Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

February 24, 2014, will be the 100th Anniversary of the death of Civil War veteran Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. General Chamberlain, who is well known from his charge down Little Round Top depicted in the movie Gettysburg, was severely wounded while charging the works at Petersburg in 1864. Chamberlain would suffer for almost 50 years from the effects of his wounds before finally succumbing to them. Speaking of General Chamberlain and his wounds, one of his doctors said, “In bearing this silently while performing all his exacting duties there was shown more heroism than in gaining the military promotions which he so valiantly earned.” General Chamberlain is sometimes said to be the last Civil War veteran to die from his wounds.

In memory of the 100th anniversary of his death, the Joshua Chamberlain Society and joshualawrencechamberlain.com will be starting a memorial fund to honor the warrior’s memory while helping modern day wounded warriors.

The 20th Maine monument at Gettysburg and Chamberlain’s gravesite in Maine are often festooned with flags and flowers. The flowers will fade, but a gift to the Chamberlain Society will be a lasting tribute to all wounded warriors.

The Joshua Chamberlain Society (“JCS”) is a grass roots 501(c)(3) federally tax exempt charity that was formed with the mission of providing long term support to veterans that sustained permanent combat injuries fighting the long war on terror for our nation. It also provides long term support to the children of veterans who made the ultimate sacrifice in our service. In what we believe is a unique mission, we adopt these severely wounded veterans as JCS Heroes, and they will stay part of our family for the remainder of their lives, just as their injuries will be with them for the remainder of their lives. As the battles in Afghanistan and elsewhere continue to rage, we have been introduced to more wounded warriors than our current funds allow us to adopt. As such, our continued challenge is to raise money in the hopes of serving more and more JCS Heroes.

To learn more about the society, please visit www.chamberlainsociety.org

The Joshua Chamberlain Memorial Fund will be an ongoing support network allowing donors to track its progress. (See funds raised at bottom of this page.) As the fund grows, it will directly benefit the adoption of a new Hero or meet the needs of a current Hero.

Please help us honor our heroes with a donation to the Joshua Chamberlain Memorial Fund.

• Click below to donate to JCS.
  http://stl.chamberlainsociety.org/donate.php

• Donations are also accepted via postal mail:
  
  Joshua Chamberlain Society
  P.O. Box 8475
  Olivette, MO 63132.

Please make checks payable to the Joshua Chamberlain Society with a memo directing the donation to the “JLC Memorial Fund.”

If you are interested in being a sponsor, please contact us at: suzgoldjcs-at-gmail-dot-com

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There’s always a new angle on an old story, isn’t there?

This past weekend there was a post by a member over at Civil War Talk who recently visited Tombstone, Arizona, and was surprised to see a small Confederate flag marking the grave of one of that location’s better-known, um, residents. Newman Haynes “Old Man” Clanton (right, c. 1880) was the father of Ike and Billy Clanton, part of the “Cowboy” faction that ran afoul of the Earp brothers in Tombstone in 1881. When the Earps, along with the tubercular dentist Doc Holliday confronted the Cowboys at the OK Corral in late October 1881, Ike happened to be unarmed and ran off; Billy stayed and died, shot through the right wrist and in the chest and abdomen.

Old Man Clanton didn’t live to see his son killed in that famous shoot-out; Newman had himself been shot down a few months before in an ambush while herding stolen cattle through the Guadalupe Canyon, at the extreme southern end of the Arizona/New Mexico border. In truth, all the Clantons had a long reputation as troublemakers and small-time criminals, mostly involving cattle rustling, often with animals stolen from across the border in Mexico. Ike Clanton himself would be killed in a shoot-out with a detective attempting to arrest him on rustling charges in 1887; his violent end probably surprised exactly no one.

The family was originally from Missouri, but resettled in Texas in the 1850s. At the time of the 1860 U.S. Census, Newman Haynes Clanton and his family were were farming or ranching in Dallas County. He and his wife, Maria (or Mariah), had six children living with them, including twelve-year-old Joseph Isaac Clanton, later known as Ike. Two more children, including Billy, would be born after 1860.

Clanton’s Civil War service record, as documented by his file at the National Archives (8.3MB PDF), is spotty. He appears to have enlisted as a Private in Co. K of the First Texas Heavy Artillery Regiment at Waco on March 1, 1862, for a period of one year. In May 1862 he was on detached duty at Hempstead, Texas, employed as a nurse. He was discharged on July 6 as being overage; he would have been in his mid-40s. He re-enlisted at Fort Hébert, near Galveston, on January 1, 1863, the day of the Battle of Galveston, ostensibly for the duration of the war. Clanton apparently had other plans, though, because his record shows him as absent without leave from that date, and marked as a deserter from March 2, 1863.

In ealry 1864, Clanton joined an unknown Texas State Militia unit which was probably occupied paroling the frontier. He went into the U.S. Provost’s headquarters at Franklin, Texas (north of present-day Bryan and College Station) on August 26, 1865 and swore out his allegiance to the United States. Just eight days later, on September 3, 1865, Clanton arrived at Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory, with (as his record notes) “persons now at Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory, enroute to California, who formerly belonged to the Confederate States Army.” The speed of Clanton’s travel — roughly 850 miles in eight days — strongly suggests he went by stagecoach, rather than on his own horse or by wagon. Even so, it would have been an unusually fast stagecoach ride; the pre-war Butterfield Overland Express traveled roughly that same route, and didn’t make as good a time as Clanton would have had to in the summer of 1865.

Or maybe, as CWT user Nathanb1 suggests, he wasn’t in both places at all. The NARA records, ostensibly made just over a week apart, almost describe different middle-aged men:

Same man at Franklin, Texas on August 26, and then at Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory on September 3? It’s hard to see how. But if anyone was the sort to have some unknown scheme, it would be Newman Haynes Clanton.

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