Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

But not this one. We sent a letter to the editor, which was promptly ignored so we thought we would give you the article as one post and our response on another.

Milford Daily News
Milford, Massachusetts
Civil War took the arm of a Franklin man
By James Buckley/ Local Columnist
Friday, June 30, 2006

During the Civil War, men were allowed to select the regiment that they wanted to join. As a result, the majority of fighting men chose to join a regiment filled with men from their town and neighboring towns. The upside of this arrangement was that they felt more comfortable among men from their own region and did not have to spend time adjusting to "foreign" ways. The downside was that if any given regiment had many fatalities in a battle, the town from which they had come had an excessive number of men to mourn.

Samuel Jordan of Franklin decided when he was just three days shy of his seventeenth birthday to join Company "C" of the 45th Massachusetts Regiment, in part because there were a significant number of men from Franklin who had also made the same choice. They included Corporal George T. Woodward, and Privates William Adams, Andrew Alexander, Lowell Adams, Orren (sometimes recorded as Owen) Ballou, Charles Bemis, Edmund Freeman, Walter Fisher, Nathaniel Grow, Francis Glynn and Samuel Hunt.

But when Jordan's enlistment with that unit expired, he decided not to rejoin the 45th Regiment but rather enlisted in the 18th Massachusetts Regiment. At a later date and perhaps throughout the rest of his life, he rued the day he had made the decision to switch regiments.
Sometimes historians and military personnel have refused to come to a consensus on one name for any given battle. This usually happened with battles that have not shared the notoriety of such battles as Gettysburg and Antietam. As a result, the Virginia battle in which Jordan became a casualty is known by seven rather colorful names: Totopotomoy Creek, Bethesda Church, Crumps Creeks, Haw's Shop, Matadequin Creek, Shady Grove Road and Hanovertown.

The fact that this battle has multiple names does not mean that it had few casualties. On the contrary, 1,100 Union troops were either wounded or were killed in battle, while and equal number of Confederate troops also died or were wounded, including Brigadier General George Doles who was killed by a Union sharpshooter near Bethesda Church.

At the beginning of this wandering battle, the Union leaders sent some of their troops to probe General Robert E. Lee's position along Totopotomy Creek, while others were deployed toward Hanover Court House. The rebels decided to counter these moves by coming in on the far right flank of the Union forces. This proved to be a mistake. Apparently those Confederate generals who had made this decision, including General Lee, had not been told by their forward observers that a sizable swampland called Crump's Creek would be in their path. As a result, instead of making hasty progress, the rebel forces were bogged down in the swamp and soon became unable to advance at all.

Because the rest of the Confederate forces were under strength due to the inability of some of their troops to get out of the swamp expeditiously, they were unable to withstand the advance made by the Union Army, including Jordan's Eighteenth Regiment.

Some of the Union troops managed to maneuver themselves into a position on the left of the rebels. As a consequence, they were able to drive the rebel forces back onto Shady Grove Road. Confronted with this advance, Confederate General Early attacked the left flank of the Union Army. In time, the Federal forces were also driven back to Shady Grove Road. Given the fact that by then components of both armies had now been driven back to that road, it is not surprising that it was there that most of the casualties occurred.

Samuel Jordan was among that number. He was forcefully hit in his left arm by an enemy bullet. Today army surgeons might have been able to save that arm, but given the fact that 99 percent of surgeons in the Union and Confederate Armies had received no formal medical education and had learned how to perform surgery by watching older but equally uneducated doctors do so, it is no wonder that Jordan's arm was considered shattered beyond repair and was therefore summarily amputated.

Thus Samuel Jordan became an amputee before he had reached his 19th nineteenth birthday. As a result, in July 1864, Samuel Jordan had plenty of time to wonder how we would earn a living during the rest of his life, given the fact that he now had only one arm. And it is reasonable to assume that his frame of mind became blacker when he heard that the battle in which he had lost his arm was officially declared indecisive, making his sacrifice and that of over 2,000 other men, fruitless.