A soldier claimed by the long shadow of the Civil War

By Walter Fox

I remember as a boy seeing the rusted cast-iron flag holder, bearing the letters "G.A.R." encircled by a wreath, on a grave in my mother's family plot. I knew even then that someone in her family had served in the Civil War, but I was never really clear on who that person was.

My mother's aunt confided in me that he had died of a disease contracted from "sleeping in doorways" during the war. Since that didn't make much sense to me then, I don't recall pursuing it any further. Besides, our family had moved away from the area and, I suspected, from some of the heartache that these headstones represented.

When my mother died, I went through the mountains of papers, important and unimportant, that she had carefully saved. I came across what appeared to be a slightly yellowed legal document of some kind. Opening its triple folds, I could not miss the words United States of America ornately inscribed at the top.

It was her grandmother's pension certificate, and it said that as the widow of a Civil War veteran, she was entitled each month to collect the sum of $8 for herself and $2 for each of her three children. Two other short documents, attached to the bottom of the first with a straight pin, indicated that the allotment had increased to $25 in 1917 and to $30 in 1920.

Suddenly, it dawned on me that the man buried under the cast-iron flag holder was my great-grandfather. The certificate gave him not only a name — Joseph Serwazi — but the rank of private in Company L of the 192d Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.

My curiosity was piqued. Had he fought at Antietam? Chancellorsville? Gettysburg?

I went to the library and found that the 192d, recruited in Philadelphia, was one of the so-called l00-day regiments, composed of volunteers who signed up to serve for three months if the unit was activated by the governor.

The 192d was called up by Gov. Andrew Gregg Curtin in July 1864, after Confederate raiders had cut rail and telegraph lines between Baltimore and Philadelphia. The regiment was sent to a camp near Baltimore and soon moved to Fort McHenry, where it received orders to proceed to Johnson's Island, in Lake Erie, to take up guard duty at a prison camp for Confederate officers.

Within a few days of arriving at the camp, near Sandusky, Ohio, the regiment was sent to Gallipolis, about 200 miles south on the Ohio River, for guard and patrol duty at a Union Army supply depot. There, seven companies, among them Company L, were separated and sent to Weston, W.Va., where Confederate guerrillas were active.

After completing its service, the regiment returned to Philadelphia and was mustered out on Nov. 11, 1864.

So, as far as I could determine, my great-grandfather had seen no combat, despite having traveled nearly 2,000 miles in less than four months.

But my interest in this ancestor was now aroused, so I wrote to the National Archives to obtain his military and pension records. Then I called the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum of Philadelphia to find out if there was any further information on the 192d. Much to my surprise, there was: A volunteer named John C. Myers kept a daily journal of the regiment's service that was published in 1864, and the library had a copy.

An unusually perceptive recruit, Myers recorded the day-to-day tribulations of green soldiers learning on the run: bivouacs in torrential rains and unseasonable cold, marches through knee-deep mud, deaths from disease and accidents, and occasional food shortages.

While en route to Sandusky by rail from Baltimore, the regiment ran out of provisions after Pittsburgh. At every subsequent train stop, Myers noted, the men foraged for food by entering all nearby houses and obtaining it by "purchase, begging or stealth." Still, these were minor privations compared with the carnage for which the Civil War is justly famous.

Then the envelope from the National Archives arrived. My great-grandfather's military records consisted of three cards: a muster-in, muster, and muster-out roll. They revealed that he was 18 when he was mustered into the regiment on July 12, 1864; that he had been present for all roll calls; and that he had been mustered out on Nov. 11, still unpaid from the date of enlistment, and owing the government $11.34 for clothing and 43 cents for a wrench and wiper for his musket.

By contrast, the pension records consisted of 20 pages of affidavits and other official documents supporting my great-grandmother's claim that she was entitled to a Civil War widow's pension. The reason? Her husband had died in 1884 of tuberculosis — a disease he had contracted during his 100 days of service.

Twenty years after my great-grandfather was discharged from the Grand Army of the Republic, the war reached out and claimed him as a victim — one of those delayed casualties that make the real human cost of such conflicts so difficult to calculate.