They are together, John Riley and Eliphas, and have been for the last 151 years, separated only by the bones of two other Illinois boys taken, oh too soon, by that brutal war.
I wonder if their Grandmothers, the Riley sisters Martha Elizabeth and Sarah Wallace, fussed over the blue-eyed, dark-haired little boys, each named for their fathers and their fathers before them; maybe they even helped deliver them into this world. That was a lifetime ago, back when everybody they knew lived in Wayne County Tennessee, before they all began moving north to Illinois with its promise of better land and a better life.
It was John Riley’s Pap Jonathan Halford who in about 1847 had gathered long-connected families together for the removal to Fayette and then Christian County, Illinois where Jonathan’s brother James and other members of the clan had settled a few years earlier. Jonathan and his wife Martha along with her sister Barbara and husband Wilson Casey, were among the first to pack up their families and head out, followed soon by Martha and Barbara’s widowed mother Sarah. Not much later, Eliphaz and Kesiah Prater and their family, including young Eliphas make the same trip. The elder Eliphaz was the son of Sarah’s sister Martha Elizabeth so the boys were 2nd cousins.
I wonder if John Riley and Eliphas played together when they were lads, in those few precious hours when whatever work there was to be done on the farm could wait a bit. Did they challenge each other to games of skill? Did they wrestle, compete in foot races and work on their shooting, vying to lay claim to the best aim? Did they sit at night next to a flickering kerosene lamp, seeing who could beat who at checkers?
Their already close family ties were strengthened further when Eliphas’s brother Zebulon married John Riley’s cousin Caroline Casey in 1855. No sooner was the wedding celebration over, though, than the extended Prater and Casey families moved themselves to the Iron Mountains in southern Missouri. There was good cash money to be made working in the iron ore mines there. Money that could be used to buy more Illinois farm land.
Cash always comes with a price, though, and sometimes it is very dear. The newly wed Zebulon perished, probably from injuries in the mines, on August 2nd 1859. He was only twenty-two and left behind the twenty-year-old Caroline and the two babies, Eliza Jane born in 1856 and William D born just a month before his father died. Having seen enough of the dirty, dangerous mines, the extended families moved once again, right back to Christian County. There was a war heating up and duty’s call was strong.
John Riley Halford had turned 17 on February 24, 1862, just when General Grant gave Federal troops their first real strategic victory at Ft Donelson, Tennessee. Eliphas’s 18th birthday was two months later, only three weeks after the bloody Battle of Shiloh. For these boys born of the Tennessee soil but with Union hearts, the times must have seemed to be theirs to grab, to bring honor to themselves, their families and their country.
I wonder how long it took them to convince their parents to let them enlist. After all, John Riley’s older brother William had decided to volunteer as had his cousin James Halford. Caroline’s brothers William and John Casey were ready to go, too. Another brother, James, had already enlisted. Eliphas’s oldest brother, Brice, was serving in the 6th Illinois Cavalry and now brothers Samuel and Benjamin, too, were ready to prove their courage. All knew that Zebulon would have joined them... if only he hadn’t died.
Some 200,000 men were processed through Camp Butler between 1861 and 1866 and thousands of rebel prisoners were held there. Nothing remains of it today but ghosts.
There's more ....
So it was that eight young men, bound by blood, gathered up their courage, polished their mettle and went marching off to war. Together they enlisted at Camp Butler, only 17 miles away in their beloved President's own home of Springfield, on September 10, 1862 and were mustered in on October 25th. They left together on November 11th for what would be a six day journey to Memphis, Tennessee.
All eight were assigned to Company D of the Illinois 130th Infantry. Once in Tennessee they were attached to the Sixteenth Army Corps at Fort Pickering where they were assigned provost duty for the city of Memphis. A more pestilential place could hardly have been found for such a newly formed regiment. Camp fever was running rampant as was a local outbreak of measles and the most feared killer of them all, smallpox. The company suffered extreme loss of life to disease in those first few months.
I wonder if Eliphas was already ill when John Riley succumbed to the fever on January 7, 1863 just fifty-one days after they had arrived at Fort Pickering. Eliphas himself was to live only fourteen days longer before the fever took him too on January 21st.
Were the surviving brothers and cousins able to minister to their fallen kin, I wonder? Did they sit with them and whisper stories of home and say how proud they had made their families? I wonder if they helped bury the young ones, there in their graves so close together. Did they sing the words “mine eyes have seen the glory?” while they wiped tears from their eyes. Did someone drum out a funeral dirge or play a plaintive flute? Who would tell the mothers, the fathers, brothers and sisters back home, I wonder? How would things ever be right again?
1863, that terrible year, didn’t get any better for these families. John Casey was to die in the camp hospital in Vicksburg in August. John Riley’s Pap died on October 8 and his uncle Wilson Casey, John, James and William’s daddy, drowned in a swollen creek two days after Christmas. Zebulon’s widow Caroline got married again on August 13th so there was something, after all, to be thankful for.
Somehow William Halford got himself discharged on March 21, 1864, perhaps when the news of his father’s death arrived, and made his way home to Christian County. It isn’t known when William Casey was discharged but he and Benjamin Prater were transferred to the Illinois 77th, which with the 130th entered Sabine Cross Roads on April 8, 1864, and found themselves overwhelmed by the enemy. 176 officers and men were killed, wounded and made prisoners, leaving only about 125 men available for duty. Benjamin Prater was one of the men who was taken prisoner and would not be released until the end of the war. Was William captured only to be returned at the end of the war or was he one of the lucky ones? His service record, unfortunately, does not say. We do know that he and Benjamin along with James Casey and Brice Prater survived the war and returned home to live out their years.
Samuel Prater resigned from the 130th in December 1863 to accept a commission as 2nd Lieutenant in Co F, 25th Corps, d'afrique (later the 93rd U.S. Colored Infantry) but resigned only months later because "the condition of my family is such that my presence is needed at home immediately." And what about James Halford? The record shows only that he was dishonorably discharged on July 3, 1863. He’d seen enough, I expect. That, or more likely, the record doesn't tell the whole of it.
These ten men whose lives were so inextricably bound to my Great-Great-Grandmother Caroline Casey Prater Hayes are my 2nd Great Grand Uncles. I wonder how she was able to survive all this. Did she live in a constant state of dread? I know one thing. She was very strong.
Sources:
https://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/...
Illinois Adjutant General’s Report of Regimental and Unit Histories for the years 1861-1865
(note 130th history starts on page 413)
http://www.ilsos.gov/...
Illinois Civil War Muster and Descriptive Rolls
http://www.findagrave.com/...
Memphis National Cemetery