Standing proudly before a fate unknown

Men of Company A, 16th New Hampshire Volunteers, on the Lyme Common in 1862. 

On the second floor of the smartly restored Academy Building in Lyme, N.H., hangs a blown-up photograph of about 45 men from Company A of the 16th New Hampshire Volunteers. The men stand erect on the town common before the white buildings and nearly barren hills of Lyme.

The picture captures what must have been a proud moment for the men and their families. Nothing about it hints at their grim future.

The picture was probably taken in late October or early November of 1862. The soldiers are unidentified, but Company A was recruited in and around Lyme. Most likely the men are from Lyme, Orford, Dorchester, Hanover, Lebanon and other local towns. Two officers stand in front of the enlisted men. Possibly they are 38-year-old Lt. Bela Sawyer of Lyme and 26-year-old Capt. Elias Smith of Plainfield.

The 16th New Hampshire was a nine-month regiment recruited to help fill the state’s quota in response to President Lincoln’s call for 300,000 troops. (The normal Union enlistment term was three years.) After mustering in, the regiment trained briefly on Concord Heights and headed south on Nov. 23. In its nine months the regiment never fought in a battle. Instead it was sent to Fort Burton, a former rebel outpost in the Louisiana bayou country.

This proved to be as deadly an assignment as almost any in the Union army. I found many letters and accounts of the regiment’s time at Fort Burton and its return home in August 1863. Sick men died all along the way, and many more died after reaching home. The dying continued for months after they mustered out on Aug. 20.

Using the data in regimental rosters, I calculated that of the more than 900 members of the regiment, 300 died of the fevers, diarrhea and dysentery they contracted in Louisiana. I used these calculations and the  documentary record to write one of the most tragic chapters of Our War.

Below, from Augustus Ayling’s Register, is a list of dead Company A men from Lyme and neighboring towns.  The age listed after each name is from the time of enlistment, in late 1862. As you’ll see, some died in Louisiana, some on the way home (Vicksburg, Miss., Mound City, Ill., Buffalo, N.Y.), some after reaching Concord.

There are 29 dead men in all from just one of the 16th New Hampshire’s ten companies. Eleven of them are from Lyme. No doubt some of the men in the photograph on the Lyme Common are on this list, but there is no telling who or how many.

Pvt. Charles J. Allen, 22, Lyme, died June 7, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Charles M. Avery, 36, Orford, died June 17, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Charles Baker, 36, Orford, died June 17, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Lewis Biathrow Jr., 23, Grantham, died June 5, 1863, New Orleans.

Cpl. Ransom Brocklebank, 43, Plainfield, died June 14, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Benjamin W. Chapman, 41, Plainfield (musician), died Aug. 5, 1863, near Vicksburg, Miss.

Pvt. George F. Chase, 19, Lyme, discharged with disease July 10, 1863, died Jan. 4, 1864, Lyme.

Pvt. Norman D. Comings, 20, Cornish, died Aug. 14, 1863, Mound City, Ill.

Pvt. Freeman J. Converse, 22, Lyme, died Dec. 23, 1863, Lyme.

Pvt. Joseph B. Cutler, 39, Plainfield, died June 21, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Seneca Ellis, 45, Cornish, died Aug. 26, 1863, Cornish.

Pvt. Phineas P. Gilbert, 33, Lyme, died Aug. 29, 1863, Lyme.

Pvt. Asa F. Gordon, 21, Lyme, died May 25, 1863, Brashear City, La.

Pvt. Edwin R. Houston, 31, Dorchester, died May 5, 1863, Brashear City, La.

Pvt. John L. Howard, 21, Lyme, died Aug. 24, 1863, Orford.

Pvt. Ira A. Johnson, 39, Plainfield, died August 4, 1863, near Vicksburg, Miss.

Pvt. Joseph Moore, 24, Lyme, died Aug. 21, 1863, Concord.

Pvt. Frank Norton, 28, Lebanon, died Aug. 18, 1863, Mound City, Ill.

Pvt. Alphonso Palmer, 18, Orford, died Aug. 9, 1863, near Vicksburg, Miss.

Pvt. Frank B. Porter, 19, Lyme, died Sept. 13, 1863, Lyme.

Pvt. Austin Ramsey, 27, Lyme, died Aug. 18, 1863, Concord.

Pvt. Enoch P. Smith, 33, Orford, died July 26, 1863, New Orleans, La.

Pvt. Silas Spaulding, 38, Cornish, died Sept. 20, 1863, Cornish.

Pvt. Alonzo Stark, 27, Bath (musician), died June 16, 1863, New Orleans.

Pvt. Irenus Stark, 21, Lyme, died June 3, 1863, Brashear City, La.

Pt. Luther S. Stone, 18, Plainfield, died July 7, 1863, New Orleans, La.

Pvt. John M. Vinton, 23, Plainfield, died June 16, 1863, New Orleans, La.

Pvt. John H. White, 23, Lebanon, died Aug. 12, 1863, Mound City, Ill.

Pvt. William W. Williams, 18, Lyme, died Aug. 26, 1863, Buffalo, N.Y.

A place out of time

Although it can lead to long drives and long days, one of the pleasures of my speaking tour to promote Our War is the chance to see new places and meet new people. That was certainly the case Sunday afternoon at the annual meeting of the Lyme Historians, whom I had never heard of until their president invited me.

Lucy Marie and her grandfather

Half the fun was getting there. After I had accepted the invitation, my son and his wife scheduled the baptism of Monique’s and my astonishing granddaughter, Lucy Marie, for that morning. They live in South Portland, Maine, nearly two hours from our home in Concord. Lyme is on the western edge of New Hampshire, at least three hours from Portland.

The baptism was in the Cathedral of St. Luke. Lucy Marie warmed up her voice properly early in the service and provided the sound-effects -- solo, no less -- during the holy rite. She hit her crescendo right on cue, as the priest doused her head. The other two babies, oblivious to what was expected of them, remained silent throughout.

Monique and I had to leave for Lyme right after the service. We were perplexed when the GPS did not take us to I-95, the Maine Turnpike. We are new to the GPS, but after it guided us out of a barren wilderness in west Georgia last winter, in GPS we trust. Sort of. We followed the monotone prompts while fending off suspicions that we were headed for Canada. 

The GPS guided us across central Maine and upper-central New Hampshire almost entirely on country roads. In three hours we drove less than a mile on an interstate. It was beautiful, one part nostalgia, one part new, all clothed in the spring green that still prevails just south of the White Mountains.

We entered New Hampshire at Freedom where, when our children were small long ago, we climbed Prospect Mountain. This is no 4,000-footer, but like many of our hikes, it was notable for its high view-to-strain ratio. Farther on, we saw the incisor-like peak of Mount Chocorua, a much harder climb that we made twice with our boys.

As we approached Chocurua on one of those hikes, our middle son Yuri kept falling behind as he stopped to examine the creatures in the small pools of a rocky marsh. This was a boy who loved showing us the bones in owl scat. This curiosity proved to be a harbinger. He majored in biochemistry in college and is now a cardiologist.

Warren's Redstone rocket

When we passed Squam Lake, we remembered the day a ranger on the fire tower on nearby Red Hill pointed out to us where the Henry Fonda character in On Golden Pond crashed his boat. After driving by signs for Castle in the Clouds, the Loon Center and the Polar Caves, we turned back west. We were just a couple of miles short of Warren, where we had taken the boys one Sunday to see a real Redstone rocket. It stands in a park, as though waiting for some modern-day Alan Shepard to hop aboard. (You can read about its 1971 overland journey from Alabama to Warren here.) 

Then we reached roads we had never driven before, leaving Wentworth and passing Mount Cube Farm in Orford. This was the home of the late, sometimes loony (he wanted to arm the New Hampshire National Guard with nuclear weapons, example) Gov. Meldrim Thomson. The Thomson name is still on nearly everything in the town. From Orfordville we drove south into Lyme.

In a subsequent post (or maybe two) I’ll tell you about the fruits of my two hours with the Lyme Historians, the group that has banded together to learn, preserve and protect the town’s history.

Meanwhile, the trip there was eventful enough to be worth its own post. In so many ways, outwardly at lesast, this rural, very-north-of-Boston region defies the passage of time. Constancy, tradition and respect for the past are New Hampshire assets. I'm not saying I expected to see the Boys in Blue mustering on the town commons we passed, but they would not have looked out of place.

Gallery: What the rebels won at Gettysburg

Detail of Louisiana's monument, dedicated in 1971 on the Gettysburg battlefield.

The Confederates didn’t win much at Gettysburg, but they did win the battle of the monuments. It took a while, and they won it only in looks, not in numbers.

There are 1,328 monuments and memorials on the battlefield. Despite the seeming exactitude of this number, it is almost always preceded by “approximately,” leaving room for the possibility that even today stone sentinels are hiding somewhere on the vast battlefield. Nearly all the Union monuments were put up during the late 19th century to honor specific regiments, brigades, corps and states. This is no surprise. Gettysburg is in a Union state, and the Union army won a decisive victory there.

From the Virginia monument (1917)

The first Confederate monument, Virginia’s, went up in 1917, more than half a century after the battle. Several other states erected monuments during and just after the centennial of the war.

In part, the addition of these monuments, even in the 1960s, was a sop to Jim Crow America. They represented the triumph of reunion over abolition as the object of the postwar peace, a preference that began with the Civil War veterans themselves. No matter which side they fought on, the white veterans had much more in common with each other than they did with the African-Americans freed by the war. When Reconstruction failed, most northerners accepted the racist regime that supplanted the so-called peculiar institution.

Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1965)

Because the Confederate monuments came later, they appeal much more to modern sensibilities than their Union counterparts. Some Union monuments have an antiquated Victorian charm or a neat specificity about the things soldiers carried, but most are stiff and stodgy. By contrast, the faces and postures depicted on southern monuments are romantic and heroic, befitting the myth of the Lost Cause. These are solid men, selfless and fearless men, shapely men, supermen -- little clusters of Clark Kents rendered in stone and bronze. Some statues even look biblical, conjuring visions of the archangel Gabriel trumpeting the saints into line of battle or Moses leading his beleaguered people to the Promised Land.

Over the years, my friend Dave Sullivan, a watercolor artist and photographer who helped me assemble the more than 100 photographs that appear in Our War, has shot many pictures of the Confederate statues at Gettysburg. I’m posting several of them in this gallery.

To my eye their well-chiseled beauty exceeds that of their far more plentiful brethren in the fields and ridges just across the Emmitsburg Road, a short but deadly charge away.

Detail from the Mississippi monument (1973)

Virginia (1917)

North Carolina (1929)

Detail from the North Carolina monument, dedicated in 1929.

  

Why couldn't Franklin Pierce just keep his mouth shut?

When I was researching Our War, Peter Wallner ran the library at the New Hampshire Historical Society. Peter is the author of Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son and Franklin Pierce: Martyr for the Union, a two-volume biography of the 14th president. His knowledge of the period and the Historical Society’s collections were invaluable during my work.

For a post on this blog, I asked him this question:

Unlike James Buchanan, the other Doughface president of the 1850s, Franklin Pierce spoke out during the Civil War, at first anonymously through the Democratic press and later publicly. This seems to run counter to the established behavior for former presidents. Why did Pierce feel compelled to participate in politics, and what effect do you think his speaking out had on his reputation?

Here is Peter’s response:

In his autobiography, published in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant, acknowledged his friendship with Franklin Pierce during the Mexican War. “I knew him more intimately than I did any other of the volunteer generals,” Grant wrote. He felt the need to correct history as it characterized Pierce, describing him as “a gentleman and a man of courage.”

Peter Wallner is the author of a two-
volume biography of Franklin Pierce,
New Hampshire's only U.S. president.

Dying of cancer at the time he was writing, Grant had nothing to lose in praising Pierce. The 14th president may have felt the same way during the Civil War when he was outspoken in opposing the war, particularly the policies of President Lincoln. Pierce had no political aspirations at the time but felt a need to defend his party and the policies of Jacksonian Democracy, which he had always espoused.

Throughout his political career Pierce had warned of the centralizing tendencies of the opposition party. Whether that party was Federalist, Whig or Republican, he believed its entire motive was to increase the power of the government in Washington to control the common people for the benefit of the privileged classes.

To Pierce, only three things would come of a stronger central government, and all were bad for the average citizen: he would be taxed and drafted to fight in wars, and his freedoms would be restricted. The Civil War was the fruition of all of Pierce’s fears, as the Lincoln administration used the national crisis as the excuse to tax, to draft and to restrict constitutional rights.

Pierce was particularly angered by the violations of the Constitution resulting from Lincoln’s policies. He first objected to the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus by executive order when the Constitution specifically stated that only Congress may suspend the writ. This was followed by the shutting down of newspapers that had criticized the President, the jailing by the military of at least 38,000 northern civilians, military trials of civilians and the persecution of political figures like Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham.*

Knowing Pierce’s views on the war, the Lincoln administration kept a close surveillance of his activities. Secretary of State William Seward suspected Pierce of treasonable activity on a trip to Michigan. These accusations increased Pierce’s anger, and he insisted on a Senate investigation, which cleared his name.

As more and more former friends and colleagues, many of whom were serving in the Union army, complained to the former president of their treatment by abolitionist Republicans, Pierce spoke out publicly. 

He chose a Democratic Party rally in Concord, N.H., on July 4, 1863, attended by as many as 25,000. 

Warned by friends that he could be jailed for expressing his antiwar views, Pierce lashed out at Lincoln: “True it is, that any of you, that I, may be the next victim of unconstitutional, arbitrary, irresponsible power. But we, nevertheless, are free men, and we resolve to live, or if it must be, to die, such.”

Pierce’s speech was roundly criticized in the national press as defeatist or even treasonous, and, as usual, his timing was poor. News of the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg reached Concord in the midst of the rally. The Irish anti-draft riots in New York later in July were also blamed in part on Pierce’s antiwar speech. Pierce retreated to the sidelines, making no further public pronouncements during the War.

Peter Wallner,
Pierce biographer

Grant was right: Pierce was courageous, perhaps even foolhardy, in speaking out so publicly at a time of national emergency. But he raised an important issue that has never been clarified: What powers does a president have in wartime?

In 1866, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan that the Constitution is “a law for rulers and people, equally in time of war and peace.” The 9-0 decision by a court made up largely of Lincoln appointees overturned the conviction by a military court of an Indiana man during the Civil War. Legal scholars have noted that the ruling has been frequently ignored by later presidents during national emergencies.

Pierce sacrificed what was left of his reputation by opposing the president’s policies during the greatest national crisis in U.S. history.  He never retreated from his opposition to the war and to the policies of the Lincoln administration, but his conduct during the war added the charge of treason to his reputation as a failed president.

*For more on the suppression of constitutional liberties during the Civil War see: Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Frank L. Klement, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984); Jeffrey Manber and Neil Dahlstrom, Lincoln’s Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels, and a President’s Mission to Destroy the Press (Naperville, Ill., Sourcebooks, Inc., 2005); Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War, 1860-1868 (New York: Norton, 1977).

Most popular posts

Last month, I compiled a top ten list for readership of posts on this blog. Here are the rankings a month later with the April rankings in parentheses:

1. My friend Chester (1)

2.  How did Lincoln Republicans morph into Obama Democrats? (2)

3.  Faces of Fort Wagner, Olustee and Andersonville (5)

4.   A love of music, a way with words (3)

5.  Emails from afar and a happy coincidence (4)

6.  Exeter’s Civil War general (10)

7. Gallery: Faces of the Fighting Fifth (part one) (9)

8. History’s touch (new to list)

9. The ever-changing past (6)

10. The soldier’s story behind the love story (part 1) (new to list)

Just missed: Capt. Butler, saved for posterity (7), Did Abraham Lincoln really free the slaves? and A kick in the pants at Chancellorsville

Lost and found: Jeremiah Durgin's sword

Here, in part, is the breathless entry I made in my journal in Westbrook, Conn., on June 2, 2011, the morning after my wife Monique and I drove down to meet Marcy Fuller in that town:

Capt. Durgin

“Marcy Fuller is a descendant of the Durgin family of Fisherville (now Penacook, N.H.). We made contact on the internet. She wrote me that she had the Civil War letters of Jeremiah S. Durgin, his three sons and assorted family members. And does she ever! Her collection is one of the best I have seen – four notebooks of letters and several amazing photographs – not just CDV [carte-de-visite] portraits but shots from the field. One Durgin relative, named Herman Currier, was a photographer in Penacook. In addition to pictures by him there are several stereoscopic images by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, including two Gardner images of bodies at Antietam. Probably Currier collected these.

“Jeremiah Durgin served in the 7th New Hampshire, his two older sons in the 2nd and his youngest son in the 18th. I have only begun to read the letters. The very first one I read was from Clara Farnum of Concord to her cousin Abner F. Durgin in the field with the 2nd New Hampshire at Washington before First Bull Run. Clara knew Charles W. Walker, the lieutenant killed when he fell of the troop train in New Jersey. One of my early ‘days’ [chapters] is about him, but Clara will supply the personal detail and the human feeling that were missing from my account of his out-sized funeral.

The Durgin children, ca 1855: Abner, Hiram, Sarah, Scott.

“These letters are a great find, one my best ever. . . . They are mine for as long as I need them.”

In fact, Monique could not believe that Marcy Fuller had allowed me, a stranger, to drive off with such a family treasure. I kept the letters for more than a year. They informed several chapters in Our War, but the main one was the story of the Durgins themselves. This was a tragic story, the story of a family shattered by the war.

The engraving on the sword's guard reads: "Presented to Capt. Jeremiah
D. Durgin Co. E. 7th Reft. N.H. Vols for his service as provost marshal
at Saint Augustine, Fla,, 1862."  The sword is pictured above.

Marcy and I have stayed in touch since the book came out. I saw her early last month when she drove up to Concord for Mark Travis’s and my joint book presentation at the City Auditorium.

The other day, during an internet search, she made a remarkable find herself: Jeremiah S. Durgin’s ceremonial sword, given to him when he was provost marshal of St. Augustine, Fla., early in the war. It was a job he came to loathe, as his letters home to his wife Caroline show. That may be why he didn't bring the sword home with him from the war. But it’s a beautiful sword, and you can see all the photos of it and read more about it here.

Thanks, Marcy.

Caught sleeping on Pinckney Island

Although I haven’t read all the Official Records of the Civil War, I have read many, and I have yet to see a regimental commander hang a subordinate officer out to dry the way Col. John H. Jackson did in the summer of 1862. A dead subordinate officer at that.

Slaves and soldiers on a S.C. cotton plantation (Frank P. Moore photo)

Pinckney Island (see map here) is just north of Hilton Head, where the 3rd New Hampshire Volunteers were headquartered. Along with the 4th and 7th New Hampshire, this regiment served in the  Union Army’s Department of the South along the South Carolina coast southwest of Charleston. Frank P. Moore, a Concord photographer, camped with the regiment in the spring of 1862 and chronicled its life there.

I happened upon Col. Jackson’s report while researching for a talk the other night at the Bedford Public Library. I was looking for information about the fate of soldiers from Bedford, particularly those from the 3rd who were at Pinckney Island, S.C., during the wee hours of Aug. 21, 1862.

After Union troops occupied Hilton Head and Port Royal to the north in late 1861, many former slaves left behind when their owners fled were put to work on the cotton crops at the plantations on Pinckney Island. Company H of the 3rd New Hampshire, under Joseph C. Wiggin, a 32-year-old lieutenant from Sandwich, was sent to the island’s eastern end to guard against Confederate attacks.

Sure enough, before daylight on Aug. 21, six boatloads of rebel soldiers landed and, apparently unimpeded, marched on Company H’s camp. Lt. Wiggin heard the gunfire and emerged from his tent. The next volley was aimed at him. He was later found lying dead near his tent with eight or nine bullet holes in his body.

Four privates were also killed and several men wounded in the attack. Thirty-six were taken prisoner. Some of the casualties were most likely shot by their comrades firing in the dark. Among the dead was George Adams, a 20-year-old private from Bedford. Thomas Adams, possibly George’s brother, was captured, along with William Butterfield and John Lockling, two Bedford teenagers. William Nichols, another Bedford private, was severely wounded and had to leave the regiment.

Josiah Plimpton (center) of the 3rd New Hampshire Volunteers. Plimpton investigated the
ambush of  Company H on Pinckney Island, and his colonel wrote a scathing report. (Frank P. Moore photo).  

The 3rd New Hampshire’s colonel, Enoch Q. Fellows, had resigned early that summer and had just taken command of the Ninth New Hampshire, which he was about to lead to South Mountain and Antietam. It fell to the 3rd's John H. Jackson, who was promoted to colonel to replace Fellows, to determine and report on how the rebel ambush had caught Company H sleeping. He sent his major, Josiah I. Plimpton of Milford, to Pinckney Island to investigate.

Based on Plimpton's probe, Jackson contributed the bottom line to the following string of official correspondence about the incident. I wonder how Jackson's report might have read if Lt. Wiggin had lived to tell his side of the story.

   

Maj. Gen. David Hunter, commander of the Department of the South, to Rear Adm. Samuel F. Dn Pont:

HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF THE SOUTH,

Hilton Head, Port Royal, S. C., August 21, 1862.

ADMIRAL: The enclosed report has just been received. Can you spare a gunboat to go round the island and if possible cut off the retreat of the enemy?

Enclosure: From Col. John H. Jackson to Hunter from Grahams Plantation at Hilton Head:

Headquarters, 3^rd New Hampshire, August 21, 1862; 7:30 a. m.

Col. John H. Jackson

SIR: I have just received reports from Pinckney Island that the company posted on the eastern end of the

island were surprised this morning by apparently three companies of the rebels. The lieutenant in command was taken prisoner and about 40 men. One sergeant and 5 privates escaped, and are reported on their way to these headquarters. They report the rebels at 6 o’clock this morning on the island in some force and wearing a blue uniform similar to our own. I have notified all my officers to have all their commands in readiness to move on to Pinckney Island. As you have been notified from Seabrook, I wait further orders, thinking you may think proper to send a gunboat to cut off the retreat of the rebels.

From Jackson to Henry W. Carruthers, post adjutant:

Grahams Plantation, Hilton Head, S. C., Aug. 21, 1862 10:45

SIR: Yours in reply to my communication of this morning is received. After sending my report I learned from some of those who escaped from the island that Lieutenant Wiggin was left on the island either killed or wounded badly, and that a number of our men were left there either killed or wounded. Major Plimpton, with a detachment from each of the four companies on the river, immediately landed on Pinckney Island to investigate the whole affair as far as possible and to recover those of our men who were killed or wounded.

Lieutenant Wiggin and 1 private, killed in resisting the attack, have been sent to Seabrook’s Wharf with some wounded men, who need the attendance of a surgeon. I gave Captain Emmons orders to send to Hilton Head for a surgeon, which I suppose he has done ere this. I have a report at this moment from the captain commanding the picket on the western end of the island, who has visited his posts, and they report all quiet during the night; heard no guns, cries, or anything of the kind, and also report that the enemy’s pickets present no unusual appearance. They have fired however on our pickets a number of times this morning. I shall be able to send 40 men tonight to occupy Company H’s former position.

On Pinckney Island there are a large number of contrabands and several well-cultivated plantations. The contrabands need protection and the plantations are valuable for their produce. I have been all over the island lately, and came to the conclusion that it needs five or six companies on the island to prevent these raids on our pickets. Please inform me if I shall continue to post pickets on that end of the island.

From Jackson to Hunter:

Hilton Head, S.C., September 1, 1862.

GENERAL: I have the honor to present the following report respecting an attack on the picket of this regiment stationed on Pinckney Island. The attack took place just before daylight on the morning of Thursday, August 21.

The enemy landed on the island from six boats, five of them landing above the pickets, and approached the camp from the side where no guard was stationed and fired a volley before they were discovered. The other boat came around the point to where one of our pickets was stationed very near the camp. The sentinel challenged twice and the lieutenant stepped from his tent and approached him. He had gone but a short distance when a volley was fired from the enemy, they being then in the camp. Lieutenant Wiggin was found dead a short distance from his tent, with eight or nine wounds on his body. The rebels remained but a short time on the island, and took but little of the company property and did not destroy the tents. The enemy have presented no unusual appearance since the attack.

Our loss was: Killed, 1 lieutenant, 3 privates; total, 4. Wounded, 2 privates; total 2. Missing, 3 sergeants, 4 corporals, 29 privates; total, 36. One of the wounded men has since died, and the other was severely wounded and may not recover. A number of the rebels were either killed or wounded, according to the report of one of the corporals who was taken prisoner, but the squad having him in charge was fired upon, probably by their own men in the darkness, and the fire was returned. In the confusion the corporal escaped, the guard at his side being shot dead.

On the 6th of August 3 men of Company H deserted from Pinckney Island, and a new disposition of the pickets was immediately made and the utmost vigilance urged upon the lieutenant (Wiggin) commanding that post. At different times two detachments of fresh men were sent to Pinckney Island to prevent the old pickets from relaxing their vigilance from great fatigue. At the time when the last detachment was sent I accompanied it, and examined all the picket posts, and pointed out particularly the necessity of great vigilance at the very point where the enemy landed on the 21st ultimo, and called the particular attention of the lieutenant to the importance of the post.

Since the surprise of the company (H) I have learned that the lieutenant (most unaccountably to me) removed entirely the guard at that post and the patrol from that point along the road to their camp. Lieutenant Wiggin proved himself a brave man at the battle on James Island, June 16, and nothing previous to this unfortunate affair has ever happened to shake my confidence in his ability as an officer. It was a great lack of vigilance and judgment on his part, and his too strong sense of security cost him the loss of his life and the regiment the loss of nearly an entire company. Every precaution was taken on my part to prevent any surprise of that post.

With great respect, your obedient servant,

JOHN H. JACKSON,

Colonel, Commanding Third New Hampshire Volunteers.