1. 150 years ago today, a Valley writer’s great-
great-grandfather went AWOL at the end of
the Civil War. This is how he made his way
home
By MICHAEL CAROLAN
Daily Hampshire Gazette. Northampton, Massachusetts.
Monday, May 18, 2015 (Published in print: Tuesday, May 19, 2015)
BELCHERTOWN — One hundred and fifty years ago today, Private James Early White
deserted the victorious Union Army to return home to his mother. The war had been
over more than a month and he was worried. Two younger brothers and a sister were
dead. His remaining brother was at the state asylum. And his father’s severe palsy
tremors prevented him from running their 200-acre farm.
My great-great-grandfather stood 5 feet, 10 inches
tall and was 27. He had marched 7,000 miles and
fought in 28 battles. He was shot in the lip at the
Chattahoochee River and in the head at the Battle
of Atlanta.
Still, the government charged him with desertion,
a crime that called for the death penalty. Even the
governor of Illinois, a major general during the
war, could not help his case.
His thousand-mile trek home in June 1865 was the
beginning of a complicated, 75-year odyssey,
brought to light on this sesquicentennial of the
end of the Civil War though pension records,
interviews and a pocket field diary he kept during
the war that I rediscovered.
James
Early
White
at
the
time
of
the
Civil
War
COURTESY
OF
MICHAEL
CAROLAN

2. The bounty jumper
In January 1865, my great-great-grandfather was in Beaufort, South Carolina. He had
followed General Grant to Vicksburg and General Sherman on his “March to the Sea.”
His three-year enlistment was over. While most simply re-enlisted, my great-great-
grandfather’s commander told him to go home: his health was unmanageable, with
chronic stomach pains and spells of dizziness, brought on by a piece of shrapnel that
struck him in the head.
But James Early White didn’t listen. He had sent his paychecks home and was broke. So
he went to New Britain, Connecticut, where the noted shirt manufacturer Isaac N. Lee
paid him $500 to become his substitute in the army.
The controversial practice of substitution offered money to soldiers who enlisted for
men who did not wish to fight. The army at the end of the war was desperate for men
to fill the ranks depleted by death, disease and desertion.
“Most often pecuniary interests persuaded men whose terms of service had expired to
seek out a new unit,” said Brian Matthew Jordan, author of “Marching Home: Union
Veterans and their Unending Civil War.”
“The end of the war was a maddening hour, and one riddled with uncertainty, fear, and
conflicting emotions,” Jordan wrote.
Oftentimes, soldiers became “bounty jumpers” — enlisting, taking the money and then
fleeing the unit.
I suspect my great-great grandfather became one of the thousands of such men. He
needed the money not just to return home for a few months, but to help his father. His
plan failed.
The army detained him at a conscription camp in New Haven. “I wanted to get out of
there because they abused me,” he told a pension investigator years later. Rumors
circulated among the men of his former unit: he “was drunk or drugged” and forced
into re-enlisting. The army, meanwhile, had “tied” him to a stairway to keep him from
escaping. “I told them that all I wanted was to get home to my mother and then come
back.” Instead, according to records, the army took his money, locked him up for 45
days and sent him to the “hot sands” of Wilmington, North Carolina. Then, he told his
new commander that he was headed home and would return in a few months.
This time, the war over, the army let him.

3. Complex Alliances
By mid-June 1865, James Early White was home. There, he helped his father with the
farm and comforted his mother over deaths in the family. His brothers had joined pro-
Union forces and were likely victims of Southern sympathizers who terrorized pro-
Union families during the conflict. Such sympathizers included the outlaw Jesse James
and William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, famous for hanging his victims’ scalps from his
saddle, said Bruce Nichols, author of “Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri.”
“Some of the Missouri guerrillas were desperate men,” Nichols said. “Southern
sympathizers who lived near the White family probably knew they were from Virginia.
Some folks may have taken offense that the Whites did not feel allegiance to the South
like others with Virginia or North Carolina or Tennessee roots.”
Alliances were notoriously complex in the Border States that had joined the Union but
did not abolish slavery. In fact, the White family owned slaves on its tobacco farm in
Greene County, Virginia, according to the U.S. Census. The family moved to Missouri
in 1855 and may have brought a slave or two with them. But during the Civil War,
James Early White and three of his brothers joined Union regiments.
By September 1865, my great-great-grandfather made good on his promise to return to
duty. He stopped in Illinois, the home state of the 26th Illinois, the regiment in which
he had served for most of the war. Would the governor write a letter on his behalf to
the U.S. Army requesting a pardon?
“The boy is quite young, has been a good soldier and is very anxious to get right on the
record,” wrote Gov. and former Maj. Gen. Richard Oglesby on Sept. 28. Thirteen days
later, the army ignored the governor and on Nov. 11 — what would become the
national holiday celebrating veterans — James Early White was mustered out of the
U.S. army with a “dishonorable discharge.”
Coffee for tobacco
I had read about a diary left by my great-great-grandfather in a handwritten genealogy.
My early efforts to locate it failed. I found it last year in the Okfuskee, Oklahoma,
History Center. “We had it out in a display case for some time,” said the center’s
director, Wayland Bishop. “There’s never been that much interest.”
I took the diary to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. Thomas G. Knoles,
curator of manuscripts, said that it was comparable to a modern day planner. “They
were inexpensive items at stationer’s shops,” he said. “Soldiers could write their
thoughts down so that they could share with family when they returned.”

4. There are missing sections throughout the diary; its pages are yellowed, stained, loose
or sewn together with a thread, and it is surprisingly small: 51⁄2 inches long by 3
inches wide. What’s left is about 200 pages, covering the years 1863-64.
I am floored to think my great-great-grandfather carried the diary through the war.
The muds of Arkansas, the rains in Tennessee, the swamps in Georgia, by his side while
he fished the Big Black River in Mississippi, through the chaos of Atlanta, the day the
shell went off by his head while he carried Sgt. William Cooper from the battlefield.
My great-great-grandfather notes when his unit gives three cheers on the first
anniversary of Shiloh, when it marches and how far, when it rains, when it is hot, when
the generals — Sherman, Grant, McPherson, Logan — review them, when he is covered
in dirt from shell explosions, when he is shot in the lip, when they forage for chickens
and hogs, when they fight and when they bury the dead.
The diary passage best showing the ambiguity of war was written during the Battle at
Kennesaw Mountain, in Georgia.
A diary kept by the author's great-great grandfather, written in the Army from 1863 to 1864.
COURTESY OF MICHAEL CAROLAN

5. Tuesday June 28 1864. Artillery was terrific all day. There was sharp musketry all day. One
of our boys got shot today on the skirmish lines by a sharpshooter. The Reb’s sharpshooters
get behind cliffs of rocks & conceal themselves. We can see them poke their heads out
occasionally then we shoot them in the head. Our boys & the Rebs conversing to each other
today on the skirmish lines, trade tobaco for coffy. We give rebs coffy & they give us tobaco
in exchange.
The veteran
After the war, my great-great-grandfather suffered from the health problems that
plagued many veterans and filed for a pension. He was denied; the army did not reward
deserters. He hired a noted attorney who helped. On May 20, 1890, 25 years after the
war ended, the army overturned his dishonorable discharge.
“It was often extremely hard for a veteran to track down former comrades and
physicians to verify his claims,” said Will Hickox of the history department at the
University of Kansas and contributor to the New York Times “Disunion” blog. “It was
very difficult to overturn a dishonorable discharge, as the government spent a lot of
money on pensions and tried to only pay those deserving them.”
By the turn of the century, James Early White had fathered 10 children. His son
recalled that he sang a version of the Southern anthem “Dixie” and built fires in a
“potbellied stove” early in the mornings “for when the rest of us got up.”
A lithograph of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain made by Charles Wightman, 26th Illinois,
the unit of author's great-great grandfather. COURTESY OF MICHAEL CAROLAN

6. In a family photograph, my great-great-grandfather wears the classic long, white beard
of the veteran. He is smiling, sitting in a chair surrounded by his wife and children in
front of his white clapboard farmhouse.
In 1896, he suffered “attacks of vertigo,
convulsions, double vision, noises in his ears.”
His conversations were “disjointed and
rambling.”
Neighbors reported that he “was not right in the
head.” Three years later, a medical board labeled
him, “Insane Invalid” — a condition likely called
PTSD or traumatic brain injury today. Ten years
later, my great-great-grandfather was dead. He
was 72.
His wife died exactly 18 years to the day after
him, in 1937. She was buried next to him, “200
yards from the front door” of the farmhouse at
the Pleasant View Cemetery.
Her son wrote to the government. He wanted to
be reimbursed for her casket, services, vault,
dress, slip and hose including sales tax, all
amounting to $279.25 — a final request for
compensation from an event nearly 75 years old.
Hands of history
I held the hand of the daughter of a Civil War veteran. My great-great-grandfather’s
daughter was my great-grandmother, Pearl Olive. She died when I was 9 years old but I
still recall her voice: sharp and gentle at once, the accent pure Midwestern.
One day, when Pearl was 18, she went to her mother and her father, the Civil War
veteran, and got them out of bed. They came downstairs into the parlor of their four-
bedroom farmhouse where there was a man named Lineberry waiting. He had hired a
horse and buggy and asked to marry their daughter.
James Early White in a photograph
taken in 1903.
COURTESY OF MICHAEL CAROLAN

7. The veteran looked at Lineberry and said,
“You’re getting the best girl I have,” or so the
story goes.
Pearl’s sister was named Hattie, for whom she
named one of her daughters, my grandmother.
My wife and I named our daughter Hattie as
well. So when my great-great- grandfather’s
diary arrived the other day, I told my daughter
that a long-gone relative wrote it.
“Incredible!” she said. “What does it say?”
“A lot,” I said. “A lot.”
Michael Carolan lives in Belchertown and
teaches literature and writing at Clark
University.
In writing this essay, Carolan consulted the following sources:
Frederick H. Dyer, “A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion.” Charles Cadwell, “The
old Sixth regiment, its war record, 1861-5.” Illinois Civil War Rosters from the
Adjutant General’s Report, 26th Regiment. James Marten, “Sing Not War: The Lives of
Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America.” New York Times, “Men is
Cheap,” February 4, 2015. Pension File, James E. White, National Archives and Records
Administration. Hattie Gertrude “Trudy” Lineberry, “These Are Your Ancestors,”
unpublished. “Diary of James E. White, 1863-1864,” unpublished.
The author's great grandmother Pearl
Olive White, in a photo taken in 1964.
COURTESY OF MICHAEL CAROLAN