Vett Noble of Ypsilanti: A Clerk for General Sherman

VETT NOBLE OF YPSILANTI: A Clerk for General Sherman Edited by Donald W. Disbrow Sylvester ("Vett") Noble of Ypsilanti, Michigan, was a lowly and sometimes impudent clerk in the Union army. The home town people disappointed him in being less concerned with him than he thought they should be. Yet, in the youthful outpourings he sent to his family he managed to record shrewd observations of the kaleidoscopic wartime scene; and he proved to be not unimportant after all, for he just happened to be one of William T. Sherman's few headquarters clerks during his campaign in the Carolinas in 1865. Because Private Noble of Ypsilanti had a happy flair for capturing quite well the nuances in both army and home relationships in a time of great national tragedy, his letters are much more than the boastful yawps of a lonesome nobody in uniform. For in them he discerned the major issues of the Civil War, and he could do so all the better as he himself grew from an immature army goldbrick to a proudly seasoned though still lowly functionary on the spot where important history was being made.1 As was certainly typical of most volunteer soldiers, Vett Noble belonged to a family that was almost totally unfamiliar with military life. Before Sylvester, the only ancestor with any military service at all was Captain Thaddeus Noble, who was an armorer in a Connecticut regiment during the French and Indian War. So, without doubt, the Noble clan was eager enough to get all the details from their son, the first member of the family in more than a century to shoulder arms and march off to the defense of his country.2 His father, Alonzo Miletus Noble, born in 1817 in Otisco, New York, was too old for Civil War service, and consequently devoted himself to the daguerreotype business in Ypsilanti. He also ran a livery stable and seems to 1 Dates of Noble's letters not given in the text are footnoted. Unless the name of another respondent is furnished, all citations refer to letters written eitiher to Noble's mother, Elizabeth Stone Noble, or to his sister, Irene Elizabeth ("Dott") Noble, or to botih (he wrote most of the letters to his mother). The Sylvester C. Noble Papers belong to the Ypsilanti City Historical Museum. 2 Lucius M. Boltwood, History and Genealogy of the Family of Thomas Noble of Westfield, Massachusetts (Hartford, Conn., 1878), p. 387. 15 16CIVIL WAR HISTORY have made enough money to purchase a new house and barn, a result of improved business conditions and the profits he received from the horses and mules he sold to the army. He made money, too, from his daguerreotypes, in sharp demand from families who wanted likenesses for absent husbands, sons, and brothers during the war. Vett Noble's volunteer enlistment papers describe him as twenty years old; a farmer by occupation; five feet, ten inches in height; with black eyes and black hair. The medical officer who examined him signed a statement that "[he] in my opinion is free from all bodily defects and mental infirmity." Noble was mustered into the 14th Michigan Infantry at Ypsilanti on February 13, 1862, and apart from detached service, he remained with the regiment until it was mustered out of service on July 18, 1865, at Louisville, Kentucky.3 Young Noble showed a healthy interest in telling his family all about the army. In the early months of his service he was quite fascinated with the subject of army discipline, or rather the lack of it and he was proud of those instances when he was able to outwit the military system. Only a few days after Ulysses S. Grant's standoff with the Rebel forces at Shiloh, the 14th Michigan reached the battle site. Vett sat down in the field a mile and a half from enemy troops to tell his family about Brigadier General John Pope's unaccountably harsh reaction to soldierly high jinks. The boys find that to do any thing against orders is harder dealt with here, than in the old barracks. Gen Pope ordered that no soldiers must shoot off his gun in camp...