Jacob Butler, Private, Company E
Jacob Butler, Private, Company E
Jacob Butler was born in Charles County, Maryland, about 1844. His surviving military and pension records preserve an unusually detailed glimpse of his childhood in slavery. When Jacob was about four years old, he was among eleven enslaved people listed in the estate inventory of Richard Gardiner (also spelled Gardner), who died in 1848. Jacob was valued at $125. The others ranged in age from six to forty-six and were assigned monetary values from $125 to $600.
The estate records later became important evidence in Butler's pension case. They showed that Jacob was sold for $100 to Richard Gardiner's brother William Gardiner. After William's death, Jacob passed by bequest to Frances Helen Gardiner, the wife of Edward W. Gardiner. In a 1908 affidavit, Frances Helen Gardiner recalled that Butler was then cared for by her husband until he left for the Army.
Butler's Army records describe him as a farmer, about eighteen years old, five feet five and one-half inches tall, with black complexion, black eyes, and black hair. He enlisted in January 1864 for three years and became a private in Company E of the 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops. The surviving cards differ slightly on the precise date, giving January 4 or January 5, 1864. His later pension declaration identifies his enlistment place as Benedict, Charles County, Maryland; the regimental record places his entry into the 19th during the period when the regiment was organizing and training at Camp Stanton.
The circumstances of his departure were remembered very differently by the former slaveholding family. Frances Helen Gardiner stated in 1908 that Butler had been 'compelled to go out to war' and later said that he had been 'called out to war.' Butler's own history, as reconstructed from the records, is that an enslaved young man left the Gardiner household and entered United States service at the moment when enlistment in the U.S. Colored Troops offered Black Maryland men a direct path from slavery into freedom.
Butler remained with Company E through the regiment's active campaigning. The 19th USCT joined the Army of the Potomac in the spring of 1864 and fought through the Overland Campaign and the long struggle around Petersburg and Richmond. Its authorized battle honors included the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Tolopotomy, Cold Harbor, Old Church, Petersburg, Weldon Railroad, Cemetery Hill, Hatcher's Run, Bermuda Hundred, and Richmond.
Butler's individual service cards do not record a wound or absence during the great 1864 battles. A later pension application, however, stated that he suffered an injury to his left leg while performing duty in the United States Army. The surviving file does not establish when or where that injury occurred.
He was present for the 19th's most costly day, the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg on July 30, 1864, where the regiment suffered devastating losses. Butler survived and continued in service. A January-February 1865 muster roll listed him absent sick since December 27, 1864, but he returned to duty and remained with the regiment.
After the Civil War ended, the 19th USCT was not immediately discharged. In June 1865 it sailed for Texas and was stationed on the Rio Grande frontier. Butler served there until the regiment completed its term. His company muster-out roll records his honorable discharge at Brownsville, Texas, on January 15, 1867. He was still owed money on his clothing account and part of his federal bounty.
Butler's file also contains records of a claim by Edward W. Gardiner for federal compensation for an enlisted slave. Such claims were permitted under wartime legislation when a loyal Maryland slaveholder could prove ownership and the enlistment of an enslaved man in the United States forces. The paperwork identifies Gardiner as claiming compensation for Jacob Butler of Company E. Whatever the legal theory of the claim, the documents create a stark contrast: while Butler was serving as a United States soldier, a former slaveholder was seeking payment from the government for the loss of him as property.
After nearly three years in uniform, Butler returned to Charles County. He married Georgianna Jensen at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Pomfret, Maryland, on August 28, 1869. The ceremony was performed by Father Camillus Vicinanza, an Italian Jesuit priest. Georgianna's later widow's pension declaration states that neither she nor Jacob had been previously married and that they had no surviving children under sixteen when she applied.
Butler lived in the Port Tobacco area and worked as a laborer. By the 1890s he was pursuing an invalid pension based on his Army service and the injury to his left leg. His 1912 pension declaration gave his age as sixty-seven, his birthplace as Charles County, and his post-office address as Port Tobacco. It also stated that his residences since leaving the Army had remained in Charles County.
One of the most remarkable documents in Butler's pension file was created more than forty years after emancipation. On March 16, 1908, Butler visited Frances Helen Gardiner, whom he had not seen for about twenty years, to obtain an affidavit establishing his age and identity. She later testified that she immediately recognized him as the man who had once been enslaved by the Gardiner family. Her affidavit traced his transfer from Richard Gardiner's estate to William Gardiner and then into her own household, and estimated Butler's age at about sixty-three.
The episode is an extraordinary reversal of the relationship preserved in the antebellum records. The child once listed in an estate inventory with a dollar value had survived slavery, served almost three years in the United States Army, returned home as a free man, married, and decades later used the records and testimony of the family that had claimed ownership of him to establish his rights as a United States veteran.
Jacob Butler died at Port Tobacco, Maryland, on December 21, 1912. He was about sixty-eight years old. His widow, Georgianna Butler, applied for a federal widow's pension in January 1913. Her application identified Jacob's service in Company E, 19th U.S. Colored Infantry, his 1869 marriage to her, and his death at Port Tobacco.
Jacob Butler's surviving record is especially valuable because it connects several stages of one man's life that are often documented separately: enslavement as a child, sale within a slaveholding family, enlistment in the U.S. Colored Troops, combat service, postwar family life, and the federal pension system. In 1848 he appeared in an estate inventory as 'Jacob,' age four, valued at $125. Sixteen years later he wore the uniform of the United States. He then served through the 19th USCT's campaigns and its postwar duty in Texas before returning to the same Maryland county in which he had been enslaved. His life makes the transformation represented by Black military service in the Civil War unusually tangible.
• Compiled military service and pension records of Jacob Butler, Company E, 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, National Archives.
• Robert K. Summers, Maryland's Black Civil War Soldiers: 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops (2020), entry for Jacob Butler.
• History and Roster of Maryland Volunteers, War of 1861-5, vol. 2, history and roster of the 19th Regiment Infantry, U.S. Colored Troops.
• Henry Goddard Thomas, accounts of U.S. Colored Troops in the Petersburg campaign, used for regimental context.