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

From Commissary to Combat

158 1st Lt. Aaron Hunt Ingraham, Company C, Forty-eighth New York Infantry Carte de visite by unidentified photographer, about 1861 159 From Commissary to Combat On July 18, 1863, the Forty-eighth New York Infantry lost more than half its men in an ill-fated assault on Fort Wagner, a rebel stronghold guarding Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. Its total casualties were second only to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, and among the killed was 1st Lt. Robert Edwards260 of Company C. Acting regimental quartermaster Aaron Ingraham filled his position. This was Ingraham’s first field assignment since joining the regiment almost two years earlier. Aaron Ingraham had lived a life of borderline poverty before the war. The twenty-two-year-old bachelor had eked out a living on a fifty-acre farm with his parents and three siblings in Amenia,261 New York, a small village near the northwestern corner of Connecticut. The family could not make ends meet by farming alone, and Aaron, the eldest child, worked other jobs to supplement the meager monies derived from the farm. One winter, he taught school to get the family through the cold months. He kept some money for clothes and turned over the rest to his father. In August 1861, he started a new job—as corporal in the Forty-eighth Infantry—and sent his pay home regularly. So well was he performing as acting regimental quartermaster that, when he was promoted and slated for field duty, six months passed before his superiors released him from his administrative duties. On June 1, 1864, at Cold Harbor, Virginia, the quartermasterturned -combat officer led his company into battle for the first time. The Forty-eighth arrived late in the afternoon and was directed into nearby woods—the soldiers assumed they were to make camp. But a half-hour later, the regiment was ordered, with its brigade, to attack. The Forty-eighth fixed bayonets, charged across a field into woods—and into abandoned rebel rifle pits. 160 “Here the men stopped, and commenced firing; but a lull in the fire of the enemy enforced the order to move forward, and in little more time than it takes to write it we had captured and occupied a section of the main line of Confederate works.”262 Ingraham never made it to the main line—he was shot dead at the rifle pits, in the “very moment of victory.”263 His career as a combat officer lasted a few minutes. His comrades buried his body on the battlefield. ...