James Brooks, Private, Company A

A Private Soldier

Brooks served as a private. In later testimony he described his Army life simply: he performed the ordinary duties of a soldier and “carried my musket from beginning to end.” He remembered winter quarters at Benedict. When the regiment left Camp Stanton in the spring of 1864, it went to Baltimore, then Annapolis and Washington, before marching south into Virginia.

His comrades’ pension testimony preserves unusually personal recollections of him. Several remembered a soldier called Jeff Brooks in Company A, and their statements make clear that the nickname—not James—was the name by which many of the men knew him. The testimony was complicated by the fact that several men named Brooks served in Company A, including another James Brooks, James H. Brooks.

Wounded Before Petersburg

Brooks’s military record states that he was wounded on June 22, 1864, while the 19th Regiment was serving in the trenches in front of Petersburg. A casualty sheet describes a gunshot wound of the right arm. Brooks himself later said the bullet struck his right wrist while he was on picket duty. He was taken first to a field hospital and then sent north to a hospital in New York, whose name he could no longer remember decades later.

Former Company A private James Glasgow remembered the incident when a pension examiner showed him Brooks’s photograph in 1899. After looking carefully, Glasgow recognized him as Jeff Brooks and recalled that Brooks had been shot through the wrist while the regiment was behind breastworks. Sidney Winder, another Company A veteran, likewise remembered Brooks being wounded during the regiment’s first period in the breastworks in front of Petersburg and said that Brooks went to the doctor, who bound up the wound.

Back with the Regiment

Brooks recovered sufficiently to return to duty. His later testimony and that of his comrades places him again with the 19th Regiment as it continued its wartime service. The regiment eventually went to Texas after the Civil War fighting had ended. Brooks served there with Company A and mustered out with the regiment at Brownsville, Texas, on January 15, 1867.

The Company muster-out roll records that he had joined at Fort Ringgold before final muster-out. It also shows the Army’s routine closing of his clothing and bounty accounts. Whatever uncertainties surrounded his name and prewar status, his military record establishes a long period of service extending from late 1863 through the beginning of 1867.

The Problem of His Name

More than thirty years later, Brooks faced an unusual problem when he sought a federal pension. The man applying was Charles Jefferson Brooks, but the soldier on the official rolls was James Brooks. His comrades had generally known him as Jeff. The Pension Bureau therefore had to determine whether Charles Jefferson Brooks, Jeff Brooks, and the James Brooks of Company A were one and the same man.

The investigation became especially difficult because Company A had several soldiers named Brooks. Pension examiners interviewed former comrades in Maryland and elsewhere, asking them to distinguish James Brooks, James H. Brooks, George Brooks, and other men of the same surname. Some witnesses remembered details differently after more than three decades, but a consistent picture emerged: the claimant was the short, dark-complexioned soldier they had known as Jeff Brooks, and he was the man wounded in the right wrist during the Petersburg operations.

A Photograph as Evidence

Brooks supplied something extraordinary to help prove his case: a photograph of himself. Pension examiners showed the picture to men who had served beside him in Company A. James Glasgow studied it and declared, “Ah! this is Jeff Brooks—yes I remember him.” Other veterans also identified the man in the photograph as their former comrade.

The photograph therefore survives not merely as a portrait but as a piece of federal evidence. It connected the older Charles Jefferson Brooks to the young soldier who had enlisted as James Brooks in 1863. The special examiner ultimately concluded that the testimony established Brooks’s identity and recommended that his pension claim be admitted.

After the War

The pension investigation shows Brooks living in Baltimore in 1899. In one deposition he gave an address on North Mullikin Street and described himself as a laborer. He also recalled that after being wounded he had at one point been in Richmond, Virginia, around the time of President Lincoln’s assassination. The surviving material reviewed for this profile does not yet provide a complete account of his family life, later employment, or the date and place of his death.

Why James “Jeff” Brooks Matters

James “Jeff” Brooks left an unusually vivid record for a private soldier of the 19th U.S. Colored Troops. His story includes the uncertainties of slavery and bound labor in wartime Maryland, enlistment under a name different from the one he later used, a combat wound before Petersburg, nearly three years of additional military service, and a postwar struggle to prove his own identity to the federal government.

Most important, Brooks can be seen. Individual identified photographs of Black Civil War soldiers are rare, and photographs securely tied to soldiers of the 19th Regiment are rarer still. Brooks’s portrait survived because he used it to prove who he was. His former comrades looked at the same face we see today and recognized the man they had known in Company A as Jeff Brooks.

Sources

Primary sources: James Brooks/Charles Jefferson Brooks military and pension records, National Archives, including Company Descriptive Book and muster rolls, casualty record, slave-owner compensation papers, 1899 Pension Bureau special-examination depositions, and Brooks’s identification photograph.

Additional source: Robert K. Summers, Maryland’s Black Civil War Soldiers, especially the biographical entry and photograph for James Brooks. A web search was also conducted for additional independently verifiable biographical information; no reliable source located in that search materially extended the postwar biography contained in the archival and book sources.