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

Wounded and Captured at Bull Run

7 Wounded and Captured at Bull Run On October 23, 1893, in a hotel room near the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Marcus Conant writhed in agony, unable to speak. He soon slipped into unconsciousness, but before doing so he used his hands to communicate to a doctor that he was experiencing excruciating pain in his head, behind the right ear. Ten hours later, he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, a day shy of his fifty-first birthday. He had traveled to Chicago a week earlier from his home outside Jacksonville, Florida, to visit the World’s Fair and also to seek treatment for impaired hearing and vertigo, both conditions resulting from a head wound received thirty-two years earlier at the First Battle of Bull Run. In July 1861, Pvt. Conant and his regiment, the Eleventh Massachusetts Infantry, had been in reserve near Manassas, Virginia. But on the 21st, after its brigade battery had been crippled by enemy fire, the Eleventh marched in with the Fifth Massachusetts Infantry to get the guns out. According to brigade commander Col. William Franklin,8 the regiments “were slightly exposed to the fire of the enemy’s battery on the left, and were consequently thrown into some confusion. This was shown by the difficulty of forming the Eleventh Regiment, and by wild firing made by both regiments .”9 After three failed attempts to save the cannon, Franklin reported,the regiments “retired in confusion, and no efforts of myself or staff were successful in rallying them.”10 During the attempt to reclaim the guns, Conant went down with a gunshot wound in the head, possibly caused by wild firing of the Massachusetts troops, and was captured. He spent a year in rebel prisons at Columbia , South Carolina, and Salisbury, North Carolina, then received a parole and rejoined the army as a private in the Third 8 1st Lt. Marcus Conant, Company B, Third Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Carte de visite by Mathew B. Brady (b. ca. 1823, d. 1896) of New York City and Washington, D.C., about 1865 9 Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, where he ended his military service in late 1865 as a first lieutenant. His head wound healed, leaving a scar four inches long, a halfinch wide, and, in places, as much as a half-inch deep, extending from the top of his right ear back to the occipital lobe at the base of the skull. Partial deafness and vertigo were his constant companions . He and his wife, Ellen, were married in 1867 in New Jersey and settled in Florida in 1876. They were parents of two children. The younger, Marcus Jr., was eleven at the time of his father’s death. ...