This faded photograph is of Oneil Savant, wife Eliza, and sons Jean Baptiste and Louis, taken in about 1874. By then he was “in indigent circumstances” and blind. The picture was contributed to his Findagrave memorial by Ethel Sacker.
He was a farmer in St. Landry Parish before the war and enlisted in 1861 at age 17 or 18. As a Corporal in the 8th Louisiana Infantry, Savant was wounded and captured at Sharpsburg in September 1862. He returned to duty in October 1863 only to be captured and a prisoner again, from November to near the end of the war.
This lovely picture of General William Edwin Starke is among the Images from the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans.
Starke was one of six General officers killed or mortally wounded at Sharpsburg.
A Crimean War veteran of the Royal Army, Thomas Rice was a Captain in the First Louisiana Infantry by July 1862.
He should be much more famous than he is. At the railroad cut at Second Manassas on 30 August 1862, after his men had shot off all their ammunition …
Nothing but a great quantity of rock was lying around, broken in fragments of moderate size as they had been blasted when the railroad was building. Captain Rice drew upon his experience in Crimea. He recalled that battle with stones fought in a rock quarry at Inkerman, close to the Redan – one of the bulwarks of Sebastopol – which had now come to him like a flash, born of the need. Quick as the thought, Rice picked up a piece of rock, and calling out loudly “Boys, do as we did at Sebastopol,” hurled the first stone … The company, the regiment – even other commands of the brigade – followed with more stone, pelting the enemy savagely … Excellent work was done with these rocks … Some of the enemy crawled up the bank and voluntarily surrendered themselves to escape the deadly stoning.
He led his Company at Sharpsburg in September and was wounded in the hip there. He was wounded twice more – at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, where he was left for dead – but survived the war to return home to New Orleans.
Above is a page about him in The Lost Cause: A Confederate War Record, Vol. 10, No. 1 (August 1903). The quote here is from Volume X of the Confederate Military History (1899).
Corporal Franklin Gardner [15th Mass Infantry] was one of the ‘color guard,’ and at the battle of Antietam, Sept. 17th, took up the colors from the third color bearer, who had been shot dead at his side. He received three balls; the first passed through a limb, the second through his thigh, the third in his stomach. Regardless of these wounds he managed to keep the flag waving until the next guard took it. From Wednesday morning, Sept. 17th, until Friday morning of the same week, he lay within the enemy’s lines …
He died of his wounds in Washington, DC on 6 October 1862.
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The quote above and his picture are from William A. Emerson’s Leominster: Historical and Picturesque (1888).
19 year old Private Clarence Byron Pratt of the Minden Blues – Company G, 8th Louisiana Infantry – was wounded in action at Sharpsburg in September 1862 and captured there. He was exchanged and furloughed home in November but never returned to his Company. In October 1863 he enlisted in a State Guard cavalry unit, but was captured in Louisiana in November, and spent the rest of the war in Federal prisons.
He started a newspaper in Minden, LA and was elected to the state legislature in 1868, but he tangled with County Judge and former Minden Blues Captain John L Lewis in the press and in the capitol, and Lewis’ son Robert shot Pratt in a duel in August 1868. Pratt died in December 1869 at age 27. His cause of death is not known, but his dueling wound may have contributed.
This excellent photograph of Pratt in uniform was contributed to his Findagrave memorial by Edward Wenzell.
