Civil War for the day

Ronald Coddington is the author of Faces of the Civil War and Faces of the Confederacy; a forthcoming book profiles the lives of men of color who participated in the Civil War. He writes Faces of War, a column for Civil War News, and has this article in The New York Times about the first Battle of Bull Run:

Two days after the momentous victory of Southern arms at the Battle of Bull Run, the first train crowded with Union prisoners of war rolled into Richmond, Virginia. A motley crew of bedraggled federals poured out of the cars. Curious citizens buzzed with excitement as guards marched the men through the Confederate capital.
Among the estimated 630 captives who shuffled through the streets were Alfred Ely, a congressman and a battlefield spectator, and Michael Corcoran, the Irish-born colonel of the 69th New York State Militia Infantry. The crowds packed in to see the two prize captures. But more representative of the hundreds of rank and file on the grim march was Marcus Conant, a fresh-faced boy who hailed from Massachusetts. Conant, 18, was the sole survivor of twins born to a barrelmaker and his wife in Westford, Massachusetts, a bustling community not far from the factory town of Lowell. When the war started, Conant left his job as a brass worker and enlisted in the Boston Volunteers, which formally mustered into the army as the 11th Massachusetts Infantry. Conant and his fellow soldiers, a thousand muskets strong, arrived in Washington on 3 July and paraded along Pennsylvania Avenue. “Unquestionably one of the finest regiments that has yet marched through the avenue,” reported a Washington newspaper. “May they be beaten, not on the battle field, but by the arrival of another regiment even more magnificent— if it can be done.”
Three weeks later, the 11th went into action at Bull Run. It faced intense fighting after the Confederates seized an artillery battery commanded by Captain James B. Ricketts and the regiment tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to take it back. “Our men threw themselves forward bravely, and when, after twice charging on the enemy’s batteries and were driven back, we fell back,” one soldier reported.
At some point during the engagement, a musket ball struck Conant in the head. According to a surgeon, the bullet “entered just back of the right ear injuring the ear and ploughing its way through beneath the skin and through the outer table of the skull making its exit at the external occipital protuberance.” The gunshot left a bloody trough four inches long. He suffered a complete loss of hearing in the affected ear. Conant may have been accidentally shot by one of his comrades— a victim of friendly fire. Colonel William B. Franklin, who commanded the brigade to which the 11th belonged, acknowledged in his official report that men in the rear ranks, unnerved by the fighting, sometimes fired into those in front. He singled out the 11th for wild firing and for firing without orders. Other regiments, though, had similar problems. Adding to the confusion, the soldiers of the 11th went into battle dressed in the gray uniforms issued by the state. The clothing too closely resembled that of Confederate regulars, and they wore them resentfully and under protest. “The delusive color cost us dearly,” noted a sergeant in Company D, for “one of our own regiments opened fire upon us, mistaking us for Confederates, and several valuable lives were sacrificed.”
The injured Conant likely made his way to a temporary field hospital as the battle progressed. The Confederates eventually broke the Union line, and the disorganized federal troops fled in a headlong retreat all the way to Washington. The hospital, and its wounded and medical staff, fell into enemy hands. The officers and men of the 11th mourned the loss of 88 of their comrades, and wondered what became of those who had been captured.
Meanwhile, triumphant Confederates rounded up Conant and the other captives from the battlefield, marched them to the rail station at Manassas and herded them on a train of boxcars bound for Richmond. There, the men were imprisoned in a three-story brick warehouse owned by a prosperous tobacconist, George Harwood. One inmate from a New York regiment noted, “From our prison windows we can look out on the James River, to the south. On the west we can look over the city, see the capitol building, and a secesh flag waving at each end. It makes us feel rather down-hearted to think we cannot get out and pull them down.”
As days turned to weeks and then months, scant rations, little exercise, and increasingly cramped conditions took a toll on the men. During this time, the Confederates converted other Richmond warehouses and buildings into detention sites to house the growing Union prisoner population. (In March of 1862, one site would become infamous as Libby Prison.)
As the New York inmate recalled, “Imagine a hundred haggard faces and emaciated forms— some with hair and beard of three months’ growth— so miserably clothed, in general, as to scarcely serve the purposes of decency, and many limping from the pain of unhealed wounds, and some faint conception may be obtained of our wretched condition.”
In October of 1861, Conant’s captors transferred him further south, where he spent the next seven months at prisons in Columbia, South Carolina, and Salisbury, North Carolina. In May of 1862, after ten months as a prisoner of war, Conant was finally released, and he returned to Massachusetts to recuperate. He suffered “a severe fit of sickness”, recalled a friend, “and was out of his head a large part of the time”. He remained ill for weeks, but gradually regained his health. By this time, some of his hearing had returned.
Amazingly, Conant rejoined the army that summer, in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for 300,000 volunteers. “He goes now probably to square up old scores,” stated a local newspaper in reference to Conant’s Bull Run nightmare. He went on to serve in a largely defensive role in two Massachusetts regiments. As a private in the Sixth Infantry, from 1862 to 1863, he comprised part of the garrison of Suffolk in Union-occupied southeast Virginia. Then, as an officer in the Third Heavy Artillery, from 1863 through the end of the war, he served a stint as commander of the thirty-man garrison of Fort Dupont, part of the string of forts and batteries that protected Washington.
Conant mustered out of the army as a first lieutenant in September of 1865 and returned home. He married in 1867, moved to New Jersey, and started a family. Nine years later they relocated to Jacksonville, Florida. But he never put that first engagement behind him. His Bull Run wound left a pronounced scar, while partial deafness and vertigo were constant reminders of his war experience.
He traveled to Chicago in the fall of 1893 to consult with a specialist about his ear problems, and to tour the Columbian Exposition, about to close after six wildly successful months. While in the Windy City, he may also have planned to pay a visit to the Libby Prison War Museum, home of the original Libby Prison; after the war, an architect had labeled each board, beam, timber, and stone and shipped the pieces north, and it was rebuilt and opened in 1889.
On 23 October 1893, a physician was called to a hotel room near the fairgrounds. Inside, Conant writhed in agony, unable to speak. He used his hands to communicate to the doctor that he was experiencing excruciating pain in his head, behind the right ear. He soon lapsed into unconsciousness, and died ten hours later of a cerebral hemorrhage, a day shy of his 51st birthday, survived by his wife and two children, including his eleven-year-old son, Marcus Jr. His death was attributed to the old Bull Run wound.
In an odd twist of fate, the circumstances of his death became the basis of a wildly exaggerated, highly fictionalized World’s Fair story published in newspapers across the country. According to one version, “Immediately upon his arrival at the Chicago fair, Conant turned his steps to the spot on which Libby Prison stood. What was his amazement on entering the place to meet among the visitors a companion who had been among the number of those who escaped with him from Libby thirty years ago. They held a long conversation and, after his companion had left the building, Conant threw himself on the ground in the identical spot upon which he had slept as a prisoner. While lying there he was seized with a violent pain in the ear and returned to his hotel in great agony. The pain could not be alleviated, and a few days later he died without having recovered from the singular attack.”