Benjamin Curtis, Corporal, Company I

From Slavery to the 19th U.S. Colored Troops

Benjamin Curtis was born in Prince George’s County, Maryland, about 1839. When he enlisted, the Army described him as twenty-five years old, five feet five and one-quarter inches tall, with a mulatto complexion, black eyes, and black hair. His occupation was recorded as farmer. He enlisted for three years on January 11, 1864, in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, and mustered into Company I of the 19th U.S. Colored Infantry at Camp Stanton on January 16.

Curtis entered the Army from slavery. His military record identifies him as enslaved in St. Mary’s County, and the surviving records connect his prewar status to the slaveholder named in the enlistment material. Like many men of the 19th USCT, enlistment transformed him in a matter of days from a man legally held as property into a soldier of the United States.

Shot by Union Scouts in Virginia

Curtis’s most extraordinary wartime experience came only a few months after enlistment. In April 1864 the 19th USCT was sent from Maryland into the Shenandoah Valley on a recruiting expedition. While the regiment was marching between Berryville and Winchester, its advance was suddenly fired upon. The men formed a line in rocky woods beside the road and returned the fire without breaking.

The attackers proved not to be Confederates but Union scouts operating in Confederate clothing. Captain James H. Rickard later wrote that the scouts had fired on the Black regiment to see how the men “would stand.” Curtis was struck in the forehead by a Minié ball. Rickard remembered that the shot knocked out a piece of Curtis’s skull about the size of a silver half dollar, yet did not knock him down. His comrades helped him until a wagon arrived.

A Severe Head Wound and Loss of Sight

Curtis survived a wound that could easily have been fatal. A later Surgeon General’s Office transcript gives unusually precise medical detail. It records his admission to McKim’s Mansion General Hospital in Baltimore on April 9, 1864, for a gunshot wound of the scalp. The missile entered at the left temporal region and exited at the left supraorbital region, carrying away the supraorbital ridge. He was transferred to Purney Barracks on October 13, 1864.

Curtis spent roughly seven months in the hospital system before returning to the regiment in November 1864. The injury permanently damaged his left eye, and he eventually lost its sight. Decades later he was still receiving a federal disability pension for the loss of the eye. In an 1893 pension deposition, Curtis said that he had been a pensioner since 1869 and was then receiving ten dollars a month.

Fort Harrison and Rheumatism

Curtis suffered another lasting disability during the winter campaign around Richmond. His pension papers state that while performing line or picket duty at Fort Harrison in March 1865 he developed rheumatism after exposure to severe weather. He later recalled being treated at the hospital at Point of Rocks for about three months before returning to the regiment. The attacks recurred after the war, and in an 1889 application for an increased pension he described rheumatism affecting his arms and legs and recurring pain in his head.

The head injury and the rheumatism were separate service-related conditions. The first came from the extraordinary friendly-fire incident near Winchester; the second from exposure during the regiment’s later Virginia service.

Corporal and Postwar Service in Texas

Curtis recovered sufficiently to remain in the Army after the Civil War ended. The 19th USCT was sent to Texas as part of the Federal military presence along the Rio Grande. On September 1, 1865, Curtis was promoted from private to corporal. His muster-out record notes that he had originally joined at the rank of private and records the promotion.

Corporal Curtis completed the regiment’s long postwar assignment and was honorably mustered out with Company I at Brownsville, Texas, on January 15, 1867. His record also notes a financial stoppage for one wiper and one screw driver lost, a small detail that survives beside the much larger events of his service.

Life in Baltimore

After leaving the Army, Curtis settled in Baltimore. By 1893 he was living at 510 King Street and working as an oyster shucker. In his pension deposition that year he described himself as fifty years old, although the age reported at his 1864 enlistment would make him several years older. Such age discrepancies are common in nineteenth-century military and pension records.

Curtis’s pension file also preserves evidence of his family. A September 1894 statement from the pastor of Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore certified the baptisms of three children of Sarah and Benjamin Curtis: Walter James Curtis, born September 9, 1882; Helen Elizabeth Curtis, born May 10, 1884; and Howard Benjamin Curtis, born August 15, 1886. The church record places the veteran and his family within one of Baltimore’s most important historic African American congregations.

Sources Consulted

Primary sources: Benjamin Curtis, Company I, 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, compiled military service and pension records, National Archives and Records Administration. The file includes company records, the Surgeon General’s Office hospital transcript, pension declarations and deposition, and the 1894 Sharp Street Methodist Episcopal Church statement.

Robert K. Summers, Maryland’s Black Civil War Soldiers: 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, entry for Benjamin Curtis, including Captain James H. Rickard’s account of the Virginia recruiting expedition.

Independent research: African American Civil War Memorial Museum soldier database, which independently confirms Curtis’s Company I service, enlistment date and place, birthplace, occupation, and physical description; and the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District account of the 19th USCT’s Shenandoah Valley expedition and the friendly-fire incident involving Union scouts.