The Maltby Brothers' Civil War

Chapter 1. The Reunion

1 The Reunion On December 11, 1863, a United States brigadier general and a Confederate artillery captain met on board the packet steamer Diligent on the Mississippi River below Vicksburg. The steamer had just arrived from New Orleans. The Confederate officer had not come on official business, however; he was a paroled prisoner of war. The two men, born and raised in Ohio, were brothers who had not seen each other in several years, and their reunion would have been an emotional one. An observer might have noticed a physical resemblance —both had dark complexions, black hair, and brown eyes—but the heavily bearded older brother, at five feet, eleven inches tall, was four inches taller than his younger sibling, who favored chin whiskers without a mustache.1 Brig. Gen. Jasper A. Maltby, USA, ca. 1863. (H. Scott Wolfe) Capt. William H. Maltby, CSA, ca. 1864. (Corpus Christi Public Libraries) chapter 1  The brigadier general was thirty-seven-year-old Jasper Adalmorn Maltby from Galena, Illinois, an officer with a distinguished military record. Wounded at Fort Donelson while lieutenant colonel of the 45th Illinois Infantry Regiment and seriously injured as the regiment’s colonel during the assault on Fort Hill at Vicksburg, he had recently been promoted to brigadier general and now commanded a brigade assigned to the Vicksburg Post and Defenses. His younger brother, William Henderson Maltby, twenty-six, from Corpus Christi, Texas, was the captain of a Confederate artillery battery . Three weeks earlier he had been captured with his entire unit and a contingent of Texas state troops at Confederate Fort Semmes on the northern edge of Mustang Island on the Texas coast. After learning that his brother was in New Orleans as a paroled prisoner of war, General Maltby arranged to have him brought to Vicksburg and placed under his charge. While waiting to be exchanged, William was allowed to roam freely throughout the city during daytime hours with passes authorized by the general himself, who also had the garrison’s doctor attend to his brother’s medical needs.2 During the following months, the brothers met frequently, their familial bond overriding their polarized political views. They had much family news to catch up on. Although both had spent their early years in Ashtabula County, Ohio, they had long since gone separate ways. William was only ten years old when his older brother, then twenty, enlisted in the 15th US Infantry at Lower Sandusky, Ohio, on April 21, 1847. The Mexican War was then in progress, and Jasper became a private in the army of General Winfield Scott, known as Old Fuss and Feathers because of his meticulous dress and strict adherence to military protocol. The patriotic young volunteer would have worn his sky blue woolen uniform and dark blue forage cap with its infantry insignia proudly. Trained as a gunsmith, his familiarity with firearms would have given him confidence in the use of his standard armyissued weapon, a muzzle-loading musket. As a private, Jasper received eight dollars a month, although irregularly, and one ration per day. A biographical sketch of Jasper written in July of 1861 includes a brief reference to his Mexican War service: “As a private of the Fifteenth Infantry, U.S.A., under Col. [Joshua] Howard, he followed Gen. Scott in his celebrated campaign from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, participating actively in most of those desperate battles. Such was his good conduct that, though a private soldier, after the battle of Chapultepec (in which he was wounded in the thigh) his name was honorably mentioned in the official account of the battle , and is now on record in the War Department at Washington. This would the reunion  have led to his promotion had not the war ceased.”3 There appears to be some fudging here, since Private Maltby is not included in the official listing of soldiers wounded at Chapultepec—it may have been a minor wound— nor is he mentioned in any of General Winfield Scott’s official reports. Jasper’s Mexican War military records indicate that he was court-martialed on three separate occasions, but the circumstances in those cases remain cloudy. In September of 1847 he was tried by a regimental court-martial for “neglect of duty,” found guilty, and sentenced to the loss of a month’s pay. In May of 1848 a general court-martial found him guilty of “conduct prejudicial to good order...