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

Yielded Up His Life

95 Yielded Up His Life Anna Rhoads found herself short on cash and stranded in Nashville, Tennessee. She was traveling home to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on a grim errand—bringing back the body of her husband, 1st Lt. Amos Rhoads, who had been killed a month earlier at Shelbyville, Tennessee. On June 27, 1863, Rhoads and his regiment, the Seventh Pennsylvania Cavalry, had received orders to attack entrenchments in front of Shelbyville. A Confederate private witnessed the action and gave this account: “On either side of the highway, in columns of fours, they advanced at a steady gallop, until they passed into the opening in the line of earth works, through which the main road led, some two or three hundred yards in our advance. As soon as they reached this point inside the works, still on the full run, they deployed from columns of fours into line of battle, like the opening of a huge fan.”139 The troopers came on, “with sabers high in air, made no sound whatever, beyond the rumbling tattoo which their horses’ hoofs played upon the ground.”140 At fifty yards the rebels opened fire, then fled. A detachment of 225 men from the Seventh Pennsylvania, including Rhoads, received orders to pursue the retreating rebels into Shelbyville, where a thousand Confederates, with four cannon, had massed. The Seventh, supported by two infantry regiments that attacked along side streets, blasted into town and forced most of the rebels to surrender or retreat . But a pocket of determined enemy troops remained holed up in the railway station and an adjacent structure. Rhoads and his company attacked the station from behind to force them out. In the ensuing melee, four enlisted men and two officers were shot down and killed, including Rhoads; but the assault was a success, and the commander of the Seventh, Col. William Sipes,141 praised 96 1st Lt. Amos B. Rhoads, Company B, Seventh Pennsylvania Cavalry Carte de visite by Mathew B. Brady (b. ca. 1823, d. 1896) of New York City and Washington, D.C., about 1862–1863 97 the men who had “yielded up their lives as gallantly as ever soldiers fell in a cause.”142 In Nashville, Brig. Gen. Walter Whitaker143 heard about Mrs. Rhoads’s predicament and arranged for her to have free transportation home, where she laid her husband to rest.144 Two years later, she married a veteran. She died in 1935 at age ninety-three and was buried beside her second husband in Arlington National Cemetery. ...