only one of the men,
Moaning out, all alone, the death rattle.

All quiet along the Potomac to-night!
Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming;
And their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon,
And the light of the camp-fires are gleaming.
A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night-wind
Through the forest leaves softly is creeping;
While stars up above, with their glittering eyes,
Keep guard o’er the army sleeping.
There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread
As he tramps from the rock to the fountain,
And he thinks of the two in the low trundle-bed,
Far away in the cot on the mountain.

His musket falls slack; his face, dark and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,
As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep,
For their mother—”may Heaven defend her!”
The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then—
That night when the love, yet unspoken,
Leaped up to his lips, when low, murmured vows
Were pledged to be ever unbroken.

Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes,
He dashes off tears that are welling,
And gathers his gun closer up to his breast
As if to keep down the heart’s swelling.
He passes the fountain, the blasted pine-tree,
And his footstep is lagging and weary;
Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light,
Toward the shades of the forest so dreary.

Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves?
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looked like a rifle: “Ha! Mary, good-by!”
And the life-blood is ebbing and plashing.
“All quiet along the Potomac to-night!”
No sound save the rush of the river,
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead,
The picket’s off duty forever!

Sources:

1. Barkin, Kenneth. “Ordinary Germans, Slavery, and the U.S. Civil War,” in “Essay Reviews,” in The Journal of African American History, Vol. 93, No. 1, Winter 2008, pp. 70-79. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press (published for the Association for the Study of African American and History), 2008.

2. Bates, Samuel P. History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5, Prepared in Compliance with Acts of the Legislature, Vol. 1, 1150-1190. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: B. Singerly, State Printer, 1869.

3. Beers, Ethel Lynn. “The Picket Guard.” New York, New York: Harper’s Weekly, 30 November 1861.

4. Egle, William H. Life and Times of Andrew Gregg Curtin, pp. 127, 250. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Thompson Publishing Co., 1896.

5. “47th Infantry, First State Color,” in “Pennsylvania Civil War Battle Flags.” Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee.

6. “Founding of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society,” in Africans in America. Boston, Massachusetts: WGBH Educational Foundation, 1998.

7. Hahn, George Washington, David Huber and Frederick Scott. Letter from the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers. Easton, Pennsylvania: Easton Daily Evening Express, September 1861.

8. Hardee, William Joseph. Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics. Memphis, Tennessee: E.C. Kirk & Co., 1861.

9. Henry, Matthew Schropp. History of the Lehigh Valley, Containing a Copious Selection of the Most Interesting Facts, Traditions, Biographical Sketches, Anecdotes, etc., etc., Relating to Its History and Antiquities, pp. 141-143. Easton, Pennsylvania: Bixler & Corwin, 1860.

10. Letter from the Secretary of War, Transmitting the report of Major General George B. McClellan upon the organization of the Army of the Potomac, and its campaigns in Virginia and Maryland, from July 26, 1861, to November 7, 1862. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office (Ex. Doc. No. 15 produced for the 38th Congress, 1st Session, U.S. House of Representatives), 1864.

11. Mathews, Alfred and Austin N. Hungerford. History of the Counties of Lehigh and Carbon, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Everts & Richards, 1884.

12. Newman, Richard S. “The PAS and American Abolitionism: A Century of Activism from the American Revolutionary Era to the Civil War,” in “Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers,” in “History Online: Digital History Projects.” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, retrieved online 28 August 2019.

13. Schmidt, Lewis. A Civil War History of the 47th Regiment of Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers. Allentown, Pennsylvania: Self-published, 1986.

14. Wharton, Henry. Letters from the Sunbury Guards. Sunbury, Pennsylvania: Sunbury American, 1861-1862.

The elimination of slavery in the United States of America has been a lengthy and less than perfect process, beginning with early abolition efforts which occurred during the nation’s colonial period, and which were designed to reduce and ultimately end the buying, selling, and exchanging or bartering of human beings. According to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, “the first written protest in England’s American colonies came from Germantown Friends in 1688” in Pennsylvania; the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends also subsequently “criticized the importation of slaves in 1696, objected to slave trading in 1754, and in 1775 determined to disown members who would not free their slaves.”

That same year, America’s first abolition organization, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, was also established. Formed in Philadelphia on April 14, 1775, the organization became more commonly known as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. “Throughout the 1700s,” according to PHMC historians, the Pennsylvania Assembly also actively “attempted to discourage the slave trade by taxing it repeatedly,” and then began taking a slightly more intense approach by passing “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” by a vote of 34 to 21 on March 1, 1870. The first legislative action of its kind in America, it decreed, among other things, “that ‘every Negro and Mulatto child born within the State after the passing of the Act (1780) would be free upon reaching age twenty-eight,'” and that after their release from slavery, these freed people “were to receive the same freedom dues and other privileges ‘such as tools of their trade,’ as servants bound by indenture for four years.” Heavily opposed by German Lutherans and the representatives of counties with large populations of residents of German heritage, this new law still allowed residents of the Keystone State to continue to buy slaves who had already been registered, but prohibited Pennsylvanians from importing new slaves into the state.

* Note: Although a significant number of German Lutherans initially opposed the state’s 1870 abolition act, many German Methodists adopted anti-slavery positions, as did many who were considered to be “Forty-Eighters” (Germans who emigrated to America during or after the revolutions of 1848).

Although opponents of Pennsylvania’s new abolition law continued to challenge this legislation for several years after its passage, the legislation ultimately survived, and was subsequently strengthened in 1788 to stop Pennsylvanians residing near the borders of Delaware and Maryland from sneaking slaves into the state in violation of the law. The full wording of Pennsylvania’s initial abolition act read as follows:

When we contemplate our Abhorence of that Condition to which the Arms and Tyranny of Great Britain were exerted to reduce us, when we look back on the Variety of Dangers to which we have been exposed, and how miraculously our Wants in many Instances have been supplied and our Deliverances wrought, when even Hope and human fortitude have become unequal to the Conflict; we are unavoidably led to a serious and grateful Sense of the manifold Blessings which we have undeservedly received from the hand of that Being from whom every good and perfect Gift cometh. Impressed with these Ideas we conceive that it is our duty, and we rejoice that it is in our Power, to extend a Portion of that freedom to others, which hath been extended to us; and a Release from that State of Thraldom, to which we ourselves were tyrannically doomed, and from which we have now every Prospect of being delivered. It is not for us to enquire, why, in the Creation of Mankind, the Inhabitants of the several parts of the Earth, were distinguished by a difference in Feature or Complexion. It is sufficient to know that all are the Work of an Almighty Hand, We find in the distribution of the human Species, that the most fertile, as well as the most barren parts of the Earth are inhabited by Men of Complexions different from ours and from each other, from whence we may reasonably as well as religiously infer, that he, who placed them in their various Situations, hath extended equally his Care and Protection to all, and that it becometh not us to counteract his Mercies.

We esteem a peculiar Blessing granted to us, that we are enabled this Day to add one more Step to universal Civilization by removing as much as possible the Sorrows of those, who have lived in undeserved Bondage, and from which by the assumed Authority of the Kings of Britain, no effectual legal Relief could be obtained. Weaned by a long Course of Experience from those narrow Prejudices and Partialities we had imbibed, we find our Hearts enlarged with Kindness and Benevolence towards Men of all Conditions and Nations; and we conceive ourselves at this particular Period extraordinarily called upon by the Blessings which we have received, to manifest the Sincerity of our Profession and to give a substantial Proof of our Gratitude.

And whereas, the Condition of those Persons who have heretofore been denominated Negroe and Mulatto Slaves, has been attended with Circ*mstances which not only deprived them of the common Blessings that they were by Nature entitled to, but has cast them into the deepest Afflictions by an unnatural Separation and Sale of Husband and Wife from each other, and from their Children; an Injury the greatness of which can only be conceived, by supposing that we were in the same unhappy Case. In Justice therefore to Persons so unhappily circ*mstanced and who, having no Prospect before them whereon they may rest their Sorrows and their hopes have no reasonable Inducement to render that Service to Society, which they otherwise might; and also ingrateful Commemoration of our own happy Deliverance, from that State of unconditional Submission, to which we were doomed by the Tyranny of Britain.

Be it enacted and it is hereby enacted by the Representatives of the Freemen of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in General Assembly met and by the Authority of the same, That all Persons, as well Negroes, and Mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves; and that all Servitude for Life or Slavery of Children in Consequence of the Slavery of their Mothers, in the Case of all Children born within this State from and after the passing of this Act as aforesaid, shall be, an hereby is, utterly taken away, extinguished and for ever abolished.

Provided always and be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That every Negroe and Mulatto Child born within this State after the passing of this Act as aforesaid, who would in Case this Act had not been made, have been born a Servant for Years or life or a Slave, shall be deemed to be and shall be, by Virtue of this Act the Servant of such person or his or her Assigns, who would in such Case have been entitled to the Service of such Child until such Child shall attain unto the Age of twenty eight Years, in the manner and on the Conditions whereon Servants bound by Indenture for four Years are or may be retained and holden; and shall be liable to like Correction and punishment, and intitled to like Relief in case he or she be evilly treated by his or her master or Mistress; and to like Freedom dues and other Privileges as Servants bound by Indenture for Four Years are or may be intitled unless the Person to whom the Service of any such Child Shall belong, shall abandon his or her Claim to the same, in which Case the Overseers of the Poor of the City Township or District, respectively where such Child shall be so abandoned, shall by Indenture bind out every Child so abandoned as an Apprentice for a Time not exceeding the Age herein before limited for the Service of such Children.

And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That every Person who is or shall be the Owner of any Negroe or Mulatto Slave or Servant for life or till the Age of thirty one Years, now within this State, or his lawful Attorney shall on or before the said first day of November next, deliver or cause to be delivered in Writing to the Clerk of the Peace of the County or to the Clerk of the Court of Record of the City of Philadelphia, in which he or she shall respectively inhabit, the Name and Sirname and Occupation or Profession of such Owner, and the Name of the County and Township District or Ward where he or she resideth, and also the Name and Names of any such Slave and Slaves and Servant and Servants for Life or till the Age of thirty one Years together with their Ages and Sexes severally and respectively set forth and annexed, by such Person owned or statedly employed, and then being within this State in order to ascertain and distinguish the Slaves and Servants for Life and Years till the Age of thirty one Years within this State who shall be such on the said first day of November next, from all other persons, which particulars shall by said Clerk of the Sessions and Clerk of said City Court be entered in Books to be provided for that Purpose by the said Clerks; and that no Negroe or Mulatto now within this State shall from and after the said first day of November by deemed a slave or Servant for life or till the Age of thirty one Years unless his or her name shall be entered as aforesaid on such Record except such Negroe and Mulatto Slaves and Servants as are hereinafter excepted; the said Clerk to be entitled to a fee of Two Dollars for each Slave or Servant so entered as aforesaid, from the Treasurer of the County to be allowed to him in his Accounts.

Provided always, That any Person in whom the Ownership or Right to the Service of any Negro or Mulatto shall be vested at the passing of this Act, other than such as are herein before excepted, his or her Heirs, Executors, Administrators and Assigns, and all and every of them severally Shall be liable to the Overseers of the Poor of the City, Township or District to which any such Negroe or Mulatto shall become chargeable, for such necessary Expence, with Costs of Suit thereon, as such Overseers may be put to through the Neglect of the Owner, Master or Mistress of such Negroe or Mulatto, notwithstanding the Name and other descriptions of such Negroe or Mulatto shall not be entered and recorded as aforesaid; unless his or her Master or Owner shall before such Slave or Servant attain his or her twenty eighth Year execute and record in the proper County, a deed or Instrument securing to such Slave or Servant his or her Freedom.

And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That the Offences and Crimes of Negroes and Mulattos as well as Slaves and Servants and Freemen, shall be enquired of, adjudged, corrected and punished in like manner as the Offences and Crimes of the other Inhabitants of this State are and shall be enquired of adjudged, corrected and punished, and not otherwise except that a Slave shall not be admitted to bear Witness agaist [sic] a Freeman.

And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid That in all Cases wherein Sentence of Death shall be pronounced against a Slave, the Jury before whom he or she shall be tried shall appraise and declare the Value of such Slave, and in Case Such Sentence be executed, the Court shall make an Order on the State Treasurer payable to the Owner for the same and for the Costs of Prosecution, but in Case of a Remission or Mitigation for the Costs only.

And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid That the Reward for taking up runaway and absconding Negroe and Mulatto Slaves and Servants and the Penalties for enticing away, dealing with, or harbouring, concealing or employing Negroe and Mulatto Slaves and Servants shall be the same, and shall be recovered in like manner, as in Case of Servants bound for Four Years.

And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That no Man or Woman of any Nation or Colour, except the Negroes or Mulattoes who shall be registered as aforesaid shall at any time hereafter be deemed, adjudged or holden, within the Territories of this Commonwealth, as Slaves or Servants for Life, but as freemen and Freewomen; and except the domestic Slaves attending upon Delegates in Congress from the other American States, foreign Ministers and Consuls, and persons passing through or sojourning in this State, and not becoming resident therein; and Seamen employed in Ships, not belonging to any Inhabitant of this State nor employed in any Ship owned by any such Inhabitant, Provided such domestic Slaves be not aliened or sold to any Inhabitant, nor (except in the Case of Members of Congress, foreign Ministers and Consuls) retained in this State longer than six Months.

Provided always and be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That this Act nor any thing in it contained shall not give any Relief or Shelter to any absconding or Runaway Negroe or Mulatto Slave or Servant, who has absented himself or shall absent himself from his or her Owner, Master or Mistress, residing in any other State or Country, but such Owner, Master or Mistress, shall have like Right and Aid to demand, claim and take away his Slave or Servant, as he might have had in Case this Act had not been made. And that all Negroe and Mulatto Slaves, now owned, and heretofore resident in this State, who have absented themselves, or been clandestinely carried away, or who may be employed abroad as Seamen, and have not returned or been brought back to their Owners, Masters or Mistresses, before the passing of this Act may within five Years be registered as effectually, as is ordered by this Act concerning those who are now within the State, on producing such Slave, before any two Justices of the Peace, and satisfying the said Justices by due Proof, of the former Residence, absconding, taking away, or Absence of such Slave as aforesaid; who thereupon shall direct and order the said Slave to be entered on the Record as aforesaid.

And Whereas Attempts may be made to evade this Act, by introducing into this State, Negroes and Mulattos, bound by Covenant to serve for long and unreasonable Terms of Years, if the same be not prevented.

Be it therefore enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That no Covenant of personal Servitude or Apprenticeship whatsoever shall be valid or binding on a Negroe or Mulatto for a longer Time than Seven Years; unless such Servant or Apprentice were at the Commencement of such Servitude or Apprenticeship under the Age of Twenty one Years; in which Case such Negroe or Mulatto may be holden as a Servant or Apprentice respectively, according to the Covenant, as the Case shall be, until he or she shall attain the Age of twenty eight Years but no longer.

And be it further enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That an Act of Assembly of the Province of Pennsylvania passed in the Year one thousand seven hundred and five, intitled “An Act for the Trial of Negroes;” and another Act of Assembly of the said Province passed in the Year one thousand seven hundred and twenty five intitled “An Act for “the better regulating of Negroes in this Province;” and another Act of Assembly of the said Province passed in the Year one thousand seven hundred and sixty one intitled “An Act for laying a Duty on Negroe and Mulatto Slaves imported into this Province” and also another Act of Assembly of the said Province, passed in the Year one thousand seven hundred and seventy three, intitled “An Act for making perpetual An Act for laying a duty on Negroe and Mulatto “Slaves imported into this Province and for laying an additional “Duty on said Slaves;” shall be and are hereby repealed annulled and made void.

John Bayard, Speaker

Enacted into a Law at Philadelphia on Wednesday the first day of March, Anno Domini One thousand seven hundred Eighty
Thomas Paine, Clerk of the General Assembly

Other states then followed Pennsylvania’s lead, expanding upon it by enacting less conservative measures. During a series of judicial reviews which were conducted in Massachusetts between 1781 and 1783, for example, state leaders there declared that slavery was incompatible with their state’s new constitution.

These various laws, while not perfect, did gradually achieve their aim of reducing slavery in northern states, as did 1807 legislation by the U.S. Congress which made it a crime for Americans to engage in international slave trade (effective January 1, 1808), and which ultimately reduced shipments of slaves from Africa to the United States by ninety percent. With respect to Pennsylvania, specifically, “the number of slaves dropped from 3,737 to 1,706” between 1790 and 1800, according to PHMC historians, “and by 1810 to 795. In 1840, there still were 64 slaves in the state, but by 1850 there were none.”

Meanwhile, Quakers and others active in abolition movements in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia achieved some success by pressuring slaveholders to agree to free slaves via wills and other methods of manumission so that, by 1860, more than ninety percent of black men, women, and children in Delaware and nearly fifty percent in Maryland were free.

Despite these efforts, however, the ugliness of slavery continued to persist — a fact made all too clear in newspapers and other publications of the period, including via William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. But it was, perhaps, the nation’s fugitive slave laws which finally made plain slavery’s seemingly unshakeable grip on the country. Passed by the U.S. Congress, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required that all escaped slaves, regardless of where they were captured, be returned to their masters — even if those escaped slaves had made it to safety via the Underground Railroad or other methods and had been given sanctuary by abolitionists in states where slaves had been permanently freed. In response, two years later, Harriet Beecher Stowe released her landmark, anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

After the U.S. Congress set the stage to reverse decades of anti-slavery progress with its passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, abolitionists and other opponents of slavery banded together to form the Republican Party, which held its first national convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 22, 1856. Initially proposing a system which would contain slavery until each individual state where the practice still existed could be forced to eradicate it, the Republican Party adopted a harder, anti-slavery line in 1860 after the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States.

Following the secession of multiple states from the Union, beginning with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, and the subsequent fall of Fort Sumter to Confederate States Army troops in mid-April 1861, the United States descended into a state of civil war with its federal government issuing a call for regular and volunteer troops to preserve the Union. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln formally added the abolition of slavery as one of the federal government’s stated war goals with his release of the preliminary version of his Emancipation Proclamation, which decared that, effective January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

But it would take more than two years for that hoped-for dream to truly begin and nearly 150 years for it to be completely embraced by a divided nation.

THE 13TH AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION (THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY)

“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

1864:

April 8, 1864: The United States Senate passes the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by a vote of 38 to 6.

1865:

January 31, 1865: The U.S. House passes the 13th Amendment by a vote of 119 to 56.

February 1, 1865: President Abraham Lincoln approves the Joint Resolution of Congress. According to historians at The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, even though the U.S. Constitution does not require presidential signatures on amendments, Lincoln chooses to add his signature, making the 13th Amendment “the only constitutional amendment to be later ratified that was signed by a president.” The resolution is also ratified on this day by the Illinois Legislature, making Illinois the first state to ratify the amendment. (According to news reports, the Illinois Legislature actually ratified the amendment in Springfield, Illinois before Lincoln added his signature to the document in Washington, D.C.)

February 2, 1865: Rhode Island becomes the second state to ratify the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Michigan’s legislature also ratifies the amendment on this day.

February 3, 1865: Maryland, New York, and West Virginia ratify the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

February 6, 1865: Missouri ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

February 7, 1865: Maine, Kansas, and Massachusetts ratify the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

February 8, 1865: Pennsylvania ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution while Delaware initially rejects ratification of the amendment. (Delaware’s legislature will later approve it in 1901. See below for details.)

February 9, 1865: Virginia ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

February 10, 1865: Ohio ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

February 15–16, 1865: Louisiana ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on February 15 or 16 while Indiana and Nevada both ratify the amendment on February 16, 1865.

February 23, 1865: Minnesota ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

February 24, 1865: Wisconsin ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution while Kentucky rejects ratification. (Kentucky’s legislature will later approve ratification in 1976. See below for details.)

March 9, 1865: Vermont’s governor approves the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

March 16, 1865: New Jersey initially rejects ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (The state’s legislature will later approve it in 1866. See below for details.)

April 7, 1865: Tennessee ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

April 14, 1865: Arkansas ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

May 4, 1865: Connecticut ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

June 30, 1865: New Hampshire ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

November 13, 1865: South Carolina ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

December 2, 1865: Alabama’s provisional governor approves the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution while Mississippi rejects ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Mississippi’s certified ratification of the amendment will not be achieved until 148 years later. See below for detail.)

December 4, 1865: North Carolina ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

December 6, 1865: The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is officially ratified when Georgia becomes the 27th state to approve the amendment. (America has a total of 36 states at this time in its history.) With this day’s formal abolition of slavery, four million Americans are permanently freed.

December 11, 1865: Oregon ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

December 15, 1865: California ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

December 18, 1865: United States Secretary of State William H. Seward certifies that the 13th Amendment has become a valid part of the U.S. Constitution.

William H. Seward, Secretary of State of the United States,
To all to whom these presents may come, greeting:

Dec. 18, 1865, Preamble: Know ye, that whereas the congress of the United States on the 1st of February last passed a resolution which is in the words following, namely:

“A resolution submitting to the legislatures of the several states a proposition to amend the Constitution of the United States.”

“Resolved by the Senate and House of the United States of America in Congress assembled, (two thirds of both houses occurring,) That the following article be proposed to the legislatures of the several states as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which, when ratified by three fourths of said legislatures, shall be valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the said constitution, namely:

“ARTICLE XIII.

“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

“Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

And whereas it appears from official documents on file in this department that the amendment to the Constitution of the United States proposed, as aforesaid, has been ratified by the legislatures of the State of Illinois, Rhode Island, Michigan, Maryland, New York, West Virginia, Maine, Kansas, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Vermont, Tennessee, Arkansas, Connecticut, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia; in all twenty-seven states;

And whereas the whole number of states in the United States is thirty-six; and whereas the before specially-named states, whose legislatures have ratified the said proposed amendment, constitute three fourths of the whole number of states in the United States;

Now, therefore, be it known, that I, WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State of the United States, by virtue and in pursuance of the second section of the act of congress, approved the twentieth of April, eighteen hundred and eighteen, entitled “An act to provide for the publication of the laws of the United States and for other purposes,” do hereby certify that the amendment aforesaid has become valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the Constitution of the United States.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the Department of State to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this eighteenth day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the ninetieth.

WILLIAM H. SEWARD.
Secretary of State.

December 28, 1865: Florida ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

1866:

January 15, 1866: Iowa becomes the 31st state to approve the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (alternate date January 17, 1866).

January 23, 1866: New Jersey ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

1868:

June 9, 1868: Florida reaffirms its ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as part of its legislature’s approval of a new state constitution.

1870:

February 17, 1870: Texas ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

1901:

February 12, 1901: Delaware ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

1976:

March 18, 1976: Kentucky ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

2013:

February 7, 2013: Mississippi becomes the final state to achieve certified ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

* Note: According to 2013 news reports by staff at ABC and CBS News, although Mississippi legislators finally voted for ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1995, they never notified the U.S. Archivist. As a result, their effort to formally abolish slavery was still not official – an error which was discovered in 2012 by Ranjan Batra, an immigrant from India and professor of Neurobiology and Anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. After enlisting the help of a medical center colleague (long-time Mississippi resident Ken Sullivan) in uncovering documentation of the oversight, Batra then alerted Mississippi’s Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, who finally rectified the error by sending the U.S. Office of the Federal Register a copy of Mississippi’s 1995 resolution on January 30, 2013. When that resolution was published in the Federal Register on February 7, 2013, Mississippi’s abolition of slavery finally became official.

Sources:

1. “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery — March 1, 1780.” Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, retrieved online January 31, 2019.

2. “13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery,” in “America’s Historical Documents.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, retrieved online January 31, 2019.

3. Condon, Stephanie. “After 148 Years, Mississippi Finally Ratifies 13th Amendment Which Banned Slavery.” New York, New York: CBS News, February 18, 2013.

4. Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Idealogy of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. Cary, North Carolina: Oxford University Press, April 1995.

5. “Founding of Pennsylvania Abolition Society,” in “Africans in America.” Boston, Massachusetts: WGBH (PBS), retrieved online January 31, 2019.

6. Head, David. “Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers: The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early Republic“, in Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 433-462. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, Fall 2013.

7. Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619–1877, pp. 78, 81–82. New York, New York: Hill and Wang (Macmillan), 1994.

8. “Massachusetts Constitution and the Abolition of Slavery,” in “Massachusetts Court System.” Boston, Massachusetts: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Mass.gov, retrieved online January 31, 2019.

9. McClelland, Edward. “Illinois: First State to Ratify 13th Amendment.” Chicago, Illinois: NBC 5-Chicago, November 16, 2012.

10. “No. 5: William H. Seward, Secretary of State of the United States” (certification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), in “A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774–1875: Statutes at Large,” in “American Memory.” Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, retrieved online January 31, 2019.

11. Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865. New York, New York and London, United Kingdom: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013.

12. “Ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, 1866: A Spotlight on a Primary Source by Iowa General Assembly,” in “History Now.” New York, New York: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, retrieved online January 31, 2019.

13. U.S. Senate Document No. 112-9 (2013), 112th Congress, 2nd Session: “The Constitution of the United States Of America Analysis And Interpretation Centennial Edition Interim Edition: Analysis Of Cases Decided By The Supreme Court Of The United States To June 26, 2013s,” p. 30 (of large PDF file). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, retrieved online January 31, 2019.

14. Waldron, Ben. “Mississippi Officially Abolishes Slavery, Ratifies 13th Amendment.” New York, New York: ABC News, February 18, 2013.

1863 was a pivotal year for Abraham Lincoln and the United States of America. It began with the New Year’s Day execution of the President’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all people held as slaves in every state which had seceded from the Union, saw the course of the American Civil War swing in the federal government’s favor with the Union’s victory over Confederate States Army troops in the bloody, tide-turning Battle of Gettysburg in early July, and closed with Lincoln’s attempts to reunify both his nation and family in the days leading up to Christmas through two very different documents which shared the common threads of compassion and forgiveness – an Executive Letter designed to provide his wife’s cousin – a supporter of the Confederacy – to have safe passage to, and secure residency at, her home in Arkansas, and a proclamation intended to inspire similar CSA supporters to pressure their leaders to end the war and return to the Union fold.

The texts of both documents are shown below.

Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (8 December 1863)

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A PROCLAMATION.

WHEREAS, in and by the Constitution of the United States, it is provided that the President “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment;” and

Whereas, a rebellion now exists whereby the loyal state governments of several states have for a long time been subverted, and many persons have committed, and are now guilty of, treason against the United States; and

Whereas, with reference to said rebellion and treason, laws have been enacted by congress, declaring forfeitures and confiscation of property and liberation of slaves, all upon terms and conditions therein stated, and also declaring that the President was thereby authorized at any time thereafter, by proclamation, to extend to persons who may have participated in the existing rebellion, in any state or part thereof, pardon and amnesty, with such exceptions and at such times and on such conditions as he may deem expedient for the public welfare; and

Whereas, the congressional declaration for limited and conditional pardon accords with well-established judicial exposition of the pardoning power; and

Whereas, with reference to said rebellion, the President of the United States has issued several proclamations, with provisions in regard to the liberation of slaves; and

Whereas, it is now desired by some persons heretofore engaged in said rebellion to resume their allegiance to the United States, and to reinaugurate loyal state governments within and for their respective states: Therefore–

I, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, do proclaim, declare, and make known to all persons who have, directly or by implication, participated in the existing rebellion, except as hereinafter excepted, that a full pardon is hereby granted to them and each of them, with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves, and in property cases where rights of third parties shall have intervened, and upon the condition that every such person shall take and subscribe an oath, and thenceforward keep and maintain said oath inviolate; and which oath shall be registered for permanent preservation, and shall be of the tenor and effect following, to wit:–

“I, ______ , do solemnly swear, in presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of the States thereunder; and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all acts of congress passed during the existing rebellion with reference to slaves, so long and so far as not repealed, modified, or held void by congress, or by decision of the supreme court; and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all proclamations of the President made during the existing rebellion having reference to slaves, so long and so far as not modified or declared void by decision of the supreme court. So help me God.”

The persons excepted from the benefits of the foregoing provisions are all who are, or shall have been, civil or diplomatic officers or agents of the so-called Confederate government; all who have left judicial stations under the United States to aid the rebellion; all who are, or shall have been, military or naval officers of said so-called Confederate government above the rank of colonel in the army or of lieutenant in the navy; all who left seats in the United States congress to aid the rebellion; all who resigned commissions in the army or navy of the United States and afterwards aided the rebellion; and all who have engaged in any way in treating colored persons, or white persons in charge of such, otherwise than lawfully as prisoners of war, and which persons may have been found in the United States service as soldiers, seamen, or in any other capacity.

And I do further proclaim, declare, and make known that whenever, in any of the States of Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina, a number of persons, not less than one tenth in number of the votes cast in such state at the presidential election of the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty, each having taken the oath aforesaid, and not having since violated it, and being a qualified voter by the election law of the state existing immediately before the so-called act of secession, and excluding all others, shall reestablish a state government which shall be republican, and in nowise contravening said oath, such shall be recognized as the true government of the state, and the state shall receive thereunder the benefits of the constitutional provision which declares that “the United States shall guaranty to every state in this Union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or the executive, (when the legislature cannot be convened,) against domestic violence.”

And I do further proclaim, declare, and make known that any provision which may be adopted by such state government in relation to the freed people of such state, which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent as a temporary arrangement with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class, will not be objected to by the National Executive.

And it is suggested as not improper that, in constructing a loyal state government in any state, the name of the state, the boundary, the subdivisions, the constitution, and the general code of laws, as before the rebellion, be maintained, subject only to the modifications made necessary by the conditions hereinbefore stated, and such others, if any, not contravening said conditions, and which may be deemed expedient by those framing the new state government.

To avoid misunderstanding, it may be proper to say that this proclamation, so far as it relates to state governments, has no reference to states wherein loyal state governments have all the while been maintained. And, for the same reason, it may be proper to further say, that whether members sent to congress from any state shall be admitted to seats constitutionally rests exclusively with the respective houses, and not to any extent with the Executive. And still further, that this proclamation is intended to present the people of the states wherein the national authority has been suspended, and loyal state governments have been subverted, a mode in and by which the national authority and loyal state governments may be reestablished within said states, or in any of them; and while the mode presented is the best the Executive can suggest, with his present impressions, it must not be understood that no other possible mode would be acceptable.

Given under my hand at the city of Washington the eighth day of December, A.D. one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-eighth.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

By the President:
WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.

Executive Letter in Support of Mary Todd Lincoln’s First Cousin (21 December 1863)

Executive Mansion
Washington, December 21, 1863.

Mr. and Mrs. Craig, of Arkansas, whose plantation, situated upon the Mississippi River a few miles below Helena, has been desolated during the present war, purpose returning to reoccupy and cultivate said plantation; and it is my wish that they be permitted to do so, and that the United States military forces in that vicinity will not molest them, or allow them to be molested, as long as the said Mr. and Mrs. Craig shall demean themselves as peaceful, loyal citizens of the United States.

Abraham Lincoln

Letter Text: The Raab Collection (see “Sources” below)

Sources:

1. “An Original Christmas Week Letter from Abraham Lincoln During the Civil War Is Up for Sale for the First Time.” Ardmore, Pennsylvania: The Raab Collection, December 13, 2018.

2. “Civil War Timeline,” in “Gettysburg National Military Park. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Park Service, retrieved online December 1, 2018.

3. “The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” in “Freedmen & Southern Society Project.” College Park, Maryland: Department of History, University of Maryland, retrieved online December 1, 2018.

4. “Transcript of the Proclamation,” in “The Emancipation Proclamation,” in “Online Exhibits: Featured Documents.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, retrieved online December 1, 2018.

5. Sanger, George P., ed. The Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of the United States of America from December 1863, to to December 1865, Vol. XIII, pp. 737–39. Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown and Company, 1866.

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

* Notes: According to Lincoln historian Roy P. Basler, “The original draft of this proclamation has not been located, but a letter from John G. Nicolay to John Hay from New York, April 1, 1864, relates that ‘the Mss. of the President’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, which was written by Seward and is in his handwriting’ had been sent by the State Department to Leavitt Hunt ‘to be sold at the Fair.’”

The proceeds from that and other Sanitary Fairs raised millions of dollars funds in support of the aid rendered by the U.S. Sanitary Commission to sick and wounded Union soldiers and their families.

Nicolay, a German immigrant, served as one of two private secretaries to President Abraham Lincoln.

The paragraph formatting used for the reprinting of the proclamation (above) was taken from the formatting used for the publication of the proclamation in the 17 October 1863 edition of Harper’s Weekly.

Sources:

1. Basler, Roy P., editor, et. al. Collected works, vol. 6. The Abraham Lincoln Association/Springfield, Illinois. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

2. Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1863: A primary source by Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Nast. New York, New York: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of History, retrieved online 1 November 2017.

A tantalizing new videoreleased by 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story just opened an important new portal to the 19th century for Civil War enthusiasts, teachers, students, and genealogists.

Faces of the 47th is part of a larger, ongoing initiative to document and raise public awareness about the 47th Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry – the only regiment from the Keystone State to fight in the Union’s 1864 Red River Campaign across Louisiana. The video presents the photographic and illustrated images of more than two dozen men who fought with the all-volunteer unit between 1861 and 1865.

“Each one of these images holds the potential to help family history researchers feel closer to their Civil War-era ancestors while also enabling teachers, students and Civil War enthusiasts to deepen their connections to one of the most painful chapters in the American narrative,” explains Laurie Snyder, managing editor for the project. “By ‘putting faces to the names’ on military muster rolls, we’re bringing history to life while also paying tribute to those who fought to eradicate slavery and preserve our nation’s union.”

The photo digitization project received early support from Thomas MacEntee, founder of High-Definition Genealogy, via The Genealogy Fairy™ program, which enabled Snyder to locate and digitize photographs of key members of the regiment. Among the images preserved in this initial collection are the faces of a regimental chaplain, musicians, prisoners of war (POWs), military surgeons, and officers and enlisted men who were grievously wounded or killed in combat, as well as several men who became inventors, leading business executives and elected officials in and beyond Pennsylvania after the war.

“At the time I applied for the grant, there were hundreds of photographs tucked away in public libraries, historical societies, universities, and private family history collections from Maine to California and Michigan to Louisiana. Most had not yet been digitized and might have been lost for all time had Thomas MacEntee not provided the support he did when he did,” said Snyder. “More work still needs to be done, of course, because there are photos still not yet scanned, but the project took more than two dozen giant steps forward with just that one grant from Thomas. He’s a hero in my book.”

Other significant support for the project has been provided by the Burrowes and Wasserman families.

About the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers

Recruited primarily at community gathering places in their respective home towns, the soldiers who served with the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry were primarily men of German heritage whose families still spoke German or “Pennsylvania Dutch” more than a century after their ancestors emigrated from Germany in search of religious and political freedom. Still others were recent immigrants from Germany, Ireland and Cuba. Formerly enslaved black men who had been freed by the regiment from plantations in South Carolina and Louisiana were added to regimental rosters in 1862 and 1864.

In addition to fighting in the battles of Sabine Cross Roads/Mansfield, Pleasant Hill and Monett’s Ferry/Cane River during the Red River Campaign, the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers also engaged in the defense of Washington, D.C. in 1861 and again in 1865, following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; the capture of Saint John’s Bluff, Florida and Battle of Pocotaligo, South Carolina (1862); the garrisoning of Forts Taylor and Jefferson in Key West and the Dry Tortugas, Florida (1863); Union Major-General Philip Sheridan’s tide-turning Shenandoah Valley Campaign (1864), including the battles of Berryville, Opequon, Fisher’s Hill, and Cedar Creek; and provost (military police) and Reconstruction duties in Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina (1865). Most were finally released from duty when the regiment formally mustered out on Christmas Day in 1865.

Learn More and Support

To learn more about the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers and lend your support to this historic initiative, visit the website of 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers: One Civil War Regiment’s Story, and follow the project on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube.

We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart. The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression can not be restrained. In the midst of this, however, He, from Whom all blessings flow, must not be forgotten. A call for a national thanksgiving is being prepared, and will be duly promulgated. Nor must those whose harder part gives us the cause of rejoicing, be overlooked. Their honors must not be parcelled out with others. I myself, was near the front, and had the high pleasure of transmitting much of the good news to you; but no part of the honor, for plan or execution, is mine. To Gen. Grant, his skilful officers, and brave men, all belongs. The gallant Navy stood ready, but was not in reach to take active part.

By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the national authority—reconstruction—which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.

As a general rule, I abstain from reading the reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I can not properly offer an answer. In spite of this precaution, however, it comes to my knowledge that I am much censured for some supposed agency in setting up, and seeking to sustain, the new State Government of Louisiana. In this I have done just so much as, and no more than, the public knows. In the Annual Message of Dec. 1863 and accompanying Proclamation, I presented a plan of re-construction (as the phrase goes) which, I promised, if adopted by any State, should be acceptable to, and sustained by, the Executive government of the nation. I distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which might possibly be acceptable; and I also distinctly protested that the Executive claimed no right to say when, or whether members should be admitted to seats in Congress from such States. This plan was, in advance, submitted to the then Cabinet, and distinctly approved by every member of it. One of them suggested that I should then, and in that connection, apply the Emancipation Proclamation to the theretofore excepted parts of Virginia and Louisiana; that I should drop the suggestion about apprenticeship for freed-people, and that I should omit the protest against my own power, in regard to the admission of members to Congress; but even he approved every part and parcel of the plan which has since been employed or touched by the action of Louisiana. The new constitution of Louisiana, declaring emancipation for the whole State, practically applies the Proclamation to the part previously excepted. It does not adopt apprenticeship for freed-people; and it is silent, as it could not well be otherwise, about the admission of members to Congress. So that, as it applies to Louisiana, every member of the Cabinet fully approved the plan. The Message went to Congress, and I received many commendations of the plan, written and verbal; and not a single objection to it, from any professed emancipationist, came to my knowledge, until after the news reached Washington that the people of Louisiana had begun to move in accordance with it. From about July 1862, I had corresponded with different persons, supposed to be interested, seeking a reconstruction of a State government for Louisiana. When the Message of 1863, with the plan before mentioned, reached New-Orleans, Gen. Banks wrote me that he was confident the people, with his military co-operation, would reconstruct, substantially on that plan. I wrote him, and some of them to try it; they tried it, and the result is known. Such only has been my agency in getting up the Louisiana government. As to sustaining it, my promise is out, as before stated. But, as bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest. But I have not yet been so convinced.

I have been shown a letter on this subject, supposed to be an able one, in which the writer expresses regret that my mind has not seemed to be definitely fixed on the question whether the seceded States, so called, are in the Union or out of it. It would perhaps, add astonishment to his regret, were he to learn that since I have found professed Union men endeavoring to make that question, I have purposely forborne any public expression upon it. As appears to me that question has not been, nor yet is, a practically material one, and that any discussion of it, while it thus remains practically immaterial, could have no effect other than the mischievous one of dividing our friends. As yet, whatever it may hereafter become, that question is bad, as the basis of a controversy, and good for nothing at all—a merely pernicious abstraction.

We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier, to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these states have even been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.

The amount of constituency, so to to [sic] speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests, would be more satisfactory to all, if it contained fifty, thirty, or even twenty thousand, instead of only about twelve thousand, as it does. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers. Still the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is “Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help to improve it; or to reject, and disperse it?” “Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new State Government?”

Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave-state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the State, held elections, organized a State government, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union, and to perpetual freedom in the state—committed to the very things, and nearly all the things the nation wants—and they ask the nations recognition, and it’s assistance to make good their committal. Now, if we reject, and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We in effect say to the white men “You are worthless, or worse—we will neither help you, nor be helped by you.” To the blacks we say “This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how.” If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have, so far, been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, we recognize, and sustain the new government of Louisiana the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts, and nerve the arms of the twelve thousand to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. The colored man too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it? Again, if we reject Louisiana, we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national constitution. To meet this proposition, it has been argued that no more than three fourths of those States which have not attempted secession are necessary to validly ratify the amendment. I do not commit myself against this, further than to say that such a ratification would be questionable, and sure to be persistently questioned; while a ratification by three fourths of all the States would be unquestioned and unquestionable.

I repeat the question. “Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State Government?

What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States. And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state; and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state; and, withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and colatterals. Such exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.

In the present ‘situation’ as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.

Annotation (per Roy Basler, et. al., editors):

[1] AD-P, ISLA. On April 11, Salmon P. Chase had written Lincoln at length about reconstruction:

“I am very anxious about the future: and most about the principles which are to govern reconstruction for as these principles are sound or unsound so will be the work & its results. . . .

“And first as to Virginia.

“By the action of every branch of the Government we are committed to the recognition & maintenance of the State organization of which Governor Pierpont is the head. You know all the facts. . . . There will be a pressure for the recognition of the rebel organization on condition of profession of loyalty. It will be far easier and wiser, in my judgment, to stand by the loyal organization already recognized.

“And next as to the other rebel States:

“The easiest & safest way seems to me to be the enrollment of the loyal citizens without regard to complexion and encouragement & support to them in the reorganization of State Governments under constitutions securing suffrage to all citizens. . . . This you know has long been my opinion. . . .

“This way is recommended by its simplicity, facility & above all, justice. It will be, hereafter, counted equally a crime & a folly if the colored loyalists of the rebel states shall be left to the control of restored rebels, not likely, in that case, to be either wise or just, until taught both wisdom and justice by new calamities.

“The application of this principle to Louisiana is made somewhat difficult by the organization which has already taken place: but happily the Constitution enables the Legislature to extend the right of suffrage. . . .

“The same result can be assured in Arkansas by an amendment of the state constitution; or what would be better, I think, by a new Convention . . . without distinction of color. To all the other states the general principle may be easily applied. . . .'” (DLC-RTL).

On the morning after Lincoln’s speech, Chase wrote again:

“The American of this morning contains your speech of last evening. Seeing that you say something on the subject of my letter to you yesterday—reconstruction—, & refer, though without naming me, to the suggestions I made in relation to the Amnesty Proclamation, when you brought it before the Heads of Departments, I will ask your permission to add some observations to what I have already written.

“I recollect the suggestions you mention; my impression is that they were in writing. There was another which you do not mention and which, I think, was not in writing. It is distinct in my memory; though doubtless forgotten by you. It was an objection to the restriction of participation in reorganization to persons having the qualifications of voters under the laws of their several states just before rebellion.

“Ever since questions of reconstruction have been talked about, it has been my opinion that the colored loyalists ought to be allowed to participate in it and it was because of this opinion that I was anxious to have this question left open. I did not however say much about the restriction. I was the only one who expressed a wish for its omission; & I did not desire to seem pertinacious.

“You will remember, doubtless, that the first order ever issued for enrollment with a view to reconstruction went to General Shepley & directed the enrollment of all loyal citizens; and I suppose that, since the opinion of Attorney General Bates, no one, connected with your administration, has questioned the citizenship of free colored men more than that of free white men. The restriction in the amnesty proclamation operated as a revocation of the order to General Shepley:—but, as I understood you not to be wedded to any particular plan of reconstruction, I hoped & believed that reflection & observation would probably satisfy you that the restriction should not be adhered to.

“I fully sympathized with your desire for the restoration of the Union by the change of rebel slave States into Union free States; and was willing, if I could not get exactly the plan I thought best, to take the plan you thought best, & to trust the future for modifications. I welcomed, therefore, with joy the prospects of good results from the cooperation of General Banks with the free state men of Louisiana. I think General Banks’ error, & I have said so to him, was in not acting through instead of over the Free State Committee. This Committee had already shown itself disposed to a degree of liberality towards the colored people quite remarkable at that time. They had admitted delegates from the creole colored population into their free State Convention, & had evinced a readiness to admit intelligent colored citizens of that class to the rights of suffrage. I have no doubt that great & satisfactory progress would have been made in the same direction had not the work been taken out of their hands. This created the impression that the advocates of general suffrage were to be treated with disfavor by the representatives of the Government. Discouragement & disinterest were the natural consequences.

“For one I was glad of all the good that was done; and, naturally, wanted more. So when I came to Washington last winter I saw Gen Banks: and, being now more deeply than ever persuaded of the necessity of universal suffrage, I begged him to write himself & to induce the Senators & Representatives elect from Louisiana to write to members of the Legislature and urge them to exercise their power under the constitution by passing an act extending suffrage to colored citizens. I knew that many of our best men in and out of Congress had become thoroughly convinced of the impolicy and injustice of allowing representation in Congress to States which had been in rebellion and were not yet prepared to concede equal political rights to all loyal citizens. They felt that if such representation should be allowed & such states reinstated in all their former rights as loyal members of the Union, the colored population would be practically abandoned to the disposition of the white population, with every probability against them; and this, they believed would be equally unjust & dangerous.

“I shared their sentiment & was therefore extremely desirous that General Banks should take the action I urged upon him. I thought indeed that he concurred, mainly, in my views, & would to some extent at least act upon them. I must have been mistaken, for I never heard that he did anything in that direction.

“I know you attach much importance to the admission of Louisiana, or rather to the recognition of her right to representation in Congress as a loyal State in the Union. If I am not misinformed there is nothing in the way except the indisposition of her Legislature to give satisfactory proof of loyalty by a sufficient guaranty of safety & justice to colored citizens through the extension to loyal colored men of the right of suffrage. Why not, then, as almost every loyal man concurs with you as to the desirableness of that recognition, take the shortest road to it by causing every proper representation to be made to the Louisiana Legislature of the importance of such extension.

“I most earnestly wish you could have read the New Orleans papers for the last few months. Your duties have not allowed it. I have read them a good deal—quite enough to be satisfied that, if you had read what I have, your feelings of humanity & justice would not let you rest till all loyalists are made equal in the right of self protection by suffrage.

“Once I should have been, if not satisfied, reasonably contented by suffrage for the more intelligent & for those who have been soldiers; now I am convinced that universal suffrage is demanded by sound policy and impartial justice alike.

“I have written too much already & will not trouble you with my reasons for this conclusion. I shall return to Washington in a day or two & perhaps it will not be disagreeable to you to have the whole subject talked over. . . .” (DLC-RTL).

Sources:

1. Basler, Roy P., editor, et. al. Collected works. The Abraham Lincoln Association/Springfield, Illinois, vol. 8. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

2. Masur, Louis P. Lincoln’s Last Speech. New York, New York: Opinionator: Disunion, The New York Times, 10 April 2015.

Battered but undeterred following their experience in the Union’s Red River Campaign across Louisiana and still attached to the 2nd Brigade, 1st Division of the U.S. Army’s 19th Corps, the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers received new orders on the 4th of July 1864. Under the command of brigadier-generals James W. McMillan, William Dwight, Jr. and William Hemsley Emory (with McMillan continuing to report to Dwight and Dwight to Emory, who headed the 19th Corps), the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers were directed to return to the East Coast.

They did – but they did so in two stages.

According to 47th Pennsylvania historian Lewis Schmidt, ‘’Companies A, C, D, E, F, H, and I, composing the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and half of the 4th division, sailed from Algiers … at 1 PM on Thursday, July 7. Companies B, G and K of the 4th and 5th divisions remained behind at Morganza, La. under command of Capt. Harte, for want of transportation, and would not arrive in Washington until July 28.”

The men from the 47th’s first detachment could not yet know it, but their transit would lead them into a memorable encounter with President Abraham Lincoln.

As this first grouping readied for departure, Corporal George R. Nichols of E Company penned the following diary entry on 7 July:

Received orders to Pack up at Six O’clock AM and I was detailed on fatigue duty to Load wagons it was for a Mark [demerit]. We Marched to the dock. Embarked on Board of the Steamer McClellan. ar [sic] was packed on Board because about Nine hundred Men was Shoved on her at one O’clock PM. Started down the Mississippi River. Past a New Mail Steamer at five PM Bound for New Orleans Past forts St. Phillip and Jackson at 8 PM. came to anchor at ten Oclock and layed to for the Night’…. [continuing on Friday]: ‘Started this Morning at four Oclock AM. Crost the Bar about Seven. Shaped our course South East. At nine Oclock the orders was torn open, and then we knowed or destination. So we are Bound for Virginia. Well I am Glad. Maby I can See My Brother’ [with the Pennsylvania Bucktail Regiment].

En route, C Company scribe Henry D. Wharton continued chronicling the regiment’s movement:

The passage down the Mississippi was mostly at night, so I am unable to give you a description of it. At Pilottown we exchanged pilots; immediately below was hailed by the S river gunboat 48 with ‘steamer ahoy: what steamer’s that?’ which was answered satisfactorily, when with a wave of the hand we parted, our boat on its way to cross the bar, and then to find out by certain papers our destination. An expedition was on the move but what point no one outside of headquarters was able to tell. It was a secret move. This was right, for the destination of former expeditions was known weeks before embarking, and by the time the troops reached the point to which they were ordered, the rebs were ready to receive them. New Orleans is filled with traitors and spies, ready to do the bidding of Jefferson D., and it is necessary that the greatest precaution be used when anything extraordinary is going on.

As the pilot was leaving, after safely steering ‘Little Mac’ past the Belize, the sealed orders were opened, when we learned our course was toward Fortress Monroe, to join in the good work going on in front of Richmond. Why our destination was kept so secret I cannot conjecture, unless it was a bait to catch spies, inducing them to forward word to Johnston that an advance was being made on Mobile, which might lead him to withdraw a portion of his troops from Sherman’s front an send them to the protection of the latter city.

When out on the gulf sixty miles, Jonas Snyder of Carbon County, Pa., a member of Company I, died. His body was prepared for burial by nicely sewing it up in blankets, with weights attached to make it sink. The funeral was conducted by Chaplain Rodrock, who read the beautiful sea service from the prayer book of the Protestant Episcopal Church. The ‘Flag of our Union’ was at half mast, the boat stopped, and as the sun was hiding in the west, the body was launched into the sea, sinking to rise no more, until the great day comes when the soul must give an account for the ‘deeds’ done in the body.

[Note: Pvt. Jonas Snyder: 45 years old, 5 feet 3 inches tall, former powder maker, died from chronic diarrhea on Friday, 8 July; however, his death was recorded in regimental books as having occurred on 19 July 1864.

A significant thinning of the ranks occurred during this phase of duty as other ailing members of the 47th Pennsylvania who had been left behind to convalesce in Louisiana and Mississippi lost their battles with disease and war wound recovery, or were discharged on Surgeons’ Certificates of Disability. Among the deceased were B Company’s Josiah Braden, who died in New Orleans and rests at the Chalmette National Cemetery in St. Bernard Parish; H Company’s Private George H. Smith, who passed away while receiving medical care at the Union’s general hospital at Natchez, Mississippi and was laid to rest in the city cemetery there before being exhumed and reinterred at the Natchez National Cemetery; and G Company’s Sergeant James Crader, who also died at the Natchez hospital but whose body was ultimately returned to Pennsylvania for burial at Allentown’s Union-West End Cemetery. According to Schmidt:

Sgt. Crader, a 48 year old shoemaker, was the father of James W., Thomas K., and Edwin K. Crader who served with the same company. His son James W. Crader would receive a promotion to 2nd Lieutenant in 1865. A news article in the Allentown Morning Call of October 24, 1910, reported in contradiction, that Sgt. Crader was ‘on his way home sick’ when he died.

The deaths continued in mid-July as A Company Privates J. Williamson and Michael Andrew died, respectively, at Baton Rouge and New Orleans on 13 and 14 July; Williamson’s grave remains unidentified to this day, according to Schmidt, but may be located at one of the national cemeteries in Baton Rouge or Port Hudson, Louisiana. Andrew, a widowed father who left behind five children under the age of 16, was ultimately interred at the Chalmette National Cemetery.

“Also returning home on another ship about this same time, after being discharged with a surgeon’s certificate in June, was Pvt. Jacob Rinnick of Company E.” Per Schmidt, he:

died on board ship as a civilian, one day out of New York. The body was temporarily buried on Long Island in the Cypress Hill Cemetery, and later disinterred after a short burial. On Saturday, July 30, the remains were returned to Easton and interred in the City Cemetery after services in his father’s house. Another source reported that the burial took place at the German Reformed Church Burial Ground in Easton.

Privates Thaddeus Heckroth of B Company, Jerome Bryner of H Company and I Company’s William Münch were among those discharged via Surgeons’ Certificates. Heckroth and Bryner were released from duty while still in Louisiana while Münch was discharged while at sea.]

Meanwhile, as Companies A, C, D, E, F, H, and I were en route to the East Coast via the steamer McClellan, the Confederate threat to the nation’s capital mounted as troops led by Lieutenant General Jubal Early made their way north through the Shenandoah Valley toward Washington. “As a result,” explained Schmidt, “troops were diverted to the defenses of Washington, and as units of the First Division of the 19th Corps began to arrive at Fortress Monroe, their orders were changed and they were sent on to the Capital. This confusion in destinations caused the main detachment of the [47th Pennsylvania] to bypass Bermuda Hundred and proceed directly to Washington.”

Still steaming aboard the McClellan on Sunday, 10 July, the 47th Pennsylvanians purposefully avoided both Forts Taylor and Jefferson due to a raging yellow fever outbreak, according to Wharton, who added:

In one week from the day we started we reached Fortress Monroe [Thursday, July 14]. Gen. [McMillan] went ashore to report, where he received orders to push on to Washington. It was here we received the first intimation of the rebel raid into Maryland and the supposed danger to which Washington was exposed. The boys were anxious to move forward that they might participate in any punishment that would be given the rebels.

Arrival in Virginia

According to C Company Captain John Peter Shindel Gobin, “Pleasant weather attended the voyage,” and the McClellan finally steamed into Hampton Roads, Virginia on the afternoon of 11 July. The next morning, he and his fellow 47th Pennsylvanians headed for Washington. While disembarked briefly at Fort Stevens, they saw President Lincoln in the flesh, and thrilled to the pomp befitting the arrival of a battle-tested regiment. Their trip down the Potomac while aboard the Creole was described by both Nichols and Wharton in their writings of 15 July as “splendid.”

As they passed Washington’s tomb, wrote Wharton, “the band of the 47th played ‘Hail Columbia’, and several national airs, while the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ on the stern of the McClellan was lowered and hoisted in salute.” After disembarking at the wharf on 7th Street, the regiment then marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, “out past the President’s house to Georgetown, and then on to this place where we bivouacked…. The 47th had disembarked and took up its line of march, arriving at Tenleytown, located about two miles north of Georgetown. The weather had been very hot, and the regiment remained in camp at Tenleytown until 3PM on Saturday.”

Nichols confirmed that the regiment started its march toward Washington at daylight, and observed that their new assignment:

Seems More like life hear then down South. We past fort Washington about 12 M. and Sighted the Capitol and Alexandria at the Same time. arrived at Washington at about one oclock PM disembarked about three Got coffee and crackers at the Sanitary Commissions. Started on the March at Six oclock PM. Marched through Washington and Georgetown to Tenlatown [Tenleytown] about Eight Miles and Bivouac for the Night at Nine oclock PM.

In his History of the Nineteenth Army Corps, Richard B. Irwin confirmed that the 47th Pennsylvania’s main detachment had indeed arrived at Tenleytown by mid-July:

About 3,600 men of Emory’s division had landed at Washington during the 12th and 13th of July, increasing the effective force of the Nineteenth Corps to about 4,200, most of whom spent the night in following the windings of the road that marks the long outline of northern fortifications.

This grouping, explained Irwin, arrived as follows:

On the 13th of July the Clinton arrived at Washington with the 29th Maine and part of the 13th Maine, the St. Mary with the 8th Vermont, the Corinthian with the remaining six companies of the 114th New York, the Mississippi with the 90th and 116th New York and the 30th Massachusetts, the Creole with the 47th Pennsylvania. As the detachments landed they were hurried, in most instances by long and needless circuits to Tennallytown, where they found themselves at night without supplies or wagons, without orders, and without much organization.

…. Out of this Grant brought order by assigning Wright to conduct the pursuit of Early. When, therefore, on the morning of the 13th Wright found Early gone from his front, he marched after him with the Sixth Corps, and ordered the detachment of the Nineteenth Corps to follow. Grant wished Wright to push on to Edwards Ferry to cut off Early’s retreat across the Potomac.

On 16 July, the 47th Pennsylvanians joined in crossing the Potomac with their fellow members of the 19th Corps, 1st Division, under Brigadier-General Emory, along with the U.S. 6th Corps at White’s Ford, the spot on the Potomac at which Early’s troops had just managed to evade the Union’s pursuit and escape to Leesburg, Virginia. The 19th Corpsmen then trekked roughly three miles past Leesburg into the Catoctin Mountains, pitched their tents at Clark’s Gap, and provided support to the Union forces led by Major-General David Hunter as Hunter’s group began flanking Early’s Army.

Unfortunately, Early’s men escaped once again, and headed again for the Shenandoah Valley – this time, marching through Snicker’s Gap.

According to the U.S. National Park Service:

A Union column, consisting of the VI Corps and elements of the XIX Corps under Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright, pursued Early’s army as it withdrew from the environs of Washington, D.C. Wright’s force was joined by elements of Crook’s command, which had accompanied Hunter during his retreat through West Virginia. On July 17, the Union cavalry passed through Snickers Gap and attempted to force passage of the Shenandoah River at Snickers Ford (Castleman’s Ferry). On the morning of July 18, the vanguard of the Union infantry moved through Snickers Gap. Col. Joseph Thoburn (of Crook’s command) led his division downstream to cross the river at Judge Richard Parker’s Ford. Early’s three nearby infantry divisions moved to defend the fords. In the afternoon, Rodes’s division attacked and shattered Thoburn’s right flank on the Cool Spring plantation. Thoburn made a stand behind a stone wall at the river’s edge and beat off three attacks until darkness enabled him to withdraw. Union pursuit of Early was delayed several days.

On 18 July 1864, the 47th Pennsylvania became one of those Union regiments tasked with entering the Shenandoah Valley via Snicker’s Gap. While there, the regiment engaged the enemy in the Battle of Cool Spring, Virginia (also known as the Battle of Snicker’s Gap). Converging on Early’s larger Confederate Army of 8,000 from three sides (front, flank and rear) as part of the smaller Union force of 5,000 men, the 47th Pennsylvania helped inspire the Rebel retreat to Strasburg from 19-20 July.

Returning to Leesburg, the Union troops encamped at Goose Creek before heading back to Washington, D.C. on 22 July. After crossing the Chain Bridge the next day, the 47th Pennsylvania’s Companies A, C, D, E, F, H, and I and their fellow 19th Corpsmen established a new camp “on the high ground overlooking the Potomac near Battery Vermont,” thereby ending “the ‘Snicker’s Gap war,” according to Irwin. (Casualties – Union: 422; Confederate: 397.)

Through the Eyes of a 47th Pennsylvanian

In recounting the Battle of Cool Spring, Wharton delineated the actions of the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers as follows:

The 6th Corps crossed the Potomac on Saturday, previous to which they overtook the rear guard of the enemy at Poolesville, a section of artillery with cavalry pressed forward and vigorously shelled the enemy from several positions. The corps overtook them at Snicker’s Gap. Though the gap might have been successfully held, it was evacuated without much delay, and our infantry took possession. The enemy held possession of the other bank of the Shenandoah River, one mile distant.

A part of Hunter’s command, to the number of five thousand, were ordered to the river, which they crossed in face of the enemy’s fire. After the force had crossed, the enemy attempted a flank movement on their right and left, but Adams’ Rhode Island Battery came into position on an eminence overlooking the valley below. They immediately opened upon the enemy with shot and shell from the three inch rifled guns, creating great havoc among them. The range was accurate and each shell burst in their midst. The enemy finding the damage to their infantry so great, attempted to silence the battery by firing upon them with twenty pound parrots, which however, lasted but a moment, as they in turn were fired upon and forced to silence. Night coming on our infantry recrossed the river to come under the batteries. At this point we lost a number in killed and wounded; a few were drowned in getting off the proper ford. Among the wounded I noticed Ed. M. Shindel, son of Rev. Jeremiah Shindel, and nephew of H. B. Masser, Esq. I am happy to state that his wound is so slight that it will scarcely keep him from duty….

Instead of going to Grant in front of Petersburg, as we expected, orders were issued sending the 6th and 19th Corps up through Maryland in quest of rebels. On the route I conversed with many farmers who had been deprived of property by the chivalry in their late raid and all of them agree in the abhorrence with which they hold the raiders, and are no ways particular in their speech concerning them. A gentleman told me they came not as warriors, but as the lower class of robbers, resorting to petty larceny, and were so mean that they even asked ladies for the ear drops worn as ornaments. At a farmer’s where they had stolen eight horses, a young lady sad that the ‘low fellows wanted papa to take the boots off his feet to give them.’

We are to move forward after the enemy, but whether it will be before the arrival of three of our companies, who could not get passage with us, I cannot tell. From what I can learn we will move towards the Point of Rocks. The raiders have, or are attempting to cross the Potomac at Rockville.

The diary of E Company’s George Nichols adds further color to Wharton’s words, indicating that on that Saturday, the 47th:

Received three days Rations. Started on the March at three oclock PM. Plenty of Good cool water along the Road. I Picked Some Green appels and ate them the first I Seen for two years and Six Month on trees Marched the distance of fourteen Miles and Encamped at half past ten oclock PM.

The next Sunday, Nichols reported that he was:

acting left Genl. Guide to the Regtment and I are not compelled to carry a Gun so in the wagon it Goes. it will be easier for Me. we Started on the tramp at Eight AM very hot and dusty at twelve M. half of the Redgt. Was Stragling be hind and when we Got to the Potomac our company Musterd only Nine Men offercers and all. The rest was Played out. We came fourteen Miles to Kelleysford [sic] arrived at three PM. We are Ordered Back to Washington’. On Monday the ‘order [was] contermanded So we Started at four oclock AM croost the River to Virginia Side the Water was three feet deep. But we forderd her all the Same We Struck the leesburg pike whent through leesburg. hamiltonn and Perserville at four PM. We caught the Rear Guard of the army and at twelve oclock Midnight we came to our division after Marching about Twenty Eight Miles. We Passed through Snickers Gap and Encamped in the Vally at Twelve oclock PM.

Wharton’s writings back up Nichols’ account of the Kelly’s Ford experience, and also confirm that the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers (Companies A, C, D, E, F, H, and I) did indeed engage in the Battle of Cool Spring/Snicker’s Gap:

The second day’s march brought us to the Potomac at Kelly’s Ford, which we crossed by wading, proceeded on our way to Leesburg, making Snicker’s Gap, where we joined the 6th Army Corps and the balance of our division of the 19th. The 6th boys are some on a march, but were completely taken by surprise when they learned we had crossed the Potomac that morning after sunrise, thinking it was impossible for troops to make what they did not, thirty miles on a hard pike.

On the Move Again

By late July, Companies A, C, D, E, F, H, and I from the 47th Pennsylvania were on the move again with Emory’s Army. Encamped the night of 26 July in Maryland “on the Frederick road, four miles north of Rockville, after a march of nineteen miles,” according to Irwin, they departed at 3 a.m. the next morning, marching another fifteen miles to a site just beyond Hyattstown. “On the 28th Emory took the road at five, marched to Monocacy Junction, where the Sixth Corps crossed the Monocacy, then filed to the right, and crossed at the upper ford, and passing through Frederick went into bivouac four miles beyond.”

They had trekked another 13 miles.

“On the 29th, an intensely hot day,” wrote Irwin, “Emory marched at eight, following the Sixth Corps, crossed the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry, marched nineteen miles, and went into bivouac at Halltown.” Following another 13-mile march on 31 July – back into and across the Catoctin Mountains – Emory ordered his exhausted men to make camp at 1 a.m. near Jefferson.

Just four hours later, they were awakened by bugle call and sent on the march again at 6 a.m. Thirteen miles later, they pitched their tents along the Emmitsburg Road, roughly two miles past Frederick. Their duties involved “holding the line of the Monocacy and observing the passes of the South Mountain,” according to Irwin.

Meanwhile, Captain Henry S. Harte and the men from Companies B, G and K were finally making their own East Coast arrival.

A Regiment Reunited

Having sailed from Louisiana aboard the Blackstone and, according to Schmidt, “after first stopping enroute [sic] at Bermuda Hundred, under temporary assignment to the Army of the James, with the Second Division of the 19th Corps,” Captain Harte and the men of Companies B, G and K arrived in Virginia on 28 July, and finally reconnected with the bulk of their regiment in Maryland at Monocacy on 2 August 1864.

On 6 August, Emory’s men crossed back over the Potomac River at Harper’s Ferry, preceded and followed, respectively, by the Union forces led by brigadier-generals George R. Crook and John B. Ricketts. “Hunter took up his position covering Halltown and proceeded to strengthen its entrenchments,” according to Irwin, while “Crook’s left rested on the Shenandoah, Emory extended the line to the turnpike road, and Wright carried it to the Potomac.”

But once again, a major shakeup in the top level of Union leadership was underway. Explained Irwin:

Grant had already proposed to unite in a single command the four distinct departments covering the theatre of war on the Shenandoah and on the upper Potomac; as the commander he had first suggested Franklin and afterward Meade. Now, since no action had followed either suggestion, he sent up Sheridan, meaning to place him in command of all the active forces of these four departments, for the purpose of overthrowing Early or expelling him from the Shenandoah. Upon learning this, Hunter, to remove the difficulty, asked to be relieved; and thus, on the 7th of August, Grant gained his wish, and an order was issued by the War Department, creating the Middle Military Division, to include Washington, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and part of Ohio, and Sheridan was assigned to the command.

The stage was now set for Major-General Philip Sheridan’s tide-turning, 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign.

Sources:

1. Bates, Samuel P. History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: B. Singerly, State Printer, 1869.

2. Battle of Snicker’s Gap/Battle of Cool Spring, in CWSAC Battle Summaries. Washington, D.C.: Civil War Sites Advisory Commission (CWSAC), The American Battlefield Protection Program, retrieved online 1 September 2016.

3. Bluhm, Jr., Raymond K. Shenandoah Valley Campaign: March-November 1864. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army.

4. Gobin, Companion J. P. S. Lincoln Under Fire, in records of the Memorial Meeting held on 13 February 1907, in Abraham Lincoln. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Commandery of the State of Pennsylvania, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, 1907-1911.

5. Irwin, Richard Bache. History of the Nineteenth Army Corps. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893.

6. Registers of Deaths of Volunteers, in Records of the U.S. Adjutant General’s Office (Record Group 94). Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, 1861-1865.

7. Schmidt, Lewis. A Civil War History of the 47th Regiment of Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers. Allentown, Pennsylvania: Self-published, 1986.

8. The Battle of Cool Spring. Washington, D.C.: Civil War Trust, retrieved online 1 September 2016.

9. U.S. Civil War Veterans’, Widows’ and Orphans’ Pension Files. Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

10. Wharton, Henry D. Letters from the Sunbury Guards. Sunbury, Pennsylvania: Sunbury American, 1864.