 |
2023 excavation of graves (The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation); 1907 view of church and Powder Magazine (Harry Mann photos, Special Collections Research Center, Swem
Library, William & Mary); Battle of Williamsburg (LOC) |
Last fall, the
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation mailed out a handful of letters, the correspondence
topped by a drawing of the old Virginia Capitol and beneath it the words: “That
the future may learn from the past.”The heading
read: RE: Potential Ancestral Connection
to Skeletal Remains at Colonial Williamsburg.
Contained in the letter’s five paragraphs was a request that must have jolted the recipients and, if they complied, help fulfill the mission of making the past relevant.
The letter explained
the remains of four Confederate soldiers had been found in 2023 in a pit and
grave near the history site’s Powder Magazine. They died from wounds suffered
in the May 5, 1862, Battle of Williamsburg. Further, the letter stated, a handwritten list of those treated at a makeshift hospital – established in a Baptist church near the magazine – still
exists.
Then the inquiry
became very personal.
“We are
reaching out to you because our genealogist has identified you, based on
publicly accessible data sources, as a descendant of … one of the soldiers who
is named on the hospital list.” That individual mentioned in the letter believed to be among the
four remains.
 |
| One of Isabella T. Sully's hospital patient list pages she recorded at Williamsburg Baptist (Tucker-Coleman Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, William
& Mary)
|
“If this
matches your understanding of your family tree, would you be willing to
participate in a DNA study to help confirm the name of this individual?,” the letter continued.
Four
descendants said yes. On March 2, a kit was mailed out to each. The
recipients will provide DNA from their cheeks and mail the swabs back for
analysis.
Their
presumed ancestor, says Jack Gary, executive director of archaeology at
Colonial Williamsburg, was from the Piedmont region of South Carolina. DNA
analysis showed him to be in his 20s. The infantryman was mortally wounded in
fighting at Fort Magruder.
The South
Carolinian has the most robust family tree of the four, and the project decided
to confirm his identity first, aiming the letters at his kin. The soldiers’ names
are being withheld for now as research and analysis continues.
Hospital list made the search possible
Gary, who signed the letter and heard from one descendant within a few days,
said the endeavor has already been remarkable -- with much more to learn.
“I have not experienced this in my career,” he told the
Picket in a recent phone call. “Not many archaeologists have used DNA this
way.”
 |
| Final resting place for four soldiers at Cedar Grove Cemetery (The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation) |
Gary’s team -- which includes staff archaeologist Eric Schweickart, lab technician Evan Bell and Elizabeth Drembus, a genealogist at William & Mary -- are the beneficiaries of good
fortune in their hunt to put names to the four sets of remains, which were
buried last year at the city’s Cedar Grove Cemetery, near the graves of other
Confederates killed in the battle.
Working from
the hospital list, census, newspaper accounts, the ledger of an undertaker and
other records, the team narrowed the possible identities to four men who served
in regiments from Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and Virginia.
Without those documents, the effort would never have gotten off the
ground.
“You have to have a known person to go off to trace their
ancestry to the modern day,” said Gary (right, at another dig. Photo Colonial Williamsburg Foundation).
The list of names, made by a widow who visited the hospital
and later raised money to rebury scores of Rebel soldiers who died at
Williamsburg, was especially crucial.
It provided names and regiments of more than 60 soldiers and
notes indicating if and when they died. Colonial Williamsburg did not see the
hospital list until after the graves were found in 2023. Bell stumbled across
it while doing research and the discovery opened the door.
Bell studied two versions to winnow the list of possible
candidates down to the four soldiers.
Gary said, if the attempt to identify the remains is
successful, descendants will know precisely what happened to the soldiers after
they were sent to Virginia to fight. That knowledge will fill in gaps for each
of their stories. Somehow, these four warriors were left behind when other
hospital dead were moved to cemeteries.
Another aim is to eventually publish all four confirmed names.
“We should try to put a name back with the individual out of
respect for human dignity,” Gary said of the South Carolinian. “If this is the
man who we think this is, it will be incredibly rewarding.”
At Williamsburg, soldiers first saw the elephant
 |
| Hancock's Federal troops launch attack on May 5, 1862 (Library of Congress) |
The
inconclusive Battle of Williamsburg was the first pitched battle of the
Peninsula Campaign, following a Confederate retreat from Yorktown. Most of the
combatants had seen little or no action before the clash.
Federal Brig.
Gen. Joseph Hooker’s division attacked the Southerners at Fort Magruder, but
was repulsed. Confederate counterattacks ultimately failed and they made a
nighttime withdrawal toward Richmond. Casualties numbered more than 3,800.
Federal
forces took the city, holding it for the rest of the war. A few hospitals
sprang up to handle the influx of wounded on both sides.
Williamsburg Baptist Church, which was formed in the early 19th century, had
already been pressed into service before the battle, treating sick Confederates
soldiers stationed at Fort Magruder and elsewhere.
 |
| Historic courthouse (left), the Powder Magazine and old Williamsburg Baptist church (right) / Special
Collections, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation
|
It received the largest
crush of the wounded.
The church,
which moved to a new location in the 1930s, kept no records during the Civil
War. But an article provided to the Picket by church office administrator Haley
Matthews claims the old site was “greatly abused” during the chaos following
the battle.
“Bloodstains
were on the floors and the pews were stored in an open shed exposed to the
weather. Soldiers were buried in the church yard near the west door, as many as
17 in one grave. Their bodies were afterwards removed to the cemetery.”
The 2023
surprise discovery at the Powder Magazine proved not all had been relocated.
Isabella Sully is the story's primary hero
The
Confederates treated at the Baptist church hospital were prisoners of war. The
Union forces wanted to move those well enough to Fort Monroe.
But dozens,
including these four, were grievously wounded and could not be sent elsewhere.
Many died in the days and weeks following the battle.
Local
residents and clerics came to the hospital, to give comfort to the wounded and
send updates to family members.
Among them
was Isabella Thompson Sully, a widow from Richmond who had traveled to
Williamsburg. She and friend Cynthia Tucker Coleman provided riveting accounts
of the suffering, with Coleman calling one drunken surgeon the “Head Devil.”
A 1937
article in the journal Religious Herald mentioned the 17 soldiers interred in
the churchyard near the west door, “buried like sardines in a box.” The author
said an African-American showed him the graves years before and they were
removed to a cemetery.
In 1892,
Sully wrote a letter (left, click to enlarge) that appeared in the Richmond Times, saying 25 of the
Rebel dead were buried in the green near the Baptist church. She described the dearth
of medicine and food until the Union army brought supplies.
“I shall
never be able to tell how we managed to keep so many wounded and starving men
alive, so that several days elapsed before I was able to make a list of those
who remained,” wrote Sully.
As more men
died, they were buried in pits near the first 25.
Critically,
Sully in 1862 recorded the names of the wounded, their regiments and company.
Dying soldiers were worried about being placed in unmarked graves
She recorded
the date of death and burial locations, when possible. She gave the list to
Coleman, and the latter’s papers ended up hiding in plain sight at William & Mary's Swem Library Special Collections.
Archaeologists
at Colonial Williamsburg were aware of a list, but they had no idea where it
was.
'They said they was goin' to take them up'
Following the Civil War, Sully and others raised money to
move scores of Confederate soldiers from the graves around the church to Cedar
Grove and Bruton Parish Church cemeteries.
A post-1892 monument at Bruton Parish (photo below) lists names of men
allegedly buried there, but some apparently were laid to rest elsewhere in the
city. One did not die at the battle, said Bell.
Bell believes the burial parties got those in the larger pits
and trenches near the Baptist church but somehow did not come across the four soldiers. “It seems like they just barely were missed.”
Interestingly, a formerly enslaved woman mentioned those four
burials in a conversation that appeared in a 1933 book.
"It is a
pity, pity, pity, for people to treat each other so bad. Lots of men were
buried around the Powder Horn. They said they was goin' to take them up, but I
ain't never seen them do it,” Eliza Baker said.
I asked why
officials did not excavate the graves after Baker mentioned the lost burials.
Colonial Williamsburg as a tourist attraction had begun to take shape by the
1930s.
Archaeology
was focused then on the site’s architecture and buildings, Bell said.
In 2023,
archaeologists were working around the Powder Magazine, which was being
renovated. A reconstruction of the 1757 Market House had replaced the old
Baptist Church nearby. Both were near Duke of Gloucester Street.
At a reconstructed wall, they came across a single grave and
a pit containing three men. All four had all of their limbs. Nearby was a pit
with three amputated legs. It was a real surprise, since most histories
indicated the dead from the hospital had all been accounted for and moved.
“There is a cluster of men who died around the same time,”
Gary recalls. “We assumed they died the same day or one day and the next day.
You are not going to leave a pit open.”
The research team determined the four soldiers died on and
around May 15, 1862.
Cynthia Tucker Coleman (left), a writer and preservationist who advocated for the restoration of historic buildings at Williamsburg, provided a vivid account of the
occupation of the town and the hospital.
“The writer can never forget seeing a dead soldier wrapped in
his coarse blanket lying in the vestibule of the Church, his body kept for a
comrade to die that the trouble of interment might be lessened – A Confederate
woman placed a white rose upon his breast and shed a tear for those who loved
him at home.”
Her account is kept at the William & Mary library and can be seen online here.
Bell recalls the archaeologists sanitized their excavation
tools and wore personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep their own DNA away
from the remains. Some of the deceased had personal items. They were not buried
in uniforms.
Experts were able to extract genetic material from teeth and skull
bones. Subsequent DNA analysis showed one soldier to be in late 40s or early
50s. One was maybe 15 while another was in his 20s and the fourth in his
20s-30s.
“We had well-preserved DNA,” said Gary, who has a theory as
to why the skeletal remains were in relatively good condition.
The courtyard area around the magazine was paved with shell.
“It is possible that the shell changed the pH of the soil, making it less
acidic.”
His detective work soon began in earnest
Bell got to work on figuring out who these four soldiers
were. The journey had a few twists and turns, but the key was finding Sully’s
pages, which are kept at William & Mary.
While Bell (right) was looking at documents relating to Cynthia
Coleman, he asked one of the Special Collections assistants, Carolyn Wilson, about the hospital list. That’s when he
learned the pages were kept in papers related to Charles Washington Coleman,
Cynthia’s son.
He recalls
thinking, “Oh, my God. This is the list Isabella Sully was talking about. The
archivist there saved the day.”
Bell later found a somewhat similar list at Washington &
Lee University in Lexington, Va. The page is within the family papers of Samuel Blain. It is not known for certain who took those handwritten notes.
The Presbyterian minister visited the hospital and
corresponded with the family of patient William Davis, who died in
Williamsburg. The list at Washington & Lee helped Bell eliminate soldiers
whose limbs were amputated.
The
technician kept an Excel spreadsheet, ensuring the narrowed list did not
mention men with amputations. He found some of the 60-plus patients at the
church were buried elsewhere. Using the Blain list helped him cut the number of
possibilities to 29.
Bell provided
the Picket a breakdown of the numbers he used:
-- 66 names on
the combined lists; this includes men who only stayed at private homes, not
just the hospital.
-- 31 of the
66 survived Williamsburg leaving 35 men
who died of their wounds after the battle.
-- 15 of the
35 have recorded burials or died in private homes leaving 20 men who died of their wounds
after the battle, but do not have recorded burials. (At left, map of Fort Magruder, Library of Congress)
-- 5 of the 20
have recorded amputations leaving 15 men
who died of their wounds after the battle, and did not have amputations. (11 of
the 58 names on the Blain list have amputations)
That was how
the list was reduced down to 15 names for analysis.
Death dates were
key because three men were buried together, allowing the team to pinpoint
soldiers who died about the same time.
“We believe they were some of the first
to die,” said Bell.
The four
apparently were buried close to a wooden fence. “There is no space for any
other burials.” That means they were off by themselves from other pits dotting
the green.
Trying to bring closure more than 160 years later
The research team, which includes Dr. Raquel Fleskes at
Dartmouth College, noted that the South Carolina soldier had no children but
several brothers and sisters. They are in touch with male descendants of one
brother.
Those who responded to Gary’s letter have the same last name as the
unnamed soldier, who died in his 20s. (Below, Powder Magazine, Wikipedia)
“If we can make a match with him we can likely confirm the
other individuals,” said Gary.
Bell said the challenge with the other three soldiers is
there are either few siblings to work from or almost no information available
on their families.
Even if Colonial Williamsburg is unable to match DNA
matches, the descendants will know their ancestors fought at Williamsburg and
struggled for life in a field hospital before passing away.
“I want
to see if my hypothesis is right and (we) bring closure to the descendants,”
said Bell.
The result
also could bring narrative stories to an American citizenry that doesn’t interact as much
with history as they used to, he added.
