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

“He Was Generally Broke Down”

65 “He Was Generally Broke Down” Edward McAtee remembered his military service with pride, and his Civil War experience was one of the last things he spoke about before he died. During the evening of November 16, 1871, suffering intense pain from injuries sustained after he was thrown from his buggy while delivering mail nine days earlier, he sat in his rocking chair and reminisced about the war with a neighbor and fellow veteran. McAtee may have repeated lines from a letter he had written earlier that year, in which he declared, “I did not stand back when Uncle Sam wanted men,” and “I gave my best days to the Government through two wars, in Mexico and the late war.”99 In 1846,McAtee,a Jefferson County,Illinois, blacksmith,signed up as a private in the state’s Third Infantry. He saw limited action with the regiment during the Mexican War. After the Third’s oneyear term expired in 1847, he went home and married. At the start of the Civil War, McAtee was a fifty-one-year-old father of five with a blacksmith shop and small farm. In late 1861, motivated by patriotism or perhaps by a desire to recapture his youth, he enlisted as a private in the Sixtieth Illinois Infantry with boys thirty years his junior. He remained in the ranks only a short time, for he was soon detailed as a hospital steward, serving in that capacity until Christmas 1862, when Company B elected him to be its new first lieutenant. His tenure with the company lasted less than one month. On January 15, 1863, McAtee became ill after a fatiguing march through rain and snow from Nashville to Shoal Creek, Tennessee. Exposure to the elements aggravated his rheumatism, and diarrhea weakened him to the point where he “was not able to perform the duties of his rank properly.”100 He was sent back to the 66 1st Lt. Edward A. McAtee, Company B, Sixtieth Illinois Infantry Carte de visite by Theodore M. Schleier (life dates unknown) of Nashville, Tennessee, about 1864 67 regimental hospital—this time as a patient. Eventually ordered to the Officer’s General Hospital on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, he resigned his commission from there in December 1864. He returned home in feeble condition—his wife described him as being “generally broke down.” His poor health prevented him from blacksmithing, so he found less strenuous work as a mail carrier. He deteriorated quickly during the week following his buggy accident in 1871. McAtee’s friend helped him to bed after they finished reminiscing, and the neighbor left for his adjoining farm. He “had been at home but a short time when I heard his folks holler, and in a short time I went over and he was dead.”101 ...