Christopher Pennell, Lieutenant, Company I

From the 34th Massachusetts to the 19th USCT

Pennell first served as an enlisted man in the 34th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and rose to sergeant. He was subsequently recommended for a commission in the United States Colored Troops.

He was appointed Second Lieutenant in the 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, on November 21, 1863. His military record gives his age as twenty-one. He reported to Camp Stanton near Benedict, Maryland, and mustered into the regiment on January 14, 1864, assigned to Company I.

The regiment was still being organized. Its enlisted men were Black Marylanders, many of whom had been enslaved before enlistment. Pennell therefore entered the 19th at the moment when officers and enlisted men were being brought together and trained for service.

Recruiting Duty in Maryland

Pennell's service record shows him absent from the regiment on recruiting duty in February 1864 under Special Order No. 22. By March he was present at Camp Birney, Maryland. Recruiting Black soldiers in Maryland could be dangerous work. Only a few months earlier, Lieutenant Eben White of the 7th USCT had been murdered near Benedict while engaged in recruiting Black men. The surviving War Department investigation documents the hostility that USCT recruiting officers could encounter in the same southern Maryland countryside in which Camp Stanton operated.

Pennell's early months with the 19th thus involved more than routine company duty. He participated in the effort to fill the ranks of a regiment composed of men whose enlistment itself challenged slavery and the authority of Maryland slaveholders.

Aide to Colonel Henry Goddard Thomas

Pennell soon became closely associated with Colonel Henry Goddard Thomas, commander of the Second Brigade, Fourth Division, Ninth Army Corps. Thomas, like Pennell, had attended Amherst College. During May and June 1864 Pennell was detached from Company I for duty at brigade headquarters as an aide.

His military file preserves several traces of his staff work. An April 26 order directed him to take charge of ordnance and ordnance stores returned by the regiment and deliver them to the post ordnance officer. Later muster information records him on detached service at brigade headquarters. By July he was serving beside Thomas in the trenches before Petersburg.

The relationship became more than merely official. Thomas later described Pennell with striking affection, saying that the young lieutenant was to him "as Jonathan was to David." That personal attachment gives unusual poignancy to Thomas's eyewitness accounts of Pennell's death.

The Colored Division at Petersburg

The Fourth Division of the Ninth Corps was the Army of the Potomac's Black division. Thomas's Second Brigade included the 19th, 23rd, 28th, 29th, and 31st U.S. Colored Troops. Thomas later recalled that officers and men were proud when the division was selected to lead the planned assault after the explosion of the Union mine beneath the Confederate defenses at Petersburg.

The plan was changed only hours before the attack. White divisions were sent forward first on the morning of July 30, 1864. They became badly disorganized in and around the enormous crater left by the explosion. The Black division was then ordered into a battlefield already crowded with troops and swept by Confederate artillery and musketry.

Thomas's later account emphasizes the severity of the fire. As his brigade advanced to the right of the crater, officers fell in rapid succession and hundreds of Black soldiers were killed or wounded. Major Theodore H. Rockwood of the 19th was among the officers killed. It was in this chaos that Pennell performed the act for which he was remembered.

The Guidon

Thomas advanced with Captain Marshall L. Dempcy, Lieutenant Pennell, four white orderlies carrying the brigade guidon, and troops of the 31st USCT close behind. Lieutenant Colonel W. E. W. Ross of the 31st was shot down, and Captain Wright was shot as he bent over him. The organization of the attacking troops was breaking apart under the concentrated fire.

Two of Thomas's four orderlies were wounded, including the man carrying the guidon. The other two sought shelter. Pennell then took the fallen brigade flag himself.

Thomas remembered Pennell moving outside the protection of the pits with his sword raised in his right hand and the guidon in his left, trying to call the men forward along the parapet. Confederate musketry concentrated upon him. Thomas wrote that the bullets whirled Pennell around several times before he fell.

Thomas said Pennell's courage was so conspicuous that, according to Colonel Lewis L. Weld, some soldiers became so absorbed in watching him that they neglected their own shelter and were themselves shot. Thomas called the twenty-one-year-old lieutenant a "superb boy."

Williston Seminary's later alumni record preserved essentially the same story: when the troops wavered under cross-fire, Pennell seized the brigade colors and advanced, calling on the men to follow. He fell far in front of the column. The account is especially valuable because it independently shows how Pennell's final action entered the memory of those who had known him before the war.

Twenty-Two Hours Prisoner of War in Dixie

A second account by Thomas, later published under the title "Twenty-Two Hours Prisoner of War in Dixie," adds an important detail. Two days after the battle, Thomas was one of the Union officers who met Confederate officers under a flag of truce while the dead were being recovered and buried. Thomas explained that he joined the party with an additional purpose: he hoped to recover the body of "his gallant young aide, Lieutenant Christopher Pennell, who fell by his side."

The battlefield Thomas described was appalling. Bodies from both armies lay in and around the trenches, many so badly damaged by artillery and musketry that recognition was impossible. Thomas searched for Pennell but could not find him.

A Body Never Recovered

In his account of the Colored Troops at Petersburg, Thomas was even more explicit about what he believed had happened. Two days after Pennell's death he searched for him under the flag of truce, but the body had disappeared among the dead.

Thomas believed that the sustained musketry around the place where Pennell fell had mutilated the bodies beyond recognition and that his young aide was probably buried among the unknown Union dead in one of the long trenches dug after the battle. Pennell therefore has no known individual grave.

The brigade guidon itself had a remarkable history. Thomas later recorded that the flag Pennell held when he was killed was captured by Private John W. Niles of Company D, 41st Virginia. It was taken to Richmond and recovered when Union troops entered the Confederate capital on April 3, 1865. Thus the flag associated with Pennell's final moments survived even though his body did not.

The 19th Regiment Remembers

On August 9, 1864, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph G. Perkins issued General Orders No. 14 from the headquarters of the 19th USCT near Petersburg. He thanked and congratulated the officers, noncommissioned officers, and privates for their conduct on July 30. Although the battle had ended disastrously, Perkins declared that the regiment had fought under the greatest disadvantages and had "done nothing to be ashamed of." Pennell was among the officers whose deaths formed part of that sacrifice.

Pennell's courage should not be separated from that of the Black soldiers around him. Thomas's account repeatedly praises the USCT troops who continued to advance and hold captured works under devastating fire. Pennell died while trying to rally those soldiers in one of the most violent episodes of the battle.

Pennell's Letters and the Life Behind the Uniform

A substantial collection of Pennell's letters survives at Amherst College. Robert H. Romer's 2022 study, I Am a Bitter Enemy to Slavery: An Amherst College Student Goes to War, Christopher Pennell (1842-1864), uses those letters to recover the person behind the brief military record.

The correspondence reveals Pennell's opposition to slavery, his struggle with his father's objections to enlistment, and his affection for Sabra Clark Snell, daughter of an Amherst professor. According to Romer's research, Pennell received a letter from Sabra shortly before the Battle of the Crater that convinced him that his love was returned. He wrote to her only days before his death.

That private story makes the battlefield account more than an episode of military heroism. Pennell was twenty-one years old, an only son, a former college student, and a young man imagining a life beyond the war when he was killed.

Remembering Christopher Pennell

Pennell served with the 19th USCT for only about six and a half months. Yet his life connects several important parts of the regiment's history: the formation of the 19th at Camp Stanton, the recruitment of Black Marylanders into the Union Army, the relationship between Black enlisted men and their white officers, and the regiment's ordeal at the Battle of the Crater.

His final action is unusually well documented because Henry Goddard Thomas witnessed it and wrote about it more than once. Pennell did not simply fall anonymously in the assault. He deliberately left shelter, recovered the brigade guidon, and exposed himself to concentrated fire while attempting to rally soldiers whose officers had been shot down.

His body was never identified, but his name survived in Army records, the history of the 19th USCT, Amherst and Williston records, Thomas's eyewitness accounts, and Pennell's own letters. The photograph of him published with Thomas's account of "The Colored Troops at Petersburg" gives a face to the young officer Thomas remembered with such affection. Together these sources preserve an unusually vivid record of a life that ended in a few terrible minutes outside Petersburg on July 30, 1864.

Sources Consulted

• Christopher Pennell, Compiled Military Service Record, Company I, 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, National Archives and Records Administration.

• Robert K. Summers, Maryland's Black Civil War Soldiers: 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops (2020).

• Henry Goddard Thomas, "The Colored Troops at Petersburg," Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 4.

• Henry G. Thomas, "Twenty-Two Hours Prisoner of War in Dixie," War Papers, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Maine Commandery, vol. 1 (1898).

• James H. Rickard, Services with Colored Troops in Burnside's Corps (Providence: Rhode Island Soldiers and Sailors Historical Society, 1894).

• U.S. House of Representatives, Murder of Lieut. Eben White, 43rd Congress, 1st Session, Ex. Doc. No. 281 (1874).

• Williston Seminary, Alumni Records from 1842 to 1874.

• Amherst College records and Christopher Pennell correspondence, as discussed in Robert H. Romer, I Am a Bitter Enemy to Slavery: An Amherst College Student Goes to War, Christopher Pennell (1842-1864) (2022).

• Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Petersburg campaign casualty records.