Fulfilling a Dream: Telling Francis Harris's Civil War Story- Part 1

Greetings, readers! I am about to start a whole new direction in these posts for the near future. I will continue the overall pattern of alternating topics, between ones on American history and ones on environmental subjects. But those on American history, for the near future, will focus on just one subject, and an exciting one, with a remarkable personal back story!

That story goes all the way back to 1998, when I was still relatively new in teaching U.S. History to juniors at my old school, Carolina Friends. One of my students that fall was Jessica Harris, already mainly showing a great talent for dance (a passion she still continues to pursue). My first-term project for the juniors was for them to choose a pre-1900 American primary document (or set of documents), to be researched and turned into a long term paper. Very occasionally (and it was always thrilling!), a student would ask if they could do the paper on documents involving their own ancestors.

In Jessica’s case, her family had a diary and a large set of letters written by one of her great-great-grandfathers, a Union soldier named Francis B. Harris. Francis was a private in the 12th New Jersey Infantry. He was a volunteer, was wounded in the unit’s first major battle (Chancellorsville in 1863), recovered, and served to war’s end (with his younger brother). He moved west after the war, first to Kansas, and in his last years all the way to Long Beach, California (where he died in 1915).

I was very excited, especially when Jessica let me borrow the originals, which had never been transcribed, let alone published. I transcribed a significant number of the letters, but soon I needed to return the documents. Jessica graduated the next year, and for a long time, that seemed to be the end of this story.

Fast forward to the spring of 2022. I met Jessica again at a landmark performance event at the school (to honor her dance teacher, one beloved by generations of students). We talked and she told me that her father, Thomas (Tom), had in his old age in California made it HIS project to fully transcribe, and hopefully publish, his ancestor’s records. He and Jessica had just completed the transcription. Knowing that I was about to retire, she wanted to know if I would be willing to collaborate with her father on the next step, making Francis’s story public. It was an exciting, and perfectly timed, offer for me. She set up a Zoom session (Jessica, her father, and me), and we had a delightful conversation (such an interesting man!!). One of my own great-great-grandfathers was also a Union soldier, and my grandfather had told me stories of his grandfather’s war years when I was a child. I readily agreed to begin the long-distance collaboration. Tom even set aside key research books to be mailed to me.

Sadly, Tom Harris died very soon afterward, at the age of 88. While I very much regret that we didn’t get to work together, his death has made me all the more determined to see his last big project through to the fruition he intended. Jessica sent me the full transcripts (I had never seen the diary), and a big box of his Civil War books, and since last summer I have set out to find out as much as possible about Francis Harris and the 12th New Jersey.

That turns out to be quite a lot. Historians would of course study the Civil War anyhow, but in its case they are uniquely blessed with a mountain of documentation by the soldiers themselves. Many thousands of young men, who would almost certainly have left little written record had they not found themselves in uniform during this nation’s bloodiest (and arguably most momentous) conflict, wrote throughout the war very detailed diaries and letters, often deeply moving, to their loved ones at home. Francis, like countless others, left a beloved wife (Margaret or “Maggie”) and small children back on his Jersey farm, and writing to her practically every week for years was clearly of the highest priority for him. In his case the letters are not just about keeping connected and about sending packages in both directions; they also contain statements of his religious faith and reflections about the cause, including about the role of slavery, a cause for which he was very much putting his life in danger. Harris spoke to his wife about preserving the letters (though unfortunately hers to him don’t seem to have survived): “I do not want to burn your letters but want you to keep them and mine too untill I come home for good. I value them, and, above all you do, keep them.” (Letter 3/15/63) In the specific case of the 12th New Jersey, I have also been blessed to have detailed accounts by two other soldiers of the unit’s actions, and especially to have a comprehensive, indispensable, and engagingly written modern overview of the 12th, published in 1988 (“To Gettysburg and Beyond”, by Edward G. Longacre). As Longacre points out, the 12th was not especially distinguished, or undistinguished, in its role in the Union Army- yet the unsung service of many units like it undoubtedly contributed to victory. No one won a Medal of Honor, but Harris and his comrades did go through two years of combat, including some of the fiercest battles of the war, including Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (which Harris missed), the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, right up to Lee’s surrender in Apr. 1865. Harris himself was wounded, sent home, and returned to his unit, only to be wounded again.

So here’s the plan! Every other post, I will present another chapter in Francis’s story, with selected quotes from his diary and letters, which I will annotate with quotes from other sources and my own commentary. I’m not sure how many installments there will be, but I am thrilled to be able to carry out Tom and Jessica’s “labor of love”, their tribute to their ancestor and to all that his service stood for! I hope that you as readers will likewise be drawn into this story, the way that I have been. Thank you, Tom and Jessica!

Recruiting Poster for 12th New Jersey (July 18, 1862). New York Historical Society.

INSTALLMENT #1- BACKGROUND (Francis Harris’s early life & the origins of the 12th New Jersey):

Harris was born on Jan. 7, 1831, in the small town of Bridgeton, NJ, in the southwest corner of the state. It was a generally quiet corner, composed of flat rich farmland and small bustling towns with early industrial specializations (especially glassworks and ironworks), plus a set of small seaports strung along a long marshy coastline bordering the Delaware Bay and Atlantic, inhabited by fishermen and oystermen. It had been settled by Europeans in the late 1600’s, at the same time as William Penn and the Quakers were founding the nearest big city (Philadelphia) just across the broad Delaware River. The first Harris to arrive in the colony seems to have been in 1725, so the family had clearly been settled in the region for multiple generations before Francis’s birth (his father, John Bunyon Harris, was also a farmer, born in 1808). His mother was Sarah Ann Shriner, born in 1806.

While American society as a whole was just starting its first Industrial Revolution when he was born, it was still overwhelmingly agricultural. The U.S. population was a small fraction of today’s (less than 13 million), but was expanding at a spectacular rate (by the time the 12th entered the Civil War in 1862 it would be just short of 32 million).

The issue that would catastrophically split the country in 1861, the future of slavery, was just beginning to wedge North apart from South when Francis was born, with the rise of the first large-scale abolitionist movement, alongside the peak boom years of the antebellum Cotton South. South Jersey would find itself very close to the geographic fault line for the slavery issue. New Jersey itself was one of the last in the North to free its slaves, though there slavery was beginning its decline in the 1830’s. Indeed, because of an apprenticeship system designed, under the Gradual Abolition Act of 1804 (amended in 1846), to keep slave labor as long as possible, there would still be a handful of people enslaved when the 12th New Jersey was formed in 1862 (which coincided with the Emancipation Proclamation)! Across the Delaware River to the northwest was Pennsylvania, with Massachusetts one of the two states most active in the abolitionist movement, and the city with the largest free black community in the country (Philadelphia). And to the west and southwest, across the famous Mason-Dixon Line, was Delaware, which still had legal slavery (though, like New Jersey, never in large numbers). All of this meant that Francis Harris’s home region was a very active part of the famous Underground Railroad for smuggling escaped slaves northward (given its location, its significant abolitionist Quaker population, and its frequent boat and ship traffic between North and South). In a clear sign of the region's loyalty, South Jersey alone would, from 1861 to 1865, send 77,000 of its young men into Union service.

There are few details about Francis’s life before his volunteering for the military. As well as his brother and fellow soldier Robert, he had two other full brothers and three full sisters. He also had a large set of half-siblings. The only clue to his education is that in one of his letters (9/6/1862) he says: “thanks to my parents who taught me to write”. At one point he notes that he and Maggie are “poor” (Letter 1/31/64). We know from his hospital discharge certificate in 1865 that he was 5’ 6’’ as an adult, with blue eyes and brown hair. He grew up in the village of Pittsgrove, and met his wife there. Margaret Trapper was born in Germany in 1828, and married her first husband James A. Gibson in nearby Mullica Hill in 1849. It’s not clear what happened to James. Francis expresses love for Maggie throughout his writings and refers nostalgically to their courtship. They married in 1856. Their first child died in infancy (all too common in their time period; they would lost another child after the war). Their surviving children at the time of the Civil War were: Brenner (known as “Brennie”), born in 1859 (and Tom and Jessica's ancestor); Elwood (known as “Cellie” or “Clellie”), born in 1862; and Henry Gibson (the last two are not mentioned on findagrave.com, which has the information for Francis’s grave, so they may have died in childhood too). Another son who would survive to adulthood, Wilbert, would be born after the war in 1871.

The most definable part of Francis’s personality, other than his clear love for his family, is his Protestant faith. It’s not clear which church he belonged to, but he came of age right after what is known as the Second Great Awakening (a great surge of Protestant fervor throughout the nation from the late 1790s to mid-1830’s). In his case, he makes frequent comments (at least early in the letters and diary) to the devotion, or lack of it, in fellow soldiers (frequently passing judgment on them accordingly!), and he attends church services and prayer meetings. As so many would do in the war, he connects it to his belief in “God who made me an Abolitionist a Unionist, a Christian, a Husband, and Father [who] will preserve us. In him I trust, and in him I center all my hope; and believe through him we shall do well, when this as the poet says “Cruel War is over”.” (Letter 4/9/1863- the last is a quote from a popular war song). His faith would become increasingly important as he went through a formidable set of trials: many months of separation from family, many battles, long stretches of hospitalization for his wounds, and the steady loss of many close friends.

The key events leading to the outbreak of the Civil War are well known, and I will not go into detail here: the rise of the antislavery Republican Party in the late 1850’s; the election of the first Republican, Lincoln, to the Presidency in 1860; and the rapid secession of Southern states, unifying as the “Confederate States of America”, with the stated aim of preserving slavery, in early 1861. Francis was not part of the first wave of volunteers who joined for three-month enlistments when the war began in April; he also wasn’t in the wave of three-year enlistments that followed the first major battle (1st Bull Run in July 1861). Instead the 12th New Jersey formed, and he joined, at a moment of great crisis for the Union cause. There was a real chance of Union victory when the massive Army of the Potomac, under George McClellan, approached the Rebel capital of Richmond in the spring of 1862. Instead the Confederates rallied under a new leader, Robert E. Lee, who carried out fierce attacks that demoralized McClellan and caused him to order a series of retreats. Lee and his right hand, “Stonewall” Jackson, then went on to a further major victory at Second Bull Run. Soon, in Aug. 1862, Lee and Jackson would embark on the first Confederate invasion of the North, crossing into western Maryland.

Lincoln was forced by these reverses to consider the momentous decision of declaring full-scale emancipation of slaves within the Confederacy, and he responded by issuing a call in July and August 1862 for 300,000 9-month and 3-year volunteers. It was in that context that the farmers, laborers and shopkeepers of southwest New Jersey would form the 12th New Jersey Infantry. As was typical for the war, it was a regionally-based regiment (a unit that typically started with about 1,000 soldiers and staff). The number was based on when it joined the list of the state’s units. The 12th began with “mustering in” on Aug. 1 at a training camp in the centrally-located town of Woodbury, close to railroad transportation. Its members, 39 officers and 953 enlisted, clearly started off with a great deal of enthusiasm. Also typically, it was first commanded by an already prominent politician, Robert C. Johnson of Salem, NJ, clearly qualified (!) as its first colonel because of his prior service in a 3-month unit (he would be long gone before the unit’s first major combat). Hardly anyone, officer or enlisted, had any prior military experience.

A brief word about the sources for all that will come next. Besides the Harris records and Longacre’s excellent secondary history, I will be using a diary by James Kiger, a company clerk and sergeant (unpublished- preserved in the Gilder Lehrman Collection), and the letters of Private Charles W. Gamble (published as a slim book recently, with brief editorial commentary by John Larry Flinchpaugh). Kiger and Harris did know each other, at least slightly; there’s a wonderful quote from Harris about the letter-writing process in winter camp: “I thought his introduction to his letter good. He thought the same of my letter. So it goes. We often read the other’s letters. It is the same with Smith and I, and him and Joe. The same intimacy exists between us three as when at home. Segarent Kiger is on another side of the candle writing in his diary. He got a few days behind. He has my journal to look at for assistance. I keep mine up with the time. When I get it full I want to have it sent home.” (Letter 1/3/63) I am very excited about the Gamble letters, which I just discovered, as they are just about the only source (other than Harris) not mentioned by Longacre. And a brief note on specifics. The base unit of a Civil War unit was the “company”: about 100 men at the start. They were known by letters (Harris was in Company A), and were the true social framework for soldiers (I have carefully recorded all of the people mentioned by Harris, and he hardly ever mentions anyone outside A in his many documents, for over 2 years, other than of course the unit’s top officers). To give another illustration, another private, William Haines, wrote an entire thick book just on his Company F- likewise never mentioning Harris (other than in the overall unit roster)! Kiger was also in A (but was invalided out early in the unit’s story), while Gamble was in Co. D (he would die of disease in Jan. 1864).

Francis Harris starts his diary on Aug. 11, 1862, when he records his arrival by train at the training camp. He’s very casual: “Pleasant day, twenty six volunteers left…Upper Pittsgrove Salem Co. New Jersey after a good dinner; volunteers in Captain L. L. Chase’s Company twelveth regiment New Jersey Vol. and proceeding by railway from Pittstown to Camp Stockton near Woodbury Gloucester Co. N. J. where we arrived at 9 oclock P. M.” Not even a mention of a farewell from his family! The next few weeks were the period of the unit’s assembling, equipping, and initial training. Francis Harris went to Philadelphia to get photographed in his new uniform (unfortunately no wartime pictures of him seem to have survived). But what those who left records were interested in most was two things: first, a set of large-scale formal banquets, with thousands present and lots of home-cooked delicacies from local women (plus the presentation of swords to officers, and of the regiment’s flag); and second, getting their first pay! Each county added a bounty to the meager federal pay ($13 a month for a private); those from Salem Co., like Harris, got $30 (they were jealous of other counties which offered $50!). For comparison, the wage for a skilled worker at the time (the war was also causing inflation) would have been about $3 a day. On Sept. 4, 1862, a Regular Army (i.e. professional) officer, Capt. Royall, appeared to swear the unit into three years of U.S. service- the men then collected a federal bounty (another $25), and entered their names (most were literate) on the muster rolls. No time to waste- at that very moment Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was invading- crossing the Potomac River into the Union state of Maryland!

That’s all for this first Harris installment! A reminder that the next post will have an environmental theme- this time about Chinese wildlife! After that, my 2nd Civil War installment will see Harris and the 12th New Jersey travel to duty close to the war zone, to a slave state, where they will receive their final training before their first major battle, Chancellorsville. Hope you’ll keep reading!!