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

Escorting Rebel Prisoners after Gettysburg

112 Pvt. Hiram H. Davis, Company F., Twentieth Veteran Reserve Corps Carte de visite by I. S. Parker (life dates unknown) of St. Albans, Vermont, about 1862 113 Escorting Rebel Prisoners after Gettysburg Pvt. Hiram Davis saw his first Confederate prisoner near Frederick , Maryland, in July 1863. More than a thousand sick and wounded rebels, captured in Pennsylvania with their ambulances and baggage wagons as they withdrew from Gettysburg, were sent to the Maryland camp where Davis and a detachment from his regiment, the Tenth Vermont Infantry, waited to escort them North. “Dirty looking men they were. . . . Some of them were badly wounded and in a dying condition,” recalled the regimental historian.170 By the end of his assignment Davis would be in as bad a state as the prisoners he was ordered to guard. Davis, who was living with his widowed father and three brothers in Fairfax, Vermont, when the war began, was the first in his family to join the army, enrolling in the Tenth in July 1862, a week shy of his seventeenth birthday. His brothers signed up in 1864; two enlisted in the First Vermont Heavy Artillery and the third was rejected after failing a physical exam.171 Davis made a favorable impression on his company’s captain, who later wrote, “You have always been a good soldier ever ready to do your duty when called upon.”172 The regiment served primarily on patrols along the Potomac River in Maryland and Virginia during its first year, and Davis and his company were among the troops detailed to escort captured Confederates from Gettysburg to Union prison camps. “It was with a sort of pleasure, although mingled with pity, that our men marched them off, such as could move, to the depot, where they put them aboard cars . . . and took them to Baltimore ,”173 wrote the regimental historian. The train ride was uneventful , but the return march, through intense July heat, proved too much for young Davis. “I was sunstroke insensible for hours,” 114 he recalled, “I was attended in person by the surgeon of my regiment , Almon Clark,174 a dear, dear man, for he saved my life, and helped me along by putting me on to his own orderly’s horse till we went into camp.”175 Davis never regained his health; his effective military service was over. He spent the next two years in Washington, D.C., hospitals, suffering from a variety of ailments, including malaria, measles, and chest pains. In January 1864, he transferred to the Veteran Reserve Corps, but his illnesses prevented him from joining his new regiment and he was discharged because of disability in the summer of 1865. He enrolled in the Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, but dropped out after a short time and drifted from job to job until 1868, when he married and settled in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. In the 1880s he owned and operated a meat and provisions market, and later he worked as a machinist. His wife died in 1909, and he succumbed to heart disease in 1930 at age seventy-five. His son, Herbert, survived him. ...