Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories

“I Was Carried from the Field Utterly Helpless”

47 “I Was Carried from the Field Utterly Helpless” In the late afternoon of September 17, 1862, at Sharpsburg, Maryland, a rebel artillery shell hissed as it rocketed through the air over the battle-scarred landscape near the Stone Bridge, a focal point of the day’s horrific battle.Seconds later, it slammed into the ground near the edge of a field and exploded a few yards from Capt. Sam Oliver, who was standing with the remnants of his regiment , the Thirty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry, which had just lost more than two hundred men and officers in bloody fighting. According to Oliver, “At or about six p.m. or it may have been a little earlier in the day, when nearly and safely through that terrible day, by the explosion of a shell, a fragment of which cut a piece from my hat, another fragment nearly severing my badge of rank from my left shoulder, I was thrown violently backwards against a stone wall or batch of large rocks, rendering me for a while insensible . I was carried from the field utterly helpless. From a hospital I was placed, in a day or two, in the railroad train and with a legion of others wounded was sent to Washington and there ordered home. My limbs were entirely useless, but with the help of crutches and two soldiers I reached my home at Salem.”79 His spine was injured and his legs paralyzed. A few months before his injury, he had resigned under pressure from his first unit, the Fourteenth Massachusetts Infantry,80 which he had joined a year earlier with a lieutenant colonel’s commission . The Fourteenth’s colonel, William Greene,81 found Oliver “of no use” to the regiment, believing: “that he has not (and never has had) the least idea of the duties of his position, that the Regiment can get along better without him than with him, and that it would be for the interest of the service if he should be honorably discharged at the earliest convenient moment.”82 Oliver resigned 48 Lt. Col. Samuel C. Oliver, Second Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Carte de visite by unidentified photographer, about 1862 49 in March 1862 and reenlisted as captain in the newly formed Thirty-fifth Infantry in August. He made a positive impression on his new colonel, Edward Wild,83 who wrote, “I had such entire confidence in him, that I twice offered him the Colonelcy of a Colored regiment. At that time we were still hoping for his complete recovery. But he felt obliged to decline the offer, or to postpone the acceptance of it.” Oliver never accepted the offer, but, encouraged by the return of movement to his legs,he shed his crutches for a cane and joined the Second Massachusetts Heavy Artillery as its major. In January 1865, he applied for a commission in the Veteran Reserve Corps, but an examination board turned him down after a routine evaluation found him deficient in military knowledge and ability. He served his term of enlistment in the Second Massachusetts in North Carolina and ended the war in command of a battalion station at Fort Fisher. He left the army at the end of 1865 with a colonel’s brevet for gallant and meritorious service and returned to his family and the carpentry business. He never regained the full use of his legs, despite a multitude of treatments over a twenty-year period, including specially designed braces and electric shock therapy. He died of bronchitis in 1888 at age sixty-one. ...