Tobias Rose on America’s Bloodiest Day
As I ramble
through the family’s history, I continue to uncover some interesting folks,
most recently my wife’s great-great-grandfather – Tobias Rose.
Samuel Tobias Rose was a third
generation North Carolinian who lived almost his entire life in Johnston
County, just south of Raleigh. He and
his family resided near the Neuse River.
They were the yeoman farmers Thomas Jefferson believed to be the
backbone of America. Tobias was not a slave owner, but living close to Raleigh,
he was certainly aware of the all the rhetoric associated with slavery and secession.
North Carolina was a reluctant
member of the Confederacy, not leaving the Union until late May of 1861, the
next to the last state to secede, departing the Union exactly 5 months after
South Carolina, the first state to secede.
It appears that Tobias may have
been a reluctant rebel as well. When he joined
the Confederate Army, the war had been raging for more than a year. There is no way of knowing what motivated him
to enlist, but for the vast majority of southerners it was not about slavery, it
was simply to defend their homeland.
On July 16, 1862, exactly one month
after the birth of his youngest son, Tobias went to Raleigh and joined Company
E of North Carolina’s 18th Infantry Regiment.
The regiment had been formed at Carolina Beach the previous year and had
joined the Army of Northern Virginia that Spring.
The 18th served in General Lawrence Branch’s
Brigade, which was attached to A.P. Hill’s Division in Stonewall Jackson’s
Corps, and it would be a member of the 18th who accidently shot
Jackson during the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863.
From a personal perspective, Branch
is fascinating. A North Carolina
congressman in the late 1850’s, he was born in Halifax County, North Carolina,
and worked for more than a decade as a young lawyer in Tallahassee, Florida –
two places where my ancestors lived during the same time periods. He was also
the great-great-grandfather of the writer Armistead Maupin.
It appears that Tobias was part of a
replacement force that joined the regiment after the Seven Days Battles in
Virginia that had taken place between June 25 and July 1. During those battles the regiment lost
fifty-seven percent of the almost four hundred troops it sent into the fight.
Depending on his training, and
there was very little in those days, Tobias probably joined the regiment
quickly, fighting in the Battles of Cedar Mountain, Second Manassas (Bull Run),
Chantilly and Harper’s Ferry. He was also involved in the Battle of Antietam,
one of the most important confrontations of the war, at perhaps the most
critical moment of the battle.
On September 17, 1862, the Confederate
Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, and the Union Army
of the Potomac, commanded by General George B. McClellan, faced off near the
town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, beside Antietam Creek. The combined total of the
two armies who met that day was more than 125,000 men.
The bloody battle began at dawn and
raged for most of the day, remembered today for killing fields such as Miller's
Cornfield, Dunker Church and the Sunken Road.
In the early afternoon, Union troops under the command of General Ambrose
Burnside entered the action, capturing a stone bridge over Antietam Creek and
advancing against the Confederates.
At that crucial moment, when it
appeared that Lee’s right flank was going to collapse, Confederate reinforcements
arrived, launching a counter assault, pushing the Federal troops back across
the bridge.
Among those Confederate
reinforcements were members of North Carolina’s 18th Infantry
Regiment, commanded by General Branch and including Private Tobias Rose. They had just marched at full speed almost
twenty miles from Harpers Ferry.
Tactically the battle was
considered a draw. Lee moved his army back to Virginia. McClellan, despite his superior numbers,
failed to pursue. That inaction ultimately cost him his command. Lincoln replaced him with Burnside in early
November.
Strategically the battle was a
Union victory. It gave Lincoln the
confidence he needed to announce the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the
slaves in the rebellious states at the beginning of 1863 and changed the
Union’s motivation for the war from preservation of the Union to ending slavery.
The Battle of Antietam was the
bloodiest day in United States history, with a combined total of 22,717 dead,
wounded, or missing.
During the fighting, General Branch
was shot and killed by a Union sniper, falling into the arms of a fellow
officer. Tobias Rose was seriously
wounded and taken to a hospital at Winchester,
Virginia, where he died on October 26, 1862.
Winchester was at the center of the Civil War, changing hands more than
50 times. As a result, it provided
medical care for thousands of soldiers from both sides.
Tobias was 34 years old when he
died, one of almost 700,000 Americans who died in that war. He left behind his wife, Sallie Parish Rose, and
their nine children, including my wife’s great-grandfather, Edwin Gray Rose,
whose seventh birthday was just five days before his father’s death. In the days that followed, Tobias’ body was
returned to North Carolina and he was buried in Selma. Sallie would be buried beside him 34 years
later.
The
illustration above is “The Battle of
Antietam” by Kurz and Allison done in 1878.
It depicts the fighting at the bridge on Antietam Creek where the 18th
Regiment helped to drive the Union forces back across the bridge. The original
art is in the collection of the Library of Congress.
© David Lee McMullen 2018
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