Henry, Maribeau and the Fourth of July

Family histories are filled with interesting tales. Mine includes an odd connection to the Fourth of July, one that dates back more than 150 years to one of the most important moments of the Civil War.  It was July 4. 1863.  In the East, Lee’s army was limping home, having just lost the Battle of Gettysburg the day before.  In the West, after a siege of almost two months, Vicksburg, Mississippi fell to Grant’s forces.

The campaign to take Vicksburg, a fortified city with a commanding view of the Mississippi River, had begun the day after Christmas the previous year and included both the Union Army and Navy. It was one of the most intense campaigns of the war and by the time it ended, residents and Confederate troops were starving, forced to live in a network of trenches and tunnels to escape the Union bombardment.

The loss of Vicksburg gave the Union total control of the Mississippi River and split the southern states.  While the war would continue for almost two more years, those two Union victories sounded the death knell of the Confederacy.

Among the Southern soldiers who surrendered and were taken as prisoners on that Fourth of July were two of my great-great-great uncles – Henry and Mirabeau Byington from Wilkinson County, Georgia.

Henry, 29, was a captain and commanded Company D of Georgia’s 57^th Infantry.  Maribeau, 25, was a musician, a rank between private and corporal, in the same company.  During the Civil War both armies had musicians who provided a variety of services, from entertaining the troops to helping commanders direct movement on the battlefield.  The brothers probably worked in concert.

After a prisoner exchange in August, Henry and Maribeau rejoined the Confederate forces, taking part in the Tennessee and Atlanta Campaigns. They fought with the Army of Tennessee, which was the last to surrender, on April 26, 1865, two weeks after Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse.

Henry and Maribeau survived the war, returned to Georgia and lived into the early Twentieth Century, although I doubt if they enjoyed celebrating Independence Day.

As for Vicksburg, it is said that the city did not celebrate the Fourth of July for more than forty years.

The men in the photograph are believed to be of members of Company H, 57th Georgia Regiment, Army of Tennessee, 1863. Left to right, First Lieutenant Archibald C. McKinley, Captain John Richard Bonner, Scott (an African American cook and probably still a slave), and Second Lieutenant Williams S. Stetson.

© David Lee McMullen 2018