2nd Texas Infantry @ Corinth

I have been reading about the battle of Corinth this week in an attempt to get a better understand of the engagement where HCR received his “wound” and highest honors.
Well, it seems a unit near and dear to my heart led the Rebel attack, the 2nd Texas Infantry. The text below is from The Handbook of Texas Online, one of my favorite sources on Texas history:

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/

“SECOND TEXAS INFANTRY. The Second Texas Infantry, a Confederate regiment, was organized in Galveston in September 1861 by its first commander, Col. John Creed Moore. The regiment organized to protect the coast of Texas from northern invasion and was initially billeted at cotton warehouses in Galveston. It was moved to Camp Bee in Houston by December 1861 to complete training. The unit was composed of ten companies of volunteer militia, and the staff officers were Maj. Hall G. Runnels and Lt. Col. William P. Rogers. By March 1862 the regiment had been moved from Houston to Corinth, Mississippi, to become a part of the Army of the Mississippi, being organized by Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston. While in Mississippi, the Second Texas fought in a number of engagements and skirmishes, including the battle at Shiloh on April 6-7, 1862, for which the unit was cited for bravery by generals P. G. T. Beauregard and Dabney Maury. The Second Texas Infantry participated on the right wing of Confederate attackers in the capture of the headquarters of three brigades and the encirclement of Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss's division in the Hornet's Nest and penetrated to within a short distance of the steamboat landing by darkness on April 6. For gallantry on this day, Moore was promoted to brigadier general, and Rogers was promoted to the rank of colonel and placed in command of the regiment. Rogers led the Second Texas in a daring attack on Fort Robinett, Corinth, Mississippi, on October 4, 1862. After two unsuccessful assaults on the fort, Rogers, parading the regimental colors from horseback, led a successful attack. However, the fort was held for only a short while before it was recaptured in a counterattack during which Rogers was killed.”

Rogers was afforded a honor almost unheard of at the time. Rosecrans, the Union commander, ordered him buried with full military honors.

Downtown Corinth & Rogers Monument

Captain Leslie Smith

Wrote a letter to HCR’s father on May 9, 1868

"….The Major (HCR) was one of my most intimate acquaintances from the time I first met him in November of 1863 in fact I preferred his society to that of any other of my fellow officers on account of his good moral qualities such as very few young men of his age and standing in the service possess. It is therefore with painfull(sic) feelings of sorrow that I inform you that I deeply sympathize with you for the loss of a good kind and affectionate son and with his brother officers for the loss of an honest ----- courteous and gallant gentleman and officer.”

“I assume you have heard all about his sad sad end long before this. I deem it but justice to his momory to inform you that there is no doubt about his not being responsible for what he done at the time. I had noticed him for some time previous as being very much changed at times would act very singular indeed and seemed to be indifferent to what was transpiring around him."

"It should be some consolation to you in your great bereavement to know that everything was done that you could have desired and the ladies of this post tired vied with each other in decorating his remains to such an extent that his coffin was litterally(sic) covered with white roses. Poor fellow, when I took my last look at him as his remains were about being carried off he looked as if he was asleep, with a sweet smile playing over his features. I hope his soul is now where we all hope to go in a short time and where trouble and sorrow are not known."

"Believe me my dear sir when I again inform you that we all deeply sympathize with his family in their great affliction."

And I remain,
Yours Truly,
Leslie Smith
Capt 1st Infantry

The Mystery Deepens

I cannot say enough about Vonnie and Horse Soldiers Research. She was able to unearth a Pension request from HCR’s father. He claimed that Harry was his sole source of income as he was an invalid and over 70 years old. In the pension request are letters from the doctors that treated Harry before his suicide and even an officer that was his good friend who describes a conversation the night before and the events of the morning of his suicide.

I have also determined that HCR was stationed at Jackson Barracks NOT at Fort Jackson.

According to Global Security:

“Down river from the French Quarter, Jackson Barracks houses the Louisiana National Guard Headquarters. This series of fine brick buildings with white columns were built in 1834-35 for troops who were stationed at the river forts. Reportedly Andrew Jackson planned the barracks to be as secure against attack from the city as from outside forces.
Maps prepared in the mid-1800s show that the area's first development began in the 1820s. The Ursuline Nuns developed an 80-acre parcel for their convent in 1826. Sugar was a dominant crop, and the Louisiana Sugar Refinery, dated 1831, is shown along with several plantations.

The complex known as Jackson Barracks is one of the earliest and most noteworthy institutions in the area. The U.S. government began assembling land in 1833 to provide a central garrison, medical and supply point for troops sent to several coastal forts built after the War of 1812. Although only one block wide at the river, the Barracks stretch 25 blocks lakeward, with only three streets crossing the complex-Dauphine, St. Claude and N. Claiborne.

Jackson Barracks Military Museum is in the old powder magazine and in a new annex. It holds artifacts dating back to the War of 1812, and it includes items from as recently as the Gulf War. The 2000 NRA Shooting Sports Camp and Coaches School was held at Jackson Barracks June 28 – July 2, 2000”

Katrina did significant damage to the Barracks and some buildings had to be razed. I will be contacting them tomorrow to see if I can gain admittance. I wonder what buildings are left from the 1860s?

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/jackson-barracks.htm

June 2007 from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JacksonBarracks7June07B.jpg

Shook Over Hell

A new book arrived today!

Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War by Eric T. Dean Jr.

James M. McPherson wrote a wonderful review of this book and that led me to purchase it. Below is a portion of of his review in the Atlantic Online, March 1998 :

EVEN though Dean discusses the possibility that PTSD is "a grab-bag of symptoms" rather than "a distinct psychiatric disorder," the core of this book is an application of the PTSD concept to Civil War soldiers. Part of the myth of the scorned and troubled Vietnam veteran is the implied contrast between his postwar treatment by a hostile or indifferent society and the hero's welcome given veterans of other wars. Although many studies of Civil War soldiers have appeared in recent years, they have focused mainly on the wartime experiences of these men; their postwar history has been relatively neglected. Union veterans returned home as victors, celebrated by parades and official receptions. Confederate veterans did not have this solace, but the romanticization of their heroic courage and pure devotion to a sanctified though doomed Lost Cause fulfilled the same cathartic function. Dean writes, "A re-examination of the Civil War veteran through the lens of the Vietnam experience promises new perspectives and challenges, regarding ... the assumption that Civil War veterans readjusted well after their war."

The combat experience of Civil War soldiers was more intensive and prolonged than that of American soldiers in Vietnam. The actual number of American soldiers was the same in both wars: three million. This represented nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population in 1861, as against 1.5 percent of the population in 1970. The number of American dead in the Civil War was 620,000; in Vietnam it was 58,000. In proportion to the population, the death rate was sixty-nine times as great in the Civil War as it was in Vietnam. The ratio of combat to support troops in Vietnam was one to seven; it was almost the reverse in the Civil War. Some 35 percent of Civil War soldiers were killed or wounded, as compared with 5.5 percent of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. There was no helicopter evacuation of the wounded and no antibiotics or antiseptic medicines in the Civil War. The physical hardships endured by Civil War soldiers would have been almost inconceivable to an American in Vietnam.

In view of these facts, Dean is quite right to hypothesize a high incidence of psychiatric casualties during the Civil War and of what we now call PTSD afterward. The problem in identifying these phenomena is that Civil War medicine had no term or concept to describe them. But observations by surgeons, officers, and soldiers themselves make clear the frequency of psychiatric casualties, which were all too often officially regarded as cowardice or malingering. Nevertheless, diagnoses of "insanity," "homesickness," "melancholy," "acute mania," "dementia," "nostalgia," "irritable heart," and even "sunstroke" offer hints of an effort to identify and understand these casualties.

Dean also presents evidence of a higher post-Civil War crime rate among veterans than among non-veterans, of nightmares and flashback recollections, of disorderly behavior, and of suicide (though data to compare veteran and non-veteran suicide rates do not exist).

Dean's research in Civil War letters and memoirs, postwar newspapers, and pension files was thorough and exhaustive. It has yielded more information about the mental health of Union veterans than historians had previously realized was available. (Comparable sources for Confederate veterans are much thinner or nonexistent.) The most original and important feature of this book is Dean's analysis of 291 case studies of Civil War veterans committed to the Indiana Hospital for the Insane. Most of them exhibited symptoms that would today be diagnosed as PTSD. The inquest record for one such inmate, Jason Roberts, supplied the title for this book:

Says he has been shook over hell.... Sometimes he is raving and excited, at others melancholy ... Very peculiar and eccentric, flying from one Subject to another, and talking incoherently on all Subjects, ... The subject of religion and his experiences in the army being paramount in his mind ... [he] thinks all his enemies should be in hell.

The amount of effort and patience required to match these asylum inmates with their combat experiences is awe-inspiring. Yet a caveat is in order. Does Dean ask the right questions about this sample?

Is the Indiana Sample of 291 men representative of Civil War veterans in Indiana or elsewhere? Can the problems of the men in this sample be generalized to a significant proportion of the approximately 180,000 [actually 135,000] Indiana veterans or the 1.9 million Union veterans?
The answers would seem to be obvious: men committed to a hospital for the insane are by definition not representative, and their problems cannot be generalized.

Having put so many hundreds of hours of research into this sample, however, Dean wants it to bear more weight than it possibly can. He acknowledges that the regiments to which these 291 men belonged had higher than average casualties from both disease and combat, but "the most salient point about the Indiana Sample is how close to average it seems in so many other respects." He continues, "One is tempted therefore to think that the problems of the Indiana Sample could not have been atypical." This is sloppy thinking. The question is not whether these men and the units to which they belonged were representative in a variety of objective criteria -- age, occupation, ethnicity, length and theater of service, number of battles, and so forth -- but whether their psychiatric problems were typical or representative of the personalities of the more than 99 percent of Civil War veterans who were never committed to an asylum. To suggest otherwise exposes Dean to the same charge of inflating the psychiatric casualties and PTSD of Civil War veterans that he has so effectively proved against superficial students of Vietnam veterans.

Despite this caveat, the Indiana Sample in combination with other evidence sustains Dean's conclusion that historians have overlooked a significant incidence of PTSD among Civil War veterans -- probably greater than that among Vietnam veterans. Of this book it can truly be said, as it is all too often falsely said of other historical studies, that it breaks new ground.

James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis Professor of American History at Princeton University. He won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize in history for Battle Cry of Freedom. McPherson's most recent book is For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War(1997).

What are you all about Harry?

It seems Robinett’s father applied for a pension because his suicide was believed to have been caused by his temporary insanity, a result of a head wound he suffered during the war. I have found no evidence of a wound, none! Officer affidavits reference his head wound and how much he changed as a result, being insane at times! Some send heartfelt letters to his father; one even gives the exact details of his suicide and of the events the night before he shot himself.

The odd thing is in the two boxes of Carded Medical Files there was not a single card on him in either box; there should have been a record of his treatment. And in one of the pension file affidavits they report that an autopsy didn't reveal any evidence of a head wound. So it must have been very slight if any existed at all. They speculate in just one affidavit that it's even possible he was becoming senile and assumed it was the result of a wound.

I have a lot more to read on this man. The court martial records clearly indicate a disturbed man with erratic behavior. Even his handwriting changes markedly in the documents. Time to turn look some at PTSD during the war.

Lots of Work This Week

Well, I am not sure how much research I can get done this week. I have AMU research papers to grade and then Final Exams. In addition, Saturday I will be in Macon, GA judging the state National History day competition.

Here we go Again

Tonight I am reading the transcript of CAPT [Brevet Major thanks to Senator Hall] Robinett’s THIRD court martial [I don’t have the transcript of the first one yet]. This time he is accused of being intoxicated (again) in a theatre in New Orleans. He is found guilty and, once again, dismissed from the service.

Major General Philip A. Sheridan, then in command of the Gulf District, refuses to overturn the court’s decision based upon his previous court martial.

Sheridan forwards the transcript to the Secretary of War who passed it on to President Andrew Johnson.

Guess how this one turns out? I am beginning to believe that Harry might have what we today call PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) or he simply has a REAL alcohol problem.

Keep History Alive
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More on the court martial

It seems the sequence I wrote last night was a bit off. I have found some letters from some interesting people asking the Judge Advocate General to consider Robinett’s distinguished service in the war. One was no less than Grant himself; others from his commanding officer at the 1st U.S. Infantry in New Orleans and from his division commander at Vicksburg.
So, how does it look tonight? Like HCR was NOT actually dismissed from service that the letters from Grant and others caused the guilty verdict to be commuted.

How does Senator Hall fit in? It now looks like he was campaigning to have Harry promoted from 1st Lieutenant to Major just weeks after his sentence was commuted.

US Senator William Hall

Well it looks now like Senator Hall, the Congressional delegation from Delaware, and some "prominent citizens" prevailed upon Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to commission HCR as a Major in the Regular Army. Stanton instead commissioned him as a Captain and sent him back to his old unit, the 1st U.S. Infantry. Why would he send him back to where he had so much obvious trouble?

So his first suspension and subsequent dismissal were basically overruled by HCR's allies and Stanton.

On to his third court martial.

Keep History Alive
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WOW, I uncovered some new information on Harry Robinette tonight.

In the spring of 1865 he was released from Lt General Grant’s staff where he was an Assistant Aide de Camp. Evidently there was no room for another captain in the 1st U.S. Infantry. No sources docs for this part, strictly speculation, it looks like he was reduced from his brevet Captaincy to 1st Lieutenant of Volunteers and sent to his unit (1st U.S. Infantry) in New Orleans. This is a regular Army unit so I am not sure why it said volunteer.

On 16 DEC ‘65 he suspended from service for one month for actions on 6 NOV: “Conduct prejudicial to good order & military discipline and using contemptuous and disrespectful language to his superior officer.” This involved Major M. Maloney who ordered him not to put his baggage on a particular wagon, which he did anyway.

On 29 DEC 65 he was dismissed from service for actions on 25 NOV “conduct unbecoming and officer and a gentleman, conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” This involved a saloon in New Orleans which he entered with two enlisted men who were refused service by the bartender. Harry jumped the bar and confronted the bartender and who then called the Officer of the Day a Captain J.D. DeRussy who he refused to obey and encouraged the enlisted to also refuse to obey.

Then what do I find but a letter date April 66 from US Senator William Hall, the District Judge of Delaware along with “many other prominent citizens of Delaware” asking Secretary of War Henry Stanton to promote Harry to Major from “his now current rank” of Lieutenant. He mentions a "severe wound" from the war, first documentation of it that I have found.

Something is funny here and doesn’t make sense. Harry gets in trouble in early November 65, gets in more trouble at the end of November. Two courts martial are held, the first suspends, the second dismisses effective at the end of December 65. How does he get back into the army as Lieutenant and why does the entire (well all three) Congressional delegation from Delaware want him reinstated?

As a final note, recall that in February of 1868 he will commit suicide at Ft. Jackson near New Orleans while still on active duty. This is a troubled man

Students note: historical research constantly leads to more questions. It is like a never ending detective story.

Keep History Alive

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