Arlington National Cemetery has been in the news lately for a number of reported transgressions, including misidentifying bodies and grave sites, dumping ashes of the cremated in a dirt pile, and using discarded gravestones to prevent soil erosion along a stream’s banks. Now a northern Virginia funeral home with a National Cemetery contract has been fined $50,000 for, among other violations, inappropriately storing the bodies of those waiting burial in a garage.
That this should be happening at any cemetery, least of all Arlington, violates one of the bedrock rules few in life will tolerate. To avoid bringing somebody’s blood to a boil: don’t play around with somebody’s heart; don’t insult somebody’s mother; don’t screw around with somebody’s money; don’t kick somebody’s dog; and, certainly least of all, don’t screw around with the dead, particularly if they have living relatives.
April 9th to 11th was what could be labeled a combination weekend at Gettysburg. Friday the 9th was, in part, spent cleaning up around the 18th's monument on Sickles Ave, while the better part of the next two days were taken up by attending the recently completed Gettysburg Seminar sponsored by the National Park Service at the Gettysburg Hotel. There will be more reported on the bi-annual seminar during the week, but first there's something I want to share, something that's seemingly out of this world.
148-year-old news of life in camp at Halls Hill, in Arlington, Virginia arrives at Donald's doorstep via a clandestine operative.
Posted by Donald at 04:00 AM. Filed under: Chasing the Dead
2 comments • Permalink
As indicated in Part One, which ran yesterday, a footnote in a book by historian Allan Nevin set Donald on the path toward solving a 146-year-old mystery regarding the fate of a family member who died at Andersonville. Today's post picks up where Part One left off, with William Forster and a small band of Union soldiers being tracked as hunted men.
Posted by Donald at 04:00 AM. Filed under: Chasing the Dead
1 comment • Permalink
A paragraph and a footnote in a book he's currently reading helps Donald to finally solve a 146-year-old mystery regarding the fate of a family member who died at Andersonville.
Note: Okay, some would call this cheating, but I decided to rerun a post that first ran three years ago, on November 13, 2006. If you read it you'll see that it's wholly appropriate for today, being that it's Friday the 13th, when superstitions run high and we all make a concerted effort to avoid cracks in sidewalk, refrain from walking under ladders, steer clear of black cats lying in wait, and throw salt over our right shoulders if we knock over the shaker.
Here's a promise though. Me and the "dead guys" will be back with a brand new post on Sunday, the day when our thoughts run deepest and usually get blown out of the water by depth charges.
Note: the wading of the Potomac River from Maryland to Shepherdstown, West Virginia is an annual event sponsored by the Shepherdstown Battlefield Preservation Association.
A single calendar page shy of the 20th, and though 147 years had intervened, this day in September 2009 bore similarities to that one in 1862. The day of the week was the same, the blue of the skies matched, the clouds spaced in the same intermittent patterns, and the numbers on the thermometers were almost unchanged.
A day shy of September 20th, I stood with a group of twenty-two people eying the Maryland shoreline, the greenish tint of the Potomac, and the not so distant West Virginia side of the river, with its 60 foot cliffs looming in the background, listening to the instructions of our tour leader Tom McGrath, much in the same way that my third great-grandfather, then a Corporal in Co. I of the 18th Massachusetts Infantry, would have listened to instructions from his commanding officer 1st Lt. Horatio Dallas, the same Dallas who would be promoted to lead Co. H when Joseph Collingwood fell at Fredericksburg eleven weeks later.
I wondered how close my feet were to the actual footprints left in the Maryland mud by George Washington Thompson, a native of Oxford County, Maine who had also left his straw working tools on a Massachusetts factory bench, his wife and his five children, to fight for the preservation of the Union, his brother Leander and nephew James B. Snow beside him in the ranks. There was a familial precedent in leaving a wife, children, and work to engage in war. George's grandfather had toted a musket against the British and his great-grandfather before him against Philip's revengful Wampanoags.
The time of day was different though. The 18th Massachusetts and the rest of the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division of the Fifth Corps had begun removing their shoes and socks sometime between seven and nine a.m. When the socks came off and when their feet first stepped into the river depends on whose account you read. I wasn't looking at a watch either, but estimated it was close to four in the afternoon when I exchanged Timberland boots for a pair of hip high dark green waders.
Accounts of the river crossing say the water was mid-shin to waist deep in spots and there was a sporting and light-hearted attitude among the men as they slogged their way across. Stepping into the water and moving only a few feet from shore, I was surprised by its clarity, as rocks of varying sizes and gently waving grass were clearly visible on the bottom. The slipperiness of those rocks was equally surprising. It was little wonder then that men from the 1st Brigade lost their footing and took a sudden bath, their ears subjected to their comrades' laughter when they righted themselves again. Most surprising was the current, which grew in strength, pushing hard like invisible hands against the legs as I neared the middle of the river.
Over 1700 men from the 1st Brigade made the crossing that morning. It's unknown how long it took them. Our little group completed it's own hundred and fifty yard crossing, with me trailing in the rear in order to keep an eye on one straggler, in about twenty minutes. Like that of the 1st Brigade, ours was not uneventful either, as one of our group took an unexpected bath. None in the group laughed, particularly not me. It was a warning to hold onto my camera that much tighter and to hope like hell it was waterproof if worse came to worse. I wondered, too, if Corporal Thompson would have barked at me for taking so long to arrive in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. I wondered, too, if not for bare feet how many 1st Brigade brogans would have been sucked up by the mud that greeted our group as we emerged from the water. That mud nearly wrestled the right wader from my leg when I planted my first step on seemingly dry land.
The wading of the Potomac River was in many respects singularly the most personal experience I've ever had in regard in visiting a Civil War site. The rush of the current, water lapping over the top of the waders, the very real possibility of stepping on a rock or rocks that George Washington Thompson himself might have stepped on, in combination, made it very real and very personal. What waited for us next was the same exact steep and winding path the 18th Mass. followed to the top of the bluffs overlooking the Potomac. On this, my third trip onto privately held land which comprises the Shepherdstown battlefield I stood, for the very first time where the Regiment stood in battle line, listening to Tom McGrath quote from letters written by Captain Joseph Collingwood, Corporal Thomas Mann, and Sergeant Solomon Beals, with a lump in my throat and a sense of real pride, not only in George Washington Thompson, but in those shoemakers, farmers, seamen, clerks, carpenters, iron moulders, straw workers, organ makers, and mechanics who comprised the 18th Massachusetts and stood their ground for an hour against the best A.P. Hill had to throw against them.
I suppose a lot of people would think it strange or unusual at best to use vacation time to grab a flight to Boston, rent a car, and pay for three nights of hotel rooms just to get a peek at a book from a defunct G.A.R. Post in Middleboro, Massachusetts. And let's not even talk about their reaction to someone walking through cemeteries searching for elusive graves instead of lying on a beach. Some people chase the sun. I chase dead people.
We first learned of the existence of the E.W. Peirce Grand Army of the Republic Post No. 8 book about two years ago. We didn’t know exactly what the book, kept in a safe at the Middleboro Town Clerk’s Office, contained, but, having seen excerpts from a similar book, we had a pretty good idea the book contained written memoirs of the wartime experiences for Post members. We had a pretty good idea, too, that some entries would be lengthy, others very brief, so the entire venture was undertaken with the realistic expectation there wouldn’t be a gold mine of information waiting, but more likely something akin to a thin vein of material.
We’ve paid others to help out with research on the 18th Mass. a few times, including twice when college students grabbed materials from their campus libraries. Those ‘finds’ yielded relatively small amounts of information, but shelling out $60 to $120 was more practical than paying travel expenses to, say, Hanover, New Hampshire. We had a similar hope with the Middleboro G.A.R. book, that we could find a local willing to help out, but, in spite of very generous financial inducements, we couldn’t entice anyone to visit the Middleboro Town Hall. Bull. Hands. Horns. You get the picture and understand the edict. Most times if you want something done you have to do it yourself and take the resulting credit card bills in stride.
Massachusetts had 210 Grand Army of the Republic Posts; Rhode Island 27; Vermont 116; New Hampshire 94; Maine 167; Connecticut 87; Virginia 28; South Carolina 6; Mississippi 3; Florida 21; North Carolina 17; Georgia 13; New York 670; and Illinois, where the G.A.R. was founded 779. Each individual Post kept a “Personal War Sketches” book supplied by the National Commandery. From what I’ve been able to ascertain very few survive. The question is what happened to them? Were they simply thrown out with the trash, or are they are in private hands? The George H. Maintien Post No. 133 in Plainville, MA provides a good example of what fate can have in store. Their records were inherited by the local Veterans of Foreign Wars Post, but then simply disappeared about 15 to 20 years ago. I remember, too, scouring around for papers written and presented by members of the O.W. Lull GAR Post No. 11 in Milford, New Hampshire and finding a cold trail, as neither the local library or historical society had anything in their files.
I spent about seven hours over a two day period at the Middleboro Town Hall in a room that lacked air conditioning, on what turned out to be the hottest days of the summer, transcribing page after page of biographies. I didn't complain though. How do you complain when you're looking at something from a hundred years ago that very few people have had the opportunity to view with their own eyes? It was pretty exciting stuff to me, though Gail and Liz, who manned the Clerk's office, seemed less enthusiastic about my periodic pronouncements over the latest find.
Let me share this observation, based on years of having lived in New England, about the attitude of most people in that region toward the Civil War. It ended a long time ago.
So what secrets did the book hold? Not too many unfortunately, although there were enough of them to have made the trip worthwhile. But the 318 pages of bios, most written for vets from other regiments, went pretty much according to expectations. There were long entries and short entries. Those at the beginning of the book seemed to have the longest, while those at the end the shortest. Typical of the contrast are these two entries:
Comrade Albert Shaw, who was born the Thirty-first day of May, 1841 in West Bridgewater, County of Plymouth, State of Massachusetts, enlisted from Middleboro and was mustered into the U.S. Service in Co. D, 18th Mass. Vol. Inft., August 24, 1861 to serve three years; participated in engagements as follows: at Yorktown, Va. April 5th to May 4th, 1862; Williamsburg, Va., May 5th; Fair Oaks, Va., May 31st; Seven Days battle, Va., June 25th to July 1st; Second Bull Run, Aug. 30th; Antietam, MD, Sept. 17th; Shepherdstown, Va. Sept. 20th; Fredericksburg, Va., Dec. 13th; Richards Ford, Va., Dec. 30th, 1862; Chancellorsville, Va. May 1st to 4th - 63; Rappahannock Station, Va. Nov. 7th 1863; Mine Run Nov. 26th to 30th, 1863; Wilderness, Va. May 5th to 7th, 1864; Laurel Hill, Va. May 8th; Spottsylvania, Va. May 10th to 18th; North Anna, Va. May 23rd to May 27th; Shady Grove Road, Va. May 30th; Cold Harbor, Va. June 1st to 12th; and Petersburg, Va., June 20th to July 20th, 1864. Was never wounded or sick in hospital during his service and on Sept. 2nd, 1864 was discharged by reason of expiration of term of service.
His father's name was Darius Shaw, his mother's Emeline Billings.
He was a charter member of Post 8, now resides in Wareham, Mass.
Died Jan. 16, 1909.
Joined E.W. Peirce Post No. 8 as a Charter Member on March 16, 1867. No offices are listed.
Comrade Charles C. Mellen, who was born Thirteenth day of December 1824 in Quincy, County of Norfolk, State of Massachusetts, enlisted at Readville, Mass. May 7th, 1861 as private in Co. D, 18th Mass. Infantry and was discharged at Emery Hospital, Washington, April 18, 1864 by reason of disability. Was present at Siege of Yorktown. He mentions as the most important event in his service the retreat of the Seven Days fight.
Died April 9, 1896 [sic]
Joined the E.W. Peirce G.A.R. Post No. 8 on March 26, 1881, but held no offices.
So what did we learn about Shaw? That his father's name was Darius and not Dennis as we had on file and we were also able to confirm additional battles he was engaged in, as well as the date he joined the E.W. Peirce Post. Regarding Mellen,, the book lists an incorrect date of death. We know the date of death is incorrect, because its been confirmed through his pension record at the National Archives.
One of the real surprises and one that we probably wouldn't have found from any other source was this citation for William S. McFarlin, former Captain of Company C. I think this qualifies as a definite 'wow.'
"After his discharge [October 19, 1862 due to disability] he was assigned to a storeroom in Washington where hospital parcels were handled and later was in charge of the corral where wagons, horses, & mules were cared for. The funeral of President Lincoln was due on the 19th. He planned to attend it when he learned a pass was necessary & only 500 were assigned. Boston Corbett had received one and being busy he gave it to the Capt..."
Boston Corbett, for those who need their memories jogged, was the man who allegedly fired the shot that mortally wounded John Wilkes Booth a week later at Garrett's Farm. It'd be interesting to learn if McFarlin and Corbett actually knew one another, or if Corbett simply gave his ticket away to first person looking for one. A small thing for sure, but one of those little tidbits of history that keeps you coming back for more. Just like a not so little black book kept in a Town Hall safe that someone will probably pour through a hundred years from now and say "wow!"
Of the more than 320,000 Union soldiers who died during the Civil War only an estimated 20,000 were embalmed and had their remains sent back home to their loved ones. The rest were buried close to where they died, either on the battlefield, or in cemeteries located in proximity to hospitals. The cost of embalming and transporting a body back home was borne exclusively by the family, or through the occasional generosity of comrades, but the sad reality then was that it was, practically speaking, a financial burden most could not bear.
In researching the 18th Massachusetts, we've found a few examples of family members or friends traveling to battlefields or hospitals to bring bodies home, or comrades accompanying the bodies home on trains. Most of these retrievals, however, occurred early in the war, when casualties, or deaths from disease, were still relatively low in comparison as to what would come later. Martin Scorsese's vision of rows of wooden caskets running the length of a New York City dock in "Gangs of New York" spoke more of Viet Nam then it ever did of the Civil War.
The question of whether family members were ever able to visit cemeteries so distant from their homes, such as Arlington, the Military Asylum in D.C., Andersonville, or countless others, has always nipped at my heels whenever I've walked among the rows of graves at those hallowed places. I don't have the answer and I suppose that nobody else does. I'd like to believe that widows and children and parents and siblings laid flowers on those graves, but the sad reality was that in all probability, and practically speaking, it was a financial burden most could not bear.
There are two men, among others from the 18th Massachusetts Infantry, who lie buried at the Military Asylum Cemetery in Washington, Cyrus Hall and Peleg Benson. Hall died of Typhoid Fever at Carver Hospital in Washington on October 19, 1862 and was buried in Section G, Grave No. 5372, leaving a widow Armenia and five children, Armenia, Albert, Cyrus, Rufus, and Edward, who ranged in age from 10 months to 12 years. Benson, who was 28 when he died of disease at Washington on Nov. 17, 1862 and was buried in Section F, Grave No. 1490, was survived by his parents Asa and Sally.
Both men have this in common: they were Shoemakers from Middleboro, Massachusetts and they have monuments at the Rock Cemetery located in that town. They were loved by their families, who each had a stone cutter carve a name into granite, giving each family a place to mourn and a place to leave their flowers.
Cyrus Hall's grave - Military Asylum Cemetery
Cyrus Hall's grave - Rock Cemetery, Middleboro, MA
Peleg Benson's grave - Military Asylum Cemetery
Peleg Benson's grave - Rock Cemetery, Middleboro, MA
Corey Gardner came through with the information on William "Billy" G. Gardner, who, as a Private in Company A of the 14th Georgia Infantry, claimed to have shot and captured Rutherford B. Hayes either at Chancellorsville or the Wilderness. The claim first surfaced when Hayes was running for President in 1876, and, while dismissed as poppycock by the Northern press, rallied the State of Georgia to Gardner's defense.
This 1876 story, from an unidentified and undated Charleston, SC newspaper clipping, was responsible, in part, for fueling Gardner family lore.
"A Charleston paper says that Mr. W.G. Gardner, a gentleman and an old Confederate soldier (Gardner was about 45 at the time), living at Gogginsville, in Forsyth county, says he shot and captured Gen. R.B. Hayes at the battle of the Wilderness or Chancellorsville. Mr. Gardner was a member of Company A, 14th Georgia Regiment. Capt. Robert Merritt, commanding the company, confirms the statement.
"Is the identity of the Republican nominee in dispute?"
W.P. Wright, a doctor in Gogginsville, submitted an affidavit in support of Billy Gardner's pension claim. Again, the document is undated.
"Mr. W.G. Gardner the faithful old soldier and very worthy applicant did on the 6th days of April 1863 capture his highness expresident Hayes then a General in the U.S.A. and one orderly by himself having to shoot off his magistys forefinger before he would surrender, bring him into camp and turning him over to the provo guard. Said capture was made to the left of the old plank road near Chancellorsville in the Wilderness in old Va. He is also burdened with an afflicted wife and has been for twenty years and prays that you may accept this application for a small pension."
What is immediately wrong with this story is that Rutherford B. Hayes did not hold the rank of General in April 1863 and wasn't anywhere close to Chancellorsville in either April or May 1863. According to his diaries from 1861 to 1865, which are accessible on Google Books, Hayes was at Fort White near Charles Town, West Virginia. At the time of the Wilderness fight, Hayes was with Crook's command crisscrossing the border between North Carolina and Virginia
In Part One of this story, which appeared on August 3rd, the possibility that Billy Gardner may have shot Col. Joseph Hayes of the 18th Massachusetts at the Wilderness was raised. Joseph is now discounted because he wasn't taken prisoner until the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad three months later. Which raises the possibility that Brig. Gen. William Hays was the person Billy was referring to.
Billy's story turns problematic again, even if allowing for a case of mistaken identity, because while William Hayes was wounded and taken prisoner at the battle of Chancellorsville, along with over 6,000 other Federals, his capture, confirmed in a May 8, 1863 report from Little Powell Hill, was credited to William Dorsey Pender's brigade, which was comprised entirely of North Carolina regiments.
I've steered Corey toward Roy Duberry's "History of the 14th Georgia Infantry Regiment," published by Heritage Press. The book focuses entirely on Company A and is based on letters written by some of the original 119 enlistees, tracking them from Second Bull Run to the surrender at Appomatox.
When you read Billy Gardner's story, it makes you wonder why he made his claim about Rutherford B. Hayes in the first place. We're not dealing with somebody who sat out the war, somebody who skulked, or somebody who was a constitutional coward. We're talking about a soldier who was wounded a number of times while engaged in some of the most brutal fighting the Civil War had to offer as a member of A.P. Hill's division and later Corps. Maybe the story started off innocently enough, i.e. throwing around bullshit on a general store porch, and it snowballed from there, until it was totally out of Billy's hands, and ultimately became something he couldn't retract without being labeled a liar.
I think Corey Gardner suspects the truth, but in some ways still wants to cling to Billy's story. It really is a neat little Civil War saga, one that can be handed down from generation to generation, and has been, although Corey admits other relatives are and have been skeptical.
I'll let Corey tell Billy's story now. There's more justice than if I try to summarize, so I'll simply let it speak for itself. However, maybe there's a reader out there, more authoritative than I am, who can shed additional light on this subject.
"William G. Gardner was born abt. 1832 at South Carolina. The family migrated to Georgia where his grandfather, John Gardner owned a plantation and his father, Jim Gardner was a gunsmith. Billy Gardner was a skilled gunman and became a sharpshooter.
He was a farmer, married, fathered children, and enlisted in the 14th Georgia Infantry as a private in 1862, serving as a sharpshooter throughout the entire war. He never served in a sharpshooter regiment so he must have been the best shot in his regiment. Gardner was probably the gunslinger of his regiment and had been the champion shooter I am assuming.
"He was wounded in the head in 1862 at the Second Battle of Bull Run. He claimed he shot and captured Hayes on April 6, 1863 in VA. He fought at Chancellorsville in 1863 and was wounded in the shoulder. He then fought at Wilderness and Richmond and received gunshot wounds in the forehead and shoulder. He then fought at Petersburg and was wounded in the foot, being captured in a hospital near Richmond, being released in May of 1865 at Newport News, VA.
"Gardner was a war hero and a seasoned warrior. He lived out his days as a farmer and died in 1912 from old age. He first made his claim in 1876 when Hayes was campaigning for the Presidency. The Northern press of course denied it, but his home state of Georgia hailed him as a hero and never questioned his claim. Gardner was a distant cousin of mine."
Note: William G. Gardner's service record and that he was wounded at Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Petersburg is confirmed by information on the "Civil War Data" Web site (www.civilwardata.com).
The query that was posted as a comment on our Blog was about as unusual a reason for requesting information as anyone is bound to get from a reader. That reader, Corey Gardner, was looking for the service record on Col. Joseph Hayes of the 18th Massachusetts, for a very specific reason. I did a post not that long ago on Hayes, who, I proudly pointed out, was the only Volunteer officer ever placed in command of a brigade of U.S. Infantry Regulars.
Corey wrote that his ancestor, a Confederate sharpshooter, claimed to have shot Gen. Rutherford B. Hayes, either at Chancellorsville or the Wilderness. In investigating that claim, Corey determined that the future President was never close to either battlefield and suspected the victim may have been Joseph Hayes. Hayes, who commanded the 1st Brigade of the 1st Division of the Fifth Corps at the Wilderness, suffered a gunshot wound to the forehead on May 5, 1864, survived the wound, and was subsequently promoted to Brigadier General.
I agreed with Corey that he might very well be on the right track. However, the story gets muddied by the fact that there were two other high ranking Union officers named Hays or Hayes, William and Alexander, both of whom were shot; William at Chancellorsville and Alexander at the Wilderness.
Hopefully Corey will respond to my email with more information on his ancestor. It's a story that, regardless of how it shakes out, would certainly qualify as one of those little oddities of the Civil War. After all it's not often, in a war that involved so much long range killing and wounding, that you're able to learn who actually fired the shot that sent a man to his grave, to captivity, or the hospital.
I was late arriving home from work, as per usual, and found an email alerting me that John Quattrucci’s Raynham Call story on Medal of Honor recipient Frederick C. Anderson of the 18th Massachusetts is on line.
Click here to read Part One of Anderson’s story.
This is exciting stuff for all of us at Touch the Elbow, because, outside of this Blog and our Web site, which is badly in need of updating, there’s so little information out there on our favorite Regiment, including books.
We’ll link to Part Two next Monday.
Toward the end of March we were contacted by John Quattrucci, a reporter for the Massachusetts based Raynham Call. John, the recipient of national awards for his coverage of local high school sports, as well as a history buff, was trying to gather information for a story on a former Raynham resident who marched off to war in 1861 and won the Nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor.
Part One of Fredrick C. Anderson’s story, which began in Boston on March 24, 1842 and culminated in the August 21, 1864 capture of the 27th South Carolina's regimental flag at the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad, debuts in the Raynham Call this week. I'll link to the story, about the man a town of 13,566 current residents has no memory of, as soon as possible.
We had a recent email from Peter Alter of the Chicago History Museum who was looking for information on Joseph Cullen Ayer, a 1st Lieutenant who served with the 18th Massachusetts. The museum had a trunk that belonged to Ayer in their collection and were contemplating including it in an exhibit that will start on July 4, 2010. Needless to say, after responding to the email, I was already stuffing a suitcase in anticipation of a trip to the Windy City next year. However, Peter cautioned the trunk might not actually make it into the exhibit. So, we’ll have to bide our time until we get the definitive word.
When you learn of things like the existence of Ayer’s trunk, it makes you wonder about the journey it’s been through and how objects wind up where they do. Obviously when the trunk was donated to the CHM in 1976, someone thought it more fitting to house it in a museum than to keep it in private hands. But where it was between May 22, 1918, when Ayer died of facial cancer at the Mountain Branch of the National Soldier’s home in Johnson City, Tennessee until Robert Anderson, a collector got his hands on it is anybody’s guess.
Ayer had one surviving relative, a son who bore his name and from whom he had been estranged from for years. The son, Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., a Harvard educated minister and historian of some note, traveled to the home to make arrangements to ship the body home to Massachusetts and collect the $22.75 in cash that his father had in his possession.
George M. Barnard, Jr., another Lieutenant in the 18th Mass., who knew Ayer as well as anyone in the Regiment and shared his opinions on everyone in letters to parents, labeled Ayer “a jackass.” Judging by Ayer’s later abandonment of his wife and child and seemingly endless wandering from one National Home to another late in life, Barnard’s assessment of Ayer, a practicing attorney before and a land speculator after the war, may not have been far off base.
I’m speculating myself, but there are events that cross as shadows over people’s lives that crush the spirit in some and serves to strengthen another. Ayer spent a year with the 18th before he was appointed as the head of the 1st Division Ambulance Corps for the Fifth Corps shortly before Antietam. Overseeing the removal and transportation of the sick, mangled, and dying for a year can worm into your psyche and leave one unable to cope with tragic news from home carrying the announcement a year old son had died. Plagued by health problems, including rheumatism and kidney disease, Ayer was subsequently discharged from military service on December 17, 1863, four months after he was ordered to return for duty with the 18th Mass., something he never did.
I’m speculating that he was a failure as a businessman after the war, because he seemed to pursue deal after deal, bouncing from Boston to Tennessee, where he speculated in land, to New Zealand, where he speculated in mining, until almost broken down physically at age 58 he entered the Togus Branch of the National Home in Augusta, Maine and applied for a pension.
Ayer’s was the second trunk belonging to a member of the 18th Mass. we’ve located. The first was that of Albert Sturdy, which I happened on purely by accident when I visited the Maine Military Museum in Augusta years ago. At the time I visited, the museum was only open every other Sunday. The curator gave me his undivided attention, which wasn’t hard to do, particularly since there was only one other visitor in the building. We spent time at the Civil War section, most of which was devoted to Joshua Chamberlain and featured such personal artifacts as a pistol and sword. I began pumping for information on Colonel Joseph Hayes, a Maine native who served with the 18th, and, as if on cue, I happened to turn around and my eyes fell on a chest clearly marked with Sturdy’s name. Believe me when I say that my mouth literally dropped open.
Sturdy, who was cited for bravery at the battle of Fredericksburg, where he nearly had his left foot blown off, made a small fortune in the jewelry manufacturing business in Attleboro, Mass. following the war and had purchased a farm in Washington, Maine as a summer retreat. Decades later, the trunk was discovered in a barn on the property and subsequently donated to the museum.
Whereas Ayer seemingly stumbled into self-created misfortune after his military service, Sturdy led a privileged life, including long stints as a bank director and secretary for the local gas company. He and his brother built enough wealth that they were sole benefactors of the local hospital in Attleboro, which still bears the family’s name.
On Fame’s eternal camping-ground
Their silents tents are spread,
And Glory guards, with solemn round,
The bivouac of the dead.
Theodore O’Hara
Andersonville National Cemetery
Antietam National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery
Balls Bluff National Cemetery
Battleground National Cemetery
Cold Harbor National Cemetery
Gettysburg National Cemetery
Glendale National Cemetery
Loudon Park National Cemetery
Melrose Cemetery, Brockton, MA
Richmond National Cemetery
Grace Episcopal Church, Silver Spring, MD
To the Memory of
Seventeen
Unknown
Confederate Dead
Who Fell In Front of
Washington, D.C.
July 12, 1864
By Their
Comrades
