Faces of the Confederacy: An Album of Southern Soldiers and Their Stories

Cartes de Visite

1 Faces of the Confederacy cartes de visite 2 Capt. Richard Curzon Hoffman, Company E, Thirtieth Battalion Virginia Sharpshooters Carte de visite published by Selby & McCauley of Baltimore, Maryland, from a negative by Stephen Israel (life dates unknown) & Co. of Baltimore, about 1865. Collection of The Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia. 3 Three Cheers from the Baltimoreans Soon after the start of the war, newly organized volunteers converged on Camp Lee, near Richmond, Virginia, to muster into the army as the Twenty-first Virginia Infantry. On June 21, 1861, the two companies that would form the heart and soul of the regiment met for the first time: Company B, a select group of Baltimore’s cultural and financial elite, welcomed Company F, an old militia organization composed of the crème de la crème of Richmond society. The Baltimoreans gave the Richmonders three hearty cheers.6 Company B’s officer corps included 1st Lt. Richard Hoffman , the son of a prosperous merchant of German ancestry. His mother gave birth to him in the family’s Baltimore mansion, and he attended private schools in the city and became a successful stockbroker.7 He joined a company in the Maryland Guard Battalion , a militia unit formed in Baltimore in 1859. In the wake of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, fifty-six of the sixty-eight members resigned and left for Virginia with Hoffman in command , and Company B was dissolved. The men took part of the company name with them, re-forming as the Maryland Guard Company in May 1861. They became the only Maryland-based company in the otherwise all-Virginia Twenty-first Infantry. Their unique uniforms, influenced by the fancy Zouave style, reinforced their out-of-state distinction.8 The Marylanders signed up for a one-year enlistment in the Twenty-first. They spent most of their time in the Shenandoah Valley, where they saw little action, and left the regiment after their term expired. Many of the men were recruited for an allsharpshooters unit; Hoffman signed on as captain and head of Company E of the Thirtieth Battalion Virginia Sharpshooters. 4 Capt. Hoffman spent significant amounts of time away from his new command. Military authorities detached him for a variety of duties, including recruiting, hunting for deserters, and serving on a board of courts martial. He tendered his resignation in February 1865. Gen. Robert E. Lee refused to accept it, and he remained in the army for two more months.9 After the war, Hoffman returned to Baltimore and entered the coal business, opening his own firm in 1875. Among his other business interests was the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, and in 1877, a stop along a new rail line in Western Maryland was named for him. It attracted a small population, and the following year the fledgling community established a post office . Hoffman, Maryland, later became an incorporated town. In 1893, he assumed the presidency of the railroad company. During his two-year tenure in that post, he successfully fought a hostile takeover attempted by J. P. Morgan and a group of New York businessmen. In 1880, at age forty-one, Hoffman married and started a family that grew to include six children. He belonged to several social clubs and Confederate veterans’ groups. He lived until the age of eighty-six, dying in 1926.10 5 He Defended His Hometown Second Lieutenant Peter McEnery Jr. was an anomaly in the Twelfth Virginia Infantry. He was a factory manager in Petersburg before the war, and men of his occupation rarely became officers. The class-conscious men in the regiment frowned upon the workers he supervised in civilian life as belonging to “a distinct and definitely lower social class,” according to a regimental historian.11 McEnery, the eldest of four children raised by Peter Sr., an immigrant from Limerick, Ireland, and his Virginia-born wife, Dorothy, grew up in Petersburg.12 The elder McEnery prospered as a slaveholding tobacco merchant with clients in the North and Great Britain. He conducted his business from a large factory , and Peter Jr. ran its daily operations. The young man also served as a first sergeant in the Petersburg City Guard, a militia company noted for being part of the security detail present at the hanging of John Brown in 1859.13 Soon after the start of the war, McEnery’s militia company elected him second lieutenant and merged into the...