MFDJ 02/03/24: Distressful Wailing and Maggoty Bones

Today’s Distressful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Here’s the interesting story of a Nebraska settler who served in the American Civil War as recounted in The Children’s Blizzard:

Born in the rich rolling farmland of eastern Ohio in 1835, Ben Shattuck was twenty-six years old and single when he enlisted in the seventy-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry on November 16, 1861, seven months after the war began. He was assigned to Company B under the command of Second Lieutenant Thomas W. Higgins, and he drilled through the cold, wet winter months along with hundreds of other raw recruits at Camp Logan near Chillicothe. By the end of January 1862, the Seventy-third Ohio was considered battle ready and the men boarded trains bound for West Virginia. Their first taste of action was a forced march of eighty miles over mountain roads in a winter storm. Near Moorfield, on the South Branch of the Potomac, they were ambushed at night by Confederate snipers as they stood warming themselves at roadside campfires. The next day, the Seventy-third came under Rebel fire again while trying to ford the storm-swollen Potomac and take Moorfield. Eventually the Union soldiers prevailed and briefly held the town before retreating back up the river.

Disease ravaged the green regiment in the aftermath of this first battle. Many died in the mud and snow. Whether Ben Shattuck was among those who fell ill during those first bitter weeks of campaigning, we do not know. But he did survive. On March 20, 1862, he was promoted to the rank of corporal. It was sometime during this first year of his service in the Union Army that Ben “converted” to Christianity, as an awakening of religious fervor was termed, and joined the Methodist church—the Methodist Episcopal Church, as it was known then.

Ben served with the Seventy-third Ohio in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, including the disastrous Second Battle of Bull Run at the end of August 1862, in which 147 of the regiment’s 310 men were killed or wounded and 20 taken prisoner, and the humiliating Union defeat at Chancellorsville the following spring. Though Chancellorsville ended in confusion and retreat for the massive Union contingent under General Joseph Hooker, the Confederate Army paid dearly for its victory. Robert E. Lee sustained some thirteen thousand casualties during the campaign (about 22 percent of his army) and lost the charismatic General Stonewall Jackson, mortally wounded by accident by his own men while returning to the Confederate lines at night. By chance, the Seventy-third Ohio was positioned away from the worst of the fighting and they emerged from the engagement relatively unscathed. In all, Union casualties came to more than seventeen thousand men during these few days in April 1863.

At noon on July 1, 1863, the Ohio Seventy-third arrived at Cemetery Hill overlooking Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and for the next three days they endured the almost ceaseless fire of Lee’s army. During the few hours at night that the guns and cannons were silent, the Ohio men lay shivering on the ground, listening to the cries of the wounded and dying on the field. “It was the most distressful wail we ever listened to,” wrote Samuel H. Hurst, the regiment’s commander.

The climax of the battle came on July 3. Early that day the Ohio men were driven back at the Emmetsburg Road, but eventually they advanced as the Union forces succeeded in breaching Lee’s line.

Sometime in the course of that day Ben Shattuck, now a sergeant, sustained a bullet wound in his right leg and was taken prisoner by the Confederate forces. For the next eighty-three days he was held at the Confederate prison camp on Belle Isle, a low-lying island surrounded by rapids of the James River near Richmond, Virginia. There were no permanent barracks for the prisoners, only tents, and food was so scarce that prisoners were reduced to gnawing on maggoty bones and stealing the boots of dying fellow soldiers and selling them for food. “All other thoughts and feelings had become concentrated in that of hunger,” wrote a Union prisoner. “Men became, under such surroundings, indifferent to almost everything, except their own miseries, and found an excuse in their sufferings for any violations of ordinary usages of humanity.” Every day, fifteen to twenty-five prisoners died. Their corpses were wrapped in canvas and tossed into holes in the ground just outside the prison. Many on Belle Isle were forced to sleep on the ground without shelter and died of exposure; many froze to death in the tents.

Belle Isle Prison Camp

“Can those be men?” the poet Walt Whitman wondered when he saw a group of Union soldiers returning from Belle Isle. “Those little livid brown ash streaked, monkey-looking dwarves? — are they not really mummified, dwindled corpses?”

After nearly three months, Ben was released from Belle Isle, possibly in an exchange for Confederate prisoners. The wound in his leg would bother him for the rest of his life. During his final fifteen months of military service, Ben fought with General Sherman’s forces in the siege of Atlanta. He watched the city burn in November of 1864 and he marched with Sherman to the sea. On New Year’s Eve of 1864, Sergeant Shattuck’s term of service expired and he was mustered out of his regiment.

Culled from: The Children’s Blizzard

Garretdom! – Empty Morphine Bottle Edition

An Empty Morphine Bottle Was Near.

CHICAGO, Sept. 27.—Attorney Lawrence J. J. Nissen was found lying dead in his office at 170 East Madison street yesterday morning. Upon a table near by stood an empty morphine bottle. At his late home, 107 Schiller street, whither the body was at once conveyed, the theory of suicide is discredited, and the confidence expressed that he died of paralysis. The deceased was for forty years a resident of Chicago, and was formerly a partner of Judge Barnum in the law business. He was fifty-nine years of age and leaves a wife and several grown children.

Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook

So I was going to put this in the “Suicide” category, but then I did additional research and found this article that made me change it to the “Accidental Death” category:

They Sought Relief from Insomnia.

An inquest was held yesterday at No. 432 West Twelfth street on the body of the lawyer, Lawrence J. J. Nissen, who was found dead in his office, No. 170 East Madison street, Sunday morning. A partly emptied bottle labeled morphine was found on a table by the side of the dead man. From the testimony of the daughter, Miss Emma Nissen, a teacher of elocution, it was learned that the lawyer had for years past suffered from insomnia, and that he was always in the habit of taking the drug to induce sleep. Some five years ago he had a narrow escape from death by taking an overdose. Judge Barnum, a former law partner of deceased, also stated that Mr. Nissen was long a sufferer from sleeplessness. The verdict was in accordance with the facts.

Culled from the September 28, 1886 issue of the Chicago Tribune.

Enjoy more morbid olde news at Garretdom!

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 23rd. Very cold and heavy frost last night, for which could not sleep much. Went out again for wood.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost