IN THE EARLY 1870S THE SURVIVORS OF THE 4TH MICHIGAN, LIKE THOUSANDS OF OTHER VETERANS, began to gather at yearly reunions. The veterans of the regiment timed the event for the anniversary of June 20, the day the first volunteers who comprised the 4th Michigan were sworn into the service of the United States in 1861. For the next half-century these annual reunions were held in the southern Michigan towns (and on occasion, Indiana and Ohio communities) that had seen the men off to the war. The locations of the reunions included Adrian, Hillsdale, Hudson, Jonesville, Sturgis, Eaton Rapids, Lansing, Detroit, Litchfield, Monroe, Reading, Palmyra, North Adams, and Angola, Indiana. These events were put on with fanfare with the support of local merchants and politicians, local chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic, an important postwar veterans association, and their Women's Relief Committee counterparts. Women from these auxiliaries and local churches almost always had charge of the banquets and picnics that were central to the reunions.
News accounts show they were as much civic events as they were get-togethers for the veterans. Local officials, businessmen, and the veterans groups who hosted the gatherings planned entertainment, food, merchant sales, and even fund-raising so that visiting veterans would incur minimal expense, if any, to attend. Invitations were extended to all area men who had been in the Union army. Even a former Confederate soldier from a North Carolina outfit, the Reverend J. M. Barclay, whose name was also given as “Barkley” and “Burkley” and who lived in Hillsdale after the war, was invited to speak at the 1884 reunion. He was made an honorary member of the regiment.1
Patriotic and proud, with moments of laughter and remembrance, the gatherings allowed the former comrades-in-arms to enjoy each other's company and honor those who hadn't come home. When an ex-soldier from Hillsdale named Henry W. Magee gave a speech at the 1875 reunion about the regiment's history, “there was hardly a dry eye in the audience while he recounted the trials which they had endured.” Surviving programs and reports on the reunions show there was always a speech and moment of silence or prayer for those who had died. More than 200 men from the regiment attended the 1875 reunion, or about half of the membership of the association of the original and reorganized 4th Michigan regiments, according to its 1876 roster.
Committees of GAR members, local officials, and volunteers greeted the veterans as they arrived at the train station of the host community, with the town decked out in flags and bunting. Attending veterans and their wives marched from the depot accompanied by brass bands, reception committees, militia and fire companies, and residents in their carriages. The processions were cheered as they trooped to the local meeting hall, or whatever venue was sufficient to accommodate them. There the veterans conducted a business meeting, electing officers, discussing memorials, and choosing the location of their next gathering. At the 1875 reunion the meeting was adjourned so the veterans could march back to the station to greet the arrival of their “old flag”—the original U.S. banner bearing the words “Defend It”—on the noon train.2
Mrs. Josephine Wilcox, the woman who had presented that flag to the 4th Michigan in June 1861, was for years its keeper, and it was routinely brought to the reunions. Newspaper accounts of the reunions don't mention the presence of any other 4th Michigan regimental banners. Often Mrs. Wilcox and the widow of George Lumbard, Mrs. J. D. North of Jackson, made ribbons or badges for the association members.3
Then the ex-soldiers convened for dinner or picnic at a local church, hall, or pavilion. Often scores of guests attended with the veterans, and hundreds of members of the public, too. The highlights of these dinners were speeches, prepared by selected veterans and others as responses to preplanned toasts—“To the old Fourth,” “The old flag,” “To the Ladies,” and other topics. Some years, as in the 4th Michigan association's 1884 reunion in Hudson, a “grand regimental ball” capped off the night, held at the local opera house. Concerts and festivities were also scheduled for the reunions. But the years took their toll. At the 1884 reunion in Hudson, 75 veterans of the regiment attended. When the reunion was held in the town of North Adams in 1898, 60 veterans were present. In 1917, the year the United States entered World War I, 33 survivors attended the reunion in Jonesville. And so it went.4
Reports about the reunions in the 1870s and 1880s show the members of their association discussed plans to place a memorial to Harrison Jeffords at Gettysburg, a matter that was resolved when the state of Michigan sponsored a monument there and at other locations on the battlefield where regiments from the state had fought. As plans for those monuments took shape in 1889, Thaddeus Huff, a Hillsdale County farmer and veteran who had been wounded at Gettysburg at the age of 22, traveled to the battlefield as a delegate from the 4th Michigan to a national committee dealing with the location of monuments. His job was to help identify the place where Jeffords had fallen. Just a few years earlier, the regiment's artist, Charles Gruner, sold a picture he'd made of the Gettysburg battle “for the nominal sum of ten dollars” to the 4th Michigan association. The association, in turn, intended to sell Gruner's picture for a higher price and put the proceeds toward the proposed marker on the battlefield. Reports about previous reunions state the association also had a painting depicting the 4th Michigan's fight at Malvern Hill—a picture also rendered by Gruner—which was apparently sold by lot as a fund-raiser for a monument to Dwight Woodbury, whose body had been returned to Adrian. What ultimately became of these battle paintings by Gruner is unknown.5
Yet by 1888, perhaps as a result of the state's commitment to erect Gettysburg monuments, the 4th Michigan survivors voted to use these funds intended for a Jeffords memorial to instead recover George Lumbard's remains from the Wilderness, return them to Hillsdale, and get an expensive marker for his grave. But the effort by those who tried to locate Lumbard's burial place in Virginia apparently didn't succeed. Details of grave diggers removed the Union dead from the Wilderness shortly after the war for reburial at Fredericksburg, and only a comparatively small number of them could be identified.6
The same year the 4th Michigan association took the vote on a monument for Lumbard, Orvey S. Barrett published a brief regimental history titled The Old Fourth Michigan Infantry that centered on his old Company B. The members of the 4th Michigan regularly recounted their regiment's experiences and battles and losses in speeches and toasts at reunions, but in 1889 the members discussed the idea of putting their companies' individual histories down on paper, with a “historian” chosen for each company to complete this job. Ultimately only Henry Seage seems to have carried out this assignment, preparing what he titled History of Co. E, 4th Mich. Infantry, 1861–1864. It took somewhat longer than a year to complete. The 40-page printed booklet, based largely on Seage's diaries, bears the statement that it was “approved by the old 4th Infantry association at its meeting, June 22, 1897.”7
The veterans showed their respect for fallen comrades in more than just speeches and moments of silence. When their association met in Adrian in 1889, the old men took the time to march to the sound of fife and drum to Oakwood Cemetery, to the grave of Dwight Woodbury. Those who couldn't make the march were driven out in carriages. The veterans formed around the grave, and the president of their association, Albert V. Cole, a former Lenawee County man who had come from Nebraska to take part in the reunion, read aloud the inscription on the stone. As the veterans filed by his marker before the march back to town, each man removed the flower that had been pinned to his jacket and placed it on the colonel's grave.
John Dean, an English-born Hillsdale County farmer who joined Company H at the age of 28 and saw the finish at Appomattox with the 1st Michigan, also survived the subsequent Texas sojourn with the reorganized 4th Michigan. He suffered wounds and illness in the war and married a volunteer nurse who took care of him in Baltimore. Though his wounds ultimately put him in a wheelchair, he fathered 10 children back in the community of Litchfield and regularly attended regimental reunions. He was, a reporter wrote in 1896, “an interested participant in all the [reunion] exercises,” and his comrades made sure he was well cared for.8
Irvin Miner, the soldier and diarist from Company F who had been captured at Gettysburg, had spent months in Confederate prison, and ultimately rejoined the reorganized 4th Michigan, hadn't seen Albert Boies since that terrible evening of July 2, 1863. Boies had been captured in or near the Wheatfield, too, but had escaped that night back to Union lines. After the war, Miner eventually moved to the town of Reed City, nearly 200 miles northwest of where he'd lived in 1861, so he didn't see Boies again until the regiment's 1916 reunion. “[B]ut they recognized each other at once as they had not changed like many others,” a report said of their meeting. Miner died the next year.9
A reunion cleared up a major misunderstanding left over from the war involving Oscar A. Janes, who'd lost an arm when the 4th Michigan was in the trenches outside Petersburg. At the regiment's first reunion in Hillsdale, Janes ran into his old sergeant, James Dickerson. Janes, a student at Hillsdale College before the war, had been wounded as night fell on June 22, 1864, but his comrades thought he had died. In fact ambulance crews had carried him off the field to a hospital. But the next day, Dickerson identified and buried the body of a soldier he thought was Janes, reporting him killed in action. Very much alive, Janes went back to Hillsdale and began practicing law there in 1871. Janes recognized Dickerson at the 4th Michigan's first regimental reunion and greeted him by name. But Janes's former sergeant just couldn't figure out who was talking to him. “Who are you, anyway?” Dickerson finally asked.
“Why, I am Janes, of your company,” he replied. “Don't you know me?”
Jim Dickerson was stunned, since standing before him was man he was sure had been killed in action back in 1864.
“My God!” Dickerson exclaimed, staring at Oscar Janes in surprise. “I buried you at Petersburg!”10
Regimental reunions weren't the only venues in which the former soldiers gathered. Some were active members of their local GAR posts and in veterans affairs for decades. Some continued to live in or near the southern Michigan communities they had left to serve in the war. For years in the Hillsdale area Company E veterans Tad Huff, Mark Taylor, and William Bird assembled with their wives and families, along with George Kinney of Company B and others on New Year's Day for dinner. Old soldiers from Company F also held annual reunions beginning in the late 1880s. Smaller than a regimental reunion, this company's get-togethers were hosted at the Hudson home of Benjamin E. Westfall, a former officer who was one of six veterans from his area to attend the 50th reunion at Gettysburg in 1913 of the survivors, North and South, who fought there. Surviving to the age of 86, Westfall tragically drowned, apparently while fishing in July 1925 on a lake near the town of White Cloud. His body was brought back to Hudson, where he was buried.11
Time marched on, and the small towns and villages that had sent the men off to war no longer used wells to get their water, but now had waterworks and indoor plumbing. There was telephone service, new factories and new technologies and conveniences. Not long after the turn of the century, the old men who came to the reunion weren't given tours of the hosting community in carriages, but in automobiles. “The men of the Old Fourth all falling like leaves,” the Hudson Gazette opined about the reunion there in 1916. “At the reunion in Hudson twenty years ago the opera house was half filled with members of the regiment; now a half a hundred were gathered.”12
By 1922 the regimental association became the keeper of what was said to have been Harrison Jeffords's sword when the GAR post at Dexter went out of existence. A news report on that year's reunion said that the 4th Michigan association would keep the sword until its old men were gone, at which time the Michigan State Pioneer and Historical Association in Lansing (predecessor of the state's historical commission) was to receive it. Whether that sword was turned over is not known, but a sword that was said to have been Jeffords's is owned today by a private collector. In the same vein, members of the regiment's association some years earlier became increasingly concerned about their beloved first regimental flag and its safekeeping, what with its possession by a woman who was likely older than most of them. Eventually Mrs. Wilcox and her family relented. By 1898, the colors were being kept in the office of Lester Salsbury, a veteran who'd been badly wounded at Gettysburg but who was then practicing law in Hudson. At the turn of the century, possession of the flag passed to the regiment's old major, James Cole, who had become an evangelist and who kept the colors in a bank vault for a time and also at his home. In 1901 the flag was turned over to the state of Michigan, where it joined other regimental flags carried by her soldiers.13
Albert H. Boies believed that, based on government pension records, about 100 members of the 4th Michigan were still alive in 1923, and most of them must have been in their 80s. But now only a handful could attend the reunions. He, Jacob Perine, and two other survivors, Albert W. Veness and Herbert D. Bryan, both of Hillsdale, gathered with their families in Hillsdale in 1928; their dinner at a hotel was sponsored by a local doctor, and the news of their gathering shared space in the local newspaper with a headline about pilot Amelia Earhart in London following her transatlantic flight. “The meeting yesterday was the first that has been held with less than twelve members present,” the newspaper said of the reunion. “Time, however, has played havoc with their ranks and the few other men who remained from the old 4th were too feeble to attend.”14
This gathering, it was reported, was the final reunion of the 4th Michigan.
Not all former soldiers of the 4th Michigan who survived the war attended the reunions, and some continued to suffer its ravages. A shoulder wound Larned B. Partridge of Company B suffered in May 1864 when members of the regiment stormed Rebel rifle pits caused him unrelenting pain, and his suffering was such that friends and family said he was depressed. “[B]efore he was wounded he was cheerful and lively,” Orvey Barrett wrote about the ex-soldier. But after leaving the army, Partridge complained there was no relief from pain in his head and shoulder. “[H]e seemed very down hearted and despondent,” Barrett wrote; he and others believed that Partridge's inability to work and the pain had driven him mad.15
In October 1867 Partridge had asked an old comrade from the 4th Michigan, John Rintz (also given as Rentz), to have a beer with him. Rintz, then in his early 30s, formerly a sergeant, was a shoemaker and store clerk in Blissfield. He recalled Partridge said that “this was the last drink he would take,” because he was tired of living and would be “better being dead than alive.” About a week letter, Partridge walked into the woods and hanged himself. Rintz lived to be an old man and take part, however briefly, in the new technological age, founding the Blissfield Telephone Company in 1897.
Some survivors of the regiment had distinguished careers in public service and politics. Oscar Janes served as Hillsdale's city clerk, city attorney, county circuit court administrator, probate judge, and paymaster general on the staff of Michigan governor Russell A. Alger. He also served in the state senate, was a federal pension agent in Detroit, and served on the board of Hillsdale College. And he was an official in the state GAR and an officer of the 4th Michigan association for years.16
Moses Luce, who mustered out of the regiment in 1864, also returned to Hillsdale to finish college and went on to law school in Albany. He went back to his home state of Illinois, married, and practiced law, representing banks and railroads. In 1873 he headed west for his health to San Diego, where he went into the practice with an ex-Confederate soldier. He continued to represent big businesses and invested in real estate and mining; he also served as a county court judge for several years and as San Diego's postmaster, appointed by President William McKinley, with whom he went to law school. He helped organize the city's public library and to establish the local Unitarian Church. In modern times, he has been considered by local historians to be one of the most important guiding forces in the shaping of the city of San Diego. Luce, the one member of the regiment to be awarded the Medal of Honor by Congress in 1895 for the rescue of his friend Asher LaFleur, died at the age of 91 on April 29, 1933. He had outlived his comrade LaFleur by some 27 years.17
John C. Tarsney, one of three Tarsney brothers to serve in the 4th Michigan's Company E, also went on to a notable career in law and politics. John admitted years later that he was not yet 17 when he enlisted, but lied about his age. His older brother James was killed at the Wilderness, while Tom (whom Henry Seage said had dropped or surrendered the regimental colors at Gettysburg) survived the war. John Tarsney, who was only 18 when he was wounded and captured at the same battle, emerged from the war with what was one of the stranger stories of escape to come out of the regiment.
John Tarsney was taken to Belle Isle and then to Andersonville, and finally to Savannah and Milan, Georgia. In the latter prison camps, Tarsney was a member of the Union prisoners' own police force, self-organized squads of soldiers who suppressed predatory criminal activity among the prisoners. In November 1864, some 17 months after he'd been captured, word spread among the prisoners at Milan that a number of men were to be released. Usually these were the sickest and most disabled prisoners; Tarsney, still reasonably healthy, learned that his name wasn't on the list.
As Tarsney finished his patrol in the camp that night, he talked with a dying man, John Francis of the 54th Pennsylvania. Francis's name was on the list; Tarsney made Francis as comfortable as possible and they talked for a while. But when Tarsney returned the next morning to check on him, Francis was dead. Tarsney quickly decided to switch identities with the dead man, pinning a note on Francis's shirt that identified him as John Tarsney of the 4th Michigan. When John Francis's name was called that evening to join the men leaving the prison camp, Tarsney, feigning sickness, took his place. Though he had to convince a Union officer to go along with the ruse, and he was questioned by suspicious Confederates, his identity switch succeeded. John Tarsney was returned to Union lines and rejoined what remained of the old 4th Michigan, by then assigned to the 1st Michigan outside of Petersburg. He would participate in the last battles in Virginia and witness the surrender of Lee.
John Tarsney mustered out of the service in 1865 and went home to Hudson to finish high school. He enrolled in the University of Michigan's law school, graduating in 1869. He married and moved to Kansas City, where he was elected to the post of city attorney and, in 1888, to the U.S. Congress. He was later appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Oklahoma Territory by President Grover Cleveland, serving in that capacity for three years before returning to Kansas City. Tarsney died a month short of his 75th birthday in September 1920. He outlived his brother Tom, who also became an attorney after the war, by more than 18 years. Tom Tarsney died at the age of 59, probably of heart disease, in Pueblo, Colorado, in the spring of 1902.18
William W. Duffield of Detroit, who served for several months as the lieutenant colonel of the 4th Michigan, went on to command the 9th Michigan Infantry and then a brigade in the Army of the Cumberland. He was wounded and captured, but survived. An engineer by training, after the war he worked building railroads and surveying land and served in the Michigan Senate. He also got federal appointments to superintend surveys of the U.S. coast and serve on the board that oversaw the operations of lighthouses.
Scotland-born George Spalding, who'd been a Democrat in the town of Monroe before the war, was a Republican ever after. He became an attorney and served his community as mayor, school board president, congressman, banker, and in other capacities. Having resigned from the 4th Michigan as a captain early in 1864, he'd gone on to be the lieutenant colonel of the 18th Michigan, the provost marshal of Nashville, Tennessee, and the colonel of a Tennessee cavalry regiment that battled Rebel troopers and irregulars, suffering further wounds and earning a brevet rank of brigadier general. When he died in 1915, he was remembered as one of the leading citizens of his community for the past half-century.19
George Maltz, a Detroiter who enlisted in the 4th Michigan as corporal and left it as lieutenant and adjutant, worked as a banker and lumberman after the war and also as a cashier for the IRS. He later moved to Alpena, where he founded a bank and served as mayor. He was also elected to serve as a regent for the University of Michigan and later as state treasurer.
Jonathan W. Childs, who had served as major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel of the regiment up to his mysterious resignation in November 1862, rejoined the army about a year later as a captain of Company D of the 2nd U.S. Colored Troops and served beyond the end of the war. He earned his law degree while serving in Florida and was active in Republican politics there during Reconstruction, holding various county and state offices, legislative and judicial, and also federal Interior Department and Internal Revenue collector's posts. He married in Georgia in 1873 and lastly worked as a clerk in the U.S. government's Land Office Surveying Division in Washington, D.C. He died at age 62 on May 24, 1896, of what was characterized as “disease of bladder and kidneys.”
Childs was given a pension after the war, having suffered pleurisy during his time in the 4th Michigan because of his exposure to the cold and wet, but his widow Frances tried for decades to show that his kidney disease and death were also linked to his service. Several former officers and men of the 4th Michigan gave affidavits that he'd been ill and in pain before his resignation in November 1862, and a family member said he'd had no urinary problems before his service. A sympathetic U.S. Congress approved an increase in her monthly widow's pension to $30 a month in 1901, but it appears that she never succeeded in convincing the government that Childs died as a result of war-related sickness or condition. Records suggest that as late as 1907 she was still trying to prove her late husband's case.20
George Yates, the handsome young man who'd gone from the regiment to serve on the staff of the brigade of which the 4th Michigan was part, survived his wounding at Fredericksburg and went home to Michigan, where he again met George Custer early in 1863. They became good friends. That spring, Custer introduced Yates to a Union cavalry commander, Gen. Alfred Pleasanton. Yates became a staff officer, serving with Pleasanton in the Army of the Potomac and then in Missouri and Kansas, even after many of his comrades had mustered out of the original 4th Michigan in June 1864.
Of course, Custer became a brigadier general and war hero. After a brief postwar marriage in St. Louis and a stint in Washington, D.C., as a government clerk, Yates was back in army in 1866—this time as a lieutenant in the 2nd U.S. Cavalry Regiment and soon after as captain in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, where he took part in Indian battles on the frontier. His friendship with Custer continued to shape the events of Yates's life, his second marriage, and ultimately, his death. Historians believe Yates was probably in command of two companies, one of the wings of the five-company force of the 7th Cavalry, that went into battle at the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876. Yates's body, scalped and mutilated, was found down the slope from that of his friend, at the place that has since been known as Custer Hill.21
William F. Robinson, who'd enlisted as a sergeant in the 4th Michigan and left as a captain, also met with violent death in the west shortly after the war. A brief biography of Robinson noted that the young dentist had been in practice with his father in Ohio before the war and had traveled to New Orleans before returning to Michigan and joining the 4th Michigan. After surviving battles and a wound at Gettysburg, Robinson, who preferred the title “Captain” rather than “Doctor,” was reportedly “killed later by Indians at Tucson, Arizona,” according to one history. But a news notice of his death filed with family papers stated Robinson was stabbed to death by a group of Mexicans who jumped him on the night of May 11, 1867. Robinson, on his way to California on a business trip, had stopped in the town to visit a friend serving in the U.S. Army's quartermaster department. The Mexicans had lost a bar brawl in a nearby saloon that night, and once thrown out, decided to get even with the next American they came across. That was Robinson, who had nothing to do with their fight. “He was a worthy young man and esteemed by all who knew him,” a newspaper said of him.22
Albert H. Boies, who had joined the 4th Michigan as a teen from Hudson, lived out most of the rest of his life in his old hometown, working at almost every sort of railroad job and various government inspector positions, too. He enjoyed traveling and for a time appeared with three other veterans in a vaudeville musical act that may have been a kind of reprise of his performance as a cadet who had accompanied the local volunteers to 4th Michigan rendezvous in Adrian back in May 1861. He served as a recruiting officer in both the Spanish-American War and World War I. He also contributed to the historical record of his old regiment by publishing articles, based on his war diaries, in his local newspaper. Boies collected Indian artifacts, outlived his wife, and died at the age of 86 in December 1930. The diary he had in his pocket when a bullet tore into it and knocked him senseless at Malvern Hill remains in the Hudson Museum. “Men are like roosters,” Boies reportedly remarked to President Woodrow Wilson about the inevitability of war. “They will fight and there are a lot of things that they will fight about.”23
Jairus Hall, who'd enlisted in the 4th Michigan in the spring of 1861 and ended up as the colonel of the reorganized regiment, was given the honorary rank of brigadier general for his dedicated service. Hall headed to Colorado in 1866 and became a bank manager, but he was too much an adventurous spirit to stay behind a desk. He also entered the silver-mining business and soon went into it on a full-time basis, developing an operation in a mountain valley that was given his name. He also invested in other mines and served in Colorado's territorial legislature. Hall reportedly won and lost fortunes, risked his life (and nearly lost it) hunting grizzly bears in the Rockies, and became an electrical engineer. He eventually married an old friend's daughter in Jackson, Michigan, where they made their home. Hall outlived her and moved to London, where he died at the age of 63 in November 1903.24
James B. Dickerson, the former sergeant who thought he'd buried Oscar Janes at Petersburg, went home to Hudson after mustering out at the rank of lieutenant from the reorganized 4th Michigan at San Antonio early in 1866. An upstate New York native and family man, Dickerson had served with the original 4th Michigan but mustered out after the Seven Days battle in the summer of 1862. He rejoined with Van Valer's company in 1864. Dickerson survived the last year of the Civil War in Virginia and the terrible illness that plagued the Union soldiers in postwar Texas, but he couldn't outlast the infirmities of old age. In December 1909, he was struck by a freight train at the crossing on the east side of his hometown. Had the 80-year-old veteran been stricken at the train track and unable to move out of the way? Did he not hear its approach? Or had he decided to end his life? “We do not know the why or how,” the hometown paper said of his death, “but surely this must teach us that the God who rules the universe knows best and in the end will make clear all dark things.”25
Harrison Daniels, a young farmer living several miles from Tecumseh when he joined what became Company G in the 4th Michigan in the spring of 1861, returned home after mustering out in 1864. He resumed farming, married, raised a family, and was active in the Grand Army of the Republic and his church. As the years went by he eventually had to give up farming and purchased rental property to support himself and his wife. “He availed himself of every opportunity to impress on the younger generation the thought of Country and God and his services were often sought on Memorial Day and other occasions in the county,” his local newspaper wrote. At the age of 75 he wrote a memoir of his experiences for his family. He lived for several years as a widower and died at the age of 90. In his reminiscence of the Civil War, Daniels fondly remembered and praised his old regimental chaplain, the Reverend John Seage, as a brave and good man, and also his sons, Henry and Richard Watson Seage. Daniels outlived them, but was sure he'd see them again in the next life. They had, he wrote, “all been mustered out into that Grand Army above, and I expect to meet them at that final reunion.”26
Jacob Perine, who told the dramatic story of running from the trees at the edge of the Wheatfield with a wounded arm as his regiment was flanked and surrounded, survived the battles of the last year of the war in Virginia with the 1st Michigan Infantry Regiment and witnessed Lee's surrender. He went home to Michigan and rejoined his family, his father having moved from Tekonsha to the town of Albion during the war. Perine spent most of the rest of his long life there, living to see his 100th birthday and beyond, and to become Albion's last Civil War veteran.
His mind stayed sharp into old age. He enjoyed gardening, hated the New Deal, and voted Republican to the end, wrongly predicting in his 90s that the country had enough of FDR and would turn him out of office in 1936. He didn't like depending on others to read him the newspapers after his eyesight gave out, and he didn't mind listening to the radio to stay up on events, though he admitted he sometimes got disgusted with the playing of “too much jazz music.” He was 102 when he died.27
Edward H. C. Taylor, who had begun the war as a officer, resigned his commission in a feud and spent the rest of his enlistment working his way up to the rank of sergeant major before mustering out in 1864, went home to upstate New York with a wound in his foot. Still a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, according to an account left by a family member, he got into a controversy at home when he spoke his mind and voted in the election that year—apparently against Lincoln and the conduct of the war.
Taylor moved to California after the war, was involved in railroad building, married, and survived his first wife. Then he went on to Portland, where he worked as an auditor for a steamship company. He married the daughter of a businessman and went into the business of shipping grain overseas until a storm wiped out his investments. He moved his family to St. Paul, Minnesota. There he worked as an accountant and railroad auditor. For 25 years after the war, the wound in his right foot, received near Spotsylvania Court House, did not heal as small pieces of bone worked their way out.
“Doesn't that hurt terrible?” one of his children asked.
“Well, it is not too comfortable,” he replied. Taylor told the child that the wound was the reason why he smoked his pipe and two cigars each day—a bad habit, he said, but one that allowed him to tolerate the pain without bothering others. (Of course, when family members later read Taylor's Civil War letters, they realized that he'd been using tobacco before he was wounded.) Taylor led the life of a quiet gentleman and died quietly, sitting in his chair after a Sunday dinner in the summer of 1905. He was 65.28
Orvey S. Barrett, who'd been wounded in the leg at Gettysburg and later wrote a short book about the 4th Michigan, went home, married, and worked as a carpenter until his old wound made him dependent on crutches to get around. Finally the disability meant that he could work no more. Less than three years before his death, he sent a letter to Gettysburg historian John Bachelder, praising his research. In an odd statement in which he said nothing about the mauling the 4th Michigan suffered in the Wheatfield and nearby woods, Barrett claimed that he and his regiment fought at Little Round Top on July 2. Of course, Barrett, like many of his comrades, had been wounded when his regiment was driven across the Wheatfield. According to his own book, he was not on Little Round Top. The 4th Michigan had not fought at that place, but had retreated to it and reformed there as the last Union counterattack was launched that evening, with the fighting coming to a close soon after. Barrett also told Bachelder that he witnessed Pickett's Charge on the next day as he lay in an open, unprotected area with other wounded—again, something at direct odds with his book, in which he said he was in a hospital and heard about developments on July 3 from others.
Barrett died in Adrian in February 1892. “I can see you all as you used to appear on the march, in battle, and in the quiet in camp,” he wrote in a tribute to his comrades in his book about the 4th Michigan. “Your pranks and repartee are fresh in my memory,” he wrote. “You all need to be proud of your record, and the part the glorious old 4th took in suppressing treason. A quarter of a century from now will close the roster for nearly all of us; a much shorter time for myself.” Barrett was correct. Within about five years from the time he wrote those words, he was gone.29
The Reverend John Seage, the tough chaplain of the 4th Michigan shot by guerillas in the spring of 1863, had joined the reorganized regiment as chaplain, but he was soon put to work recruiting and then acting as chaplain for Union forces at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He returned to White Pigeon after the war and also lived in Detroit and St. Louis. But he suffered chronically from asthma and hepatitis; the illnesses finally took his life as he visited his son Richard Watson Seage in Jersey City, N.J., in late November 1883. John Seage died just a few days before his 74th birthday.30
His son Henry S. Seage was discharged from the Union army in September 1864 outside of Petersburg at the completion of his three-year term. During the final three or four months of his service, he worked as a clerk at the First Division's supply depot. Henry Seage went back to Michigan, married, and raised a family, worked in banking (where he was associated with his old comrade, George Maltz) and went into the insurance business; he was a founding town alderman in Alpena. He was bothered by what he and others described as scurvy for the rest of his years, with doctors writing that it was disease of the liver that eventually took his life. He died in Lansing on April 9, 1899.
As did Orvey Barrett, Henry Seage sent a letter to Gettysburg historian Bachelder that cannot be reconciled with the account he recorded in his 1863 diary or with the facts recorded by others. In the letter, he wrote that his brother helped Colonel Jeffords “recapture” the regiment's flag at Gettysburg, though it was torn to pieces; that Jeffords was killed in the struggle; that he found his brother Richard on the battlefield at daylight the next morning; and that he also found Jeffords's body on the way out of the Wheatfield, where it had been left by stretcher bearers who “probably” discovered he was dead. Of course, this version of events is contradicted by the evidence of his own 1863 diary, by the report of his brigade commander, and memoirs, letters, diaries, and accounts of other officers and men who wrote that the flag was lost and that Jeffords actually died at a hospital on the morning of July 3. Henry's 1863 diary stated he that learned that day his brother was brought to the division hospital, clearly indicating that Richard Watson Seage had been carried off the field by others.
Richard Watson Seage survived his wounds, of course, and married a young woman on Staten Island in a ceremony performed by his father in April 1864. They had three children. Richard's medical and pension records show he lost the use of his right hand. He was part of the reorganized 4th Michigan, resided briefly in Franklin, Tennessee, and then Detroit, where he worked as a clerk. But he eventually went back east where his wife's family lived. There he worked for a time as a typewriter inspector. But the effects of his wounds worsened as the years went by, and Seage was eventually declared an “invalid” by the government pension office. He outlived his younger brother and father and died in New Jersey in November 1908. He was buried with his father on Staten Island.31
John Bancroft, the Massachusetts native and architectural draftsman who'd enlisted in Detroit and operated observation balloons for a time during the war, went back east, married, raised a family, and lived out the rest of his life in New Jersey. In 1907, filling out a pension form, Bancroft noted that he was “secretary of the Hammond Typewriter Co.” Bancroft died on July 27, 1918; he was 80 years old.32
Michael Vreeland, the respected young lieutenant from Wayne County badly wounded at Gettysburg, had been made the lieutenant colonel of the reorganized 4th Michigan. He came back home and got married in the spring of 1865. Within a year, with the support of Jairus Hall and Governor Crapo, Vreeland was awarded the brevet rank of colonel and then brigadier general by the U.S. government for his bravery and faithful service. Vreeland was given a posting with the Internal Revenue office after the war, but he continued to suffer from his injuries, particularly the gunshot that had torn through his lung. It never completely healed. The government gave him a job as the lighthouse keeper at Gibraltar, Michigan, on the western end of Lake Erie. He suffered continued illness from his weakened constitution, yet he survived until January 1876, aged beyond his years.
“They tell me his sufferings in his last hours were dreadful to witness, but he did not cough much or strangle from two or three days previously,” wrote his sister Laura; “his mind was perfectly clear.” Vreeland was helped from his bed while it was being made up, and rested in a nearby chair. But when he went back into his bed, he turned pale. According to his sister, the old soldier put his finger on his wrist and realized he was dying. “I have no pulse, Mollie, have I?” he quietly asked his wife.
She felt for his pulse—it must have been so weak as to escape her detection. She hesitatingly replied, “No, Michael, you have not.”
“I am dying now,” he said. “Now all pray for me…” Sadly, the old soldier didn't pass away quietly or quickly, but was wracked with pain in his final hour. But he bade his friends good-bye, looked around for his sister and brother-in-law, who had not yet arrived, and expressed his love for his family. Then he closed his eyes and was gone. In addition to his wife, Vreeland left a young son and a baby daughter. But Vreeland had recounted stories of his war experience to family and specifically to his boy, who would pass them on to his own son.
Vreeland's descendants said that there was an ironic postscript to his story, a kind of testament to Army bureaucracy. As a company commander back in 1863 when he'd barely gotten off the Gettysburg battlefield alive, Vreeland was held accountable for the equipment Company I lost when it was wiped out on the regiment's right in the woods at the edge of the Wheatfield. But because he hadn't been able to fill out the required army equipment reports or returns in a timely fashion, he was held responsible for the loss of 22 Springfield rifles and related equipment—bayonets, scabbards, and other items—amounting to a estimated $373 in 1863 prices. Family historians say that the cost of the lost weapons and equipment was deducted from his pay. Vreeland and then his family attempted to get that money back from the army. As late as 1898, his grandson wrote, Vreeland's widow was still trying to recover the pay he'd been docked for the lost arms.33
Dr. David Chamberlain, the Hudson physician who served as surgeon and assistant surgeon for the 4th Michigan until his health gave out early in 1863, eventually recovered. He left Hudson after having resided there for 16 years, moving his wife, children, and practice to Toledo, Ohio. As he had in Hudson, Dr. Chamberlain was active in civic improvements and Masonic affairs. He remained a member and participant in the regimental association, sometimes serving as president and in other capacities. He was a popular figure and center of attention at reunions for years. “Dr. Chamberlain was a great favorite among the boys, and all have a kind and genial word to say for their old army physician and surgeon,” one newspaper reported. But by the time he was in his late sixties, his health was declining, and he missed reunions for two years. When he made it to the 1895 reunion in Jonesville, the white-haired doctor surprised and delighted his old friends and was the center of attention from the moment he stepped off the train. The next night a large crowd gathered around a campfire in the park to listen him tell of his experiences, “cleaning up the muss” of the soldiers wounded in battle and caring for the sick. The job of an army doctor in war, he said, “was no soft snap.”
Chamberlain wasn't able to attend the regiment's reunions in 1899 and 1900 and sent telegrams to the men he'd taken care of nearly 40 years before, expressing his regret. The old soldiers at the 1899 reunion in Jonesville responded by conveying to him “their best wishes for his kindly remembrance of them.” Chamberlain died in Toledo two months after the 1900 reunion in Palmyra on August 22, just three months short of his 76th birthday.34
Between the reunions of the 4th Michigan association, with all the attending speeches, greetings, remarks, and toasts, the men who served with the regiment must have heard thousands of eloquent words about their battles and losses and their shared experiences. Those who attended the dedication of the Michigan monuments at Gettysburg in 1889 heard even more. Twelve of the men from the regiment who lived in the Hudson area traveled with a handful of younger friends and relatives to the dedication, along with about 30 other 4th Michigan comrades and hundreds of other state veterans. Their hometown newspapers carried accounts of their journey and the dedication of the 4th Michigan's monument, and the speeches and prayer given there were dutifully recorded and published. Lester Salsbury spoke of “the whirlwind of slaughter in the wheatfield,” while Richard Watson Seage read a heroic poem he'd written about Gettysburg. Yet very little of their own thoughts and feelings were reflected in the reporting of that time. “The old soldiers were seemingly carried back over a score of years,” wrote a man who traveled with the Hudson veterans, “to a time when their visit to Gettysburg was not a holiday, when the great battle was fought. Many had recollections like Comrade A[lbert] H. Boies, who carried Michigan roses to place on the grave of his soldier comrade, who died and was buried on the battlefield.” Which of his friends that was Boies didn't say, but he admitted that the ceremony at the Wheatfield was moving. Boies noted that during what he called an impromptu address by Salsbury, “there were few dry eyes among the men who stood upon this same ground 26 years ago and fought for the Union and right.” The ceremony closed with the singing of “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Former lieutenant and quartermaster Robert Campbell said that about 50 members of the regiment gathered around the monument for a group photograph, and that the experience was indeed strange and moving. This was a place where the dead, dying, and wounded had literally covered the ground. “To the remnant of the regiment who again assembled upon this occasion it seemed like the awakening from a dream, the memories of the past, the thoughts of the present, that the war was over and the victory ours,” he wrote. The veterans from Hudson said that they didn't regret attending the dedication, “but of course,” an anonymous writer noted upon their return, “the half of said experience will never be told.” Nor was that Albert Boies's last visit to Gettysburg. He returned again, 24 years later at the 50th anniversary of the battle with his surviving comrades from that area, Ben Westfall, John A. Dillon, Benjamin F. Bush, and Noah Webster, who had long since moved to California but came back to travel with his old friends to the battlefield. They were among a group of about 20 veterans of the 4th Michigan who attended.35
To the veterans of the regiment, these postwar reunions and speeches were fitting remembrance of their service and their sacrifice, since at no point during the war itself, or even at the disbanding of the original 4th Michigan in 1864 had a majority of those survivors ever been honored or feted in their home state. The first group of volunteers had come home from the war in a group of about 150 when their three-year hitch ended in June 1864, and they hadn't been treated as a returning regiment. Others who had joined the regiment later in 1861 returned in the fall of 1864 after having been assigned to the 1st Michigan. Those who had joined later in the war or reenlisted as “Veteran Volunteers” came back from Texas as individuals or in small groups late in 1865 and 1866. And scores of wounded and sick and debilitated soldiers had returned in painful, individual homecomings.
Given this long and varied mustering out of the soldiers of the 4th Michigan, perhaps one of the most memorable salutes came from Moses Luce, the former college student-soldier who had gone on to success as a lawyer and businessman on the West Coast. Luce proudly remembered his service with Company E. Speaking at a Memorial Day service in San Diego's Isle Theater just after the turn of the 20th century, he knew that about half of the men with whom he'd served in the war had died. The survivors, like him, were now old men. “Bright eyes have become dimmed; dark hair had become gray,” he said. “Supple limbs and erect bodies have become stiffened and bent by years of toil and the vicissitudes of time.”36
In his mind, though, Luce still saw a vivid picture of a powerful Union army as he recalled the days of mid-June 1864 when that army was on the move. Though Luce didn't speak of the ambivalence he may have felt with that memory—at that moment in time he had been headed to a last confrontation with Confederates at Petersburg with only a day left to serve in his hitch—he remembered the scene clearly. It was a memory of the 4th Michigan as part of an epic, something larger than life—the Army of the Potomac. They were part of history.
“It was my privilege to stand upon a hillside overlooking the deep waters of the James River,” he told his audience about June 15 and 16, 1864, at Wilcox's Landing. “I saw passing a great army with all the material and equipment of war. I heard the continuous marching tread of its armed men and the roll of its cannon wheels as they crossed the bridge which, in a few hours, had been constructed by its engineers. For three days and nights, it moved towards the enemy. More than a thousand flags and banners streamed above them. Far down the river I could see hundreds of flags flying from the masts of the shipping which brought to this army the material and supplies of war.”
Now when the old soldiers met, there would be no more pomp and pageantry as in the days when they were young, he knew. And although 40 years had gone by, and though he'd seen war and misery and death, it was a powerful picture Luce painted for his audience—the sight and the sound of endless blue columns marching, and transports and vessels moving on the water. Yes, the occasion for his address was to commemorate the dead. But his eulogy was alive with pride and the energy of that moment in 1864, the stunning view from the hillside in the bright morning light—the ranks of men, the James covered with ships, the flags floating on the breeze—a moment when victory had not yet been achieved, but when confidence was high and the Army of the Potomac was on the march with the clatter of hundreds of horses and wagons, the tread of thousands of feet, and the dust clouds rising in the Virginia sky.