Monday, January 28, 2013

Field of honor

Graves of unknown soldiers of the American Revolution






“These Are The Times That Try Men’s Souls”
~ Thomas Paine




For a number of weeks before the Battle of Trenton in late December 1776, the Continental Army camped on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. The British and Hessians occupied the New Jersey side. During these weeks, which Thomas Paine immortalized as “…The Times That Try Men’s Souls,” the Thompson Neely House served as a hospital for soldiers in George Washington’s army. A number of these men died and are buried along the Delaware River, a short distance from the Thompson Neely House. Their graves are within walking distance of the house, which stands along River Road south of New Hope in Bucks County.

Unknown soldier
Continental Line
Rev War
Dec 1776




Heritage of the Pidcock Family


Lawrence Smith and sons Thomas, left, and Christian.

Honoring family history


At its sixth reunion in August 1919, the Pidcock Family Association placed this bronze tablet on a boulder along Pidcock Creek in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Last September, a trio of Smiths, all descendants of John Pidcock, posed for a photo alongside the plaque. Lawrence Smith holds his son Christopher, and older brother Thomas stands on the left. Lawrence is the current president of the Pidcock Family Association.

The tablet says:

“On this spot on a tract of land
of 505 acres called by the Indians
Win-Ah-Haw-Caw-Chunk
John Pidcock, the first white settler,
built mills and established a trading
post with the Indians in 1684.”
 

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Anderson Pidcock, Civil War soldier, 1844-1864


Donald Moore, a veteran of the Vietnam War, clears grass from the stone marker memorializing Anderson Pidcock, a Union soldier killed while fighting Confederate soldiers in Virginia in 1864.

19-year-old Union soldier dies during 1864 battle in Virginia

 
 By John L. Moore

In the popular Civil War song, the crowd would shout “Hurrah! Hurrah!” when Johnny comes marching home. Unlike Johnny, my ancestor – 19-year-old Anderson Pidcock – didn’t survive the war.
The first cousin of my father’s grandmother, Anderson enlisted in the Union army in August 1861, shortly after the Confederates routed the Northern soldiers at the Battle of Bull Run in Virginia. The apprentice carpenter was 16. For nearly three years, he fought as a member of the Sixth New Jersey Infantry Volunteers, first as a private and then as a corporal.
In May 1863, he was wounded in the arm while fighting in the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia. Gangrene set in, and he was hospitalized for at least four months. At one point army surgeons nearly amputated his arm, but the doctors managed to cure him, and his arm was saved.
Anderson was well enough to return to his regiment in the autumn of 1863. He died – “killed in action” – while fighting in Virginia in 1864.

Photo shows trenches dug by Union soldiers in General Winfield 
Scott’s II Corps along Brock Road in The Wilderness in northern 
Virginia in 1864. The Sixth New Jersey was part of II Corps.

I decided to visit the battlefield where he fell, so one sunny weekend in September 2012, a friend and I traveled to northern Virginia to a place called The Wilderness. Some 62,000 Southern soldiers commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee clashed with 120,000 Northern soldiers led by Gen. U.S. Grant in early May 1864. Two days of fighting occurred there.
We found the battlefield about 20 miles west of Fredericksburg, Va. It was – and is – an immense tract of woods and swamps. Although developments of residential and retail complexes now cover much of it, the National Park Service has preserved significant sections of The Wilderness. 

2 days of close fighting, wildfires




The two days of fighting here began on Thursday, May 5, 1864, when Union troops clashed with Confederates along a road called the Orange Turnpike.  Lee ordered more Southern forces into the battle to halt the Union advance on Richmond, about 70 miles away.
Fighting resumed early on the morning of Friday, May 6, in a heavily wooded section. Union soldiers in Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps, which included the Sixth New Jersey, attacked Gen. A.P. Hill’s division of Confederates at 5 a.m. The charge took place to the south of the Orange Plank Road, just west of its intersection with Brock Road.
Anderson’s regiment was up front. “He’s in the second line going forward,” Park Ranger Beth Parnicza told us as she looked at a map that showed the location and movements of specific units on that fateful day. “He’s going to be in the thick of everything.”
The battle raged, then slowed. In late morning the Confederates mounted a counterattack: 4,000 rebel soldiers under Gen James Longstreet moved east along an unfinished railroad line that let them go around the side of Hancock’s force.
“The Sixth New Jersey would have borne much of the weight of Longstreet's flank attack at 11 a.m., but perhaps not the brunt of the attack, since they were not on the end,” the ranger said. The soldiers in “the regiment would have found themselves struggling to hold their ground in such a situation and probably would have been swept up in the attack.”
At some point, Anderson was killed.
Around 4 in the afternoon,  Lee ordered a major attack on Hancock’s line along Brock Road, and the offensive hit Pidcock’s regiment “He’s probably fallen by then. … He’s really in the thick of a lot of it,” Parnicza said.
This section of The Wilderness caught fire that day. Sparks from soldiers’ campfire and flames from the barrels of thousands of muskets set the brush and dry leaves afire. According to the ranger, the fires had begun “during the Confederate assault, and the wind blew the fire back into the faces of the Union forces. … It is definitely something your ancestor faced if he was still on the line at that time.” 
By coincidence, Anderson’s distant cousin Hiram Pidcoe from Williamsport, Pa,, was also fighting in this section of The Wilderness. Pidcoe, who survived the war, belonged to the First Pennsylvania Light Artillery. The two cousins likely didn’t know each other. Pidcoe wrote about this battle in his journal, which a descendant recently published, but his entry for this battle doesn’t mention meeting up with Pidcock.
Parnicza and another ranger gave us directions that let us find the place where the Sixth New Jersey had fought that day. It remains heavily wooded. We walked through the trees and brush where the fighting occurred. There were few other visitors that afternoon, and our feet made little noise as we followed a path maintained by the park service. I remember the occasional chirping of birds and the sounds of cars and pickup trucks driving along Brock and Orange Plank roads nearby, but otherwise, the woods were quiet. Along Brock Road we saw the remains of hurriedly dug trenches that Hancock’s men had made.
In terms of statistics, The Battle of The Wilderness resulted in 26,000 casualties, a figure that includes both dead and wounded. Of these, 8,000 were Confederate soldiers, and 18,000 were Union men.
Many soldiers who died there were buried in the Fredericksburg National Cemetery after the war, but Anderson Pidcock’s name doesn’t appear on the cemetery’s roster. The New Jersey cemetery where a small stone marker bears his name wasn’t established until 1878, and its records don’t list burials.
I don’t know where Anderson Pidcock was buried. I learned in Virginia that the bodies of hundreds of soldiers who perished at The Wilderness were never identified. It’s possible that Anderson was one of these unknown soldiers.
Be that as it may, the fighting at the Wilderness had slowed, but not stopped, Grant. On Saturday, May 7 – the day after Anderson Pidcock died – the general resumed his march toward Richmond. When his soldiers realized they were heading south, they cheered.

John L. Moore is a writer based in Northumberland, Pa. He is the historian of the Pidcock Family Association.
Anderson Pidcock's marker is located in the Holcombe Riverview Cemetery.