They marched eating four ears of corn a day and a little meat when rations were scarce. They slogged through swamps and walked through pitiless heat, carrying their wounded and dying on stretchers. They were in the forefront of some of the major battles of the Civil War. They were the volunteer soldiers from Madison County, and their impact on this area continues today.
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War and the proud legacy of service by Madison County soldiers, the Anderson Public Library created the Madison County Civil War Soldiers database, which is available on the Anderson Public Library website.
The database names soldiers who listed Madison County as their residence when they enlisted and those who enlisted in Madison County. Soldiers who moved to Madison County following the Civil War are not included.
Their stories are still remarkable today.
For example, at the Battle of Palmito Ranch in Texas along the Rio Grande River, Madison County soldiers of the 34th Indiana Infantry battled Confederate and Imperial Mexican forces on May 11, 1865, a month after the Civil War had ended.
Certainly, many died in battles, but overwhelmingly they died of diseases.
Of the 339 Madison County men who did not come home from the Civil War, three out of four died from wounds or diseases such as influenza, malaria, measles, typhoid fever and diarrhea.
Seven drowned. Another was shot on picket duty and one man, John McCarthy of the 8th Indiana Infantry, was murdered. Two Madison County soldiers were killed coming home when the steamship Sultana exploded in Memphis; another survived the blast.
Those left on the home front weren’t immune to danger.
In July 1863, in response to Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s Raid in southern Indiana, 281 Madison County men, many of them too old or too young for the Army, became Minute Men and enlisted to help drive Morgan from the state.
Five members of the United States Colored Troops listed Madison County as their home. Isaac and Joseph Hampton, Marshall Hubbard and William Birney, all soldiers in the USCT 28th Infantry, and Nelson Hill, from rural Madison County, fought in the Virginia and Texas campaigns. Hubbard was killed at Petersburg, Va., but the rest survived the war.
Now, many of these stories can come to life using the Anderson library database. The following information is available for each soldier: Name, home, rank at entry, company, regiment, enlistment date (which is called muster date) and a brief section titled “remarks,” which tells what happened to the soldier and when he left the service.
If a soldier enlisted in more than one regiment, there will be an entry for each different service. The information was taken from the Indiana Adjutant General’s Report, published in 1869 and considered the most complete source for information about Indiana’s Civil War soldiers.
A help sheet titled “Finding your ancestor in our database” gives search suggestions and the “Where do I go next?” help sheet suggests other sources of information on Civil War soldiers.
For questions about the database, call the Indiana Room at the Anderson Public Library at 641-2442 or by email: boljace@andersonlibrary.net.
Civil War: 150th Anniversary
Related Photos
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Augustus Margraff, of the Bronx in New York City, served in the 71st New York Volunteers. He is second from left sitting in the front row. The stereopticon image was submitted by Margraff's great-great granddaughter, Claire Goodwin Lee, of Anderson.
Discussion
Soldiers' lives now on library database
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