When I was in undergrad, we were assigned soldiers who participated in the Battle of Gettysburg and were court-martialed for alleged cowardice and told to write papers on them for our senior theses. This was for my history major, American Civil War Era Studies minor.
I had a soldier named Albert L. Du Puget. He had issues with his knees ("rheumatism") that made him fall behind his unit - it turns out he wasn't being a coward, he was experiencing disability symptoms. I found photos of him in his pension file at the National Archives where he was discussing his knee issues 30-40 years later, even.
After the war, he ended up living in the city I now work in for some time before eventually dying in the Philadelphia area in the early 1900s. He married a much younger woman after his first wife died to ensure she got his pension, something not uncommon at the time to help protect people and give them financial security.
I'm scanning a book right now in the library's archives. And whose name pops up, but...
It's not a common name. I'm 99% sure it's him again, after so long. I wrote that paper in 2011. He was more or less Just Some Guy - born in the UK, immigrated to New Jersey, served in the American Civil War in his 30s, lived in this city after the war...
I'm half-tempted to reach out to the professor who oversaw my thesis. I'm almost crying seeing this - it's just so goddamned surreal. Albert feels like someone I know personally because of all the research I did on him over a decade ago, so it feels like finding an old friend again.
These are two Civil War veterans, aged 84 and 94 in this interview recorded in 1929, talking about fighting in the Civil War. At the time the two men would have been 16 years old (the first speaker) and 26 years old, when the war started in 1861.
Joseph “Uncle Joe” Clovese was the last known surviving African soldier of the Union Army in the American Civil War, and lived in Pontiac at the time of his death in 1951. Clovese, who lived to be 107 years old, was born into slavery on a plantation in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, and escaped slavery in his teens to join the Union Army during the Siege of Vicksburg. He stayed with the Northern Army, first as a drummer, later as an infantryman. He was a private in Co. "C", 63rd Colored Infantry Regiment.
Following the war he worked on Mississippi river steamboats, and he later worked on the crew stringing the first telegraph wires between New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi. At the age of 104, Clovese moved from Louisiana to Pontiac, Michigan to be near family. Once the community learned about “Uncle Joe,” the citizens of Pontiac embraced him. Large gatherings were organized for his 105th, 106th and 107th birthdays on January 30th.
For his funeral, more than 300 people were packed into Newman A.M.E. Church in Pontiac (their former location, in downtown) for the service. Hundreds more gathered at the gravesite in Pontiac’s Perry Mount Park Cemetery. Veterans from the Oakland County Council of Veterans served as pall bearers. A firing party from Selfridge Air Force Base fired the final salute and taps was sounded over the cemetery. Pontiac even named a road in his honor, that ran through the Lakeside Homes complex.