Andrew J. Raymor, Lieutenant, Company A

Captured at the Battle of the Crater

Raymor went into the Battle of the Crater with Company G on July 30, 1864. His company muster roll later recorded him simply as “Missing in action July 30, 1864.” Another roll made the outcome clear: “Taken prisoner July 30, 1864. Action front of Petersburg, Va.”

The uncertainty was immediate and personal. On July 31, Captain James W. Rickard of Company G wrote to Raymor’s wife, Emma, from the regiment’s camp. “Yesterday we had a terrible battle,” he told her. “Your husband is missing.” Rickard believed Raymor had been wounded in the arm and captured. He promised to communicate anything further he learned. The letter preserved in the pension file conveys something the terse muster rolls cannot: for Raymor’s family, the Battle of the Crater began as a day of frightening uncertainty.

Raymor later described what happened. In pension testimony, a fellow officer recalled that they were captured at Petersburg on July 30 and taken south as prisoners. The men were first held in confinement and eventually sent to Columbia, South Carolina. Raymor survived a captivity that lasted for months.

A Prisoner at Camp Asylum

Raymor was among the Union officers confined at Camp Asylum in Columbia, South Carolina. The prison occupied the grounds of the unfinished South Carolina State Lunatic Asylum and became one of the Confederacy’s principal prisons for captured Union officers during the final winter of the war.

Later testimony from William H. Mills, an officer who had been imprisoned with Raymor, described the conditions they endured. After capture the prisoners were marched and transported south, sometimes sleeping on the ground without blankets. Their food could amount to little more than a pint of corn meal a day, ground cob and all, with little wood available for cooking or warmth.

Mills remembered Raymor becoming seriously ill with rheumatism while a prisoner. Raymor had no blanket, slept on the ground, and developed severe pain in his joints, back, hips, and sides. Mills recalled rubbing him with hot cloths and doing what he could to relieve him. At one point Raymor was so weak that the other prisoners had to help keep him warm and stimulate his circulation. The testimony was given decades later in support of Raymor’s pension claim, but it provides an unusually vivid account of the physical cost of his imprisonment.

Parole, Exchange, and Return

Raymor was eventually released from Confederate custody and returned to Union control. His records show him at Camp Parole near Annapolis, Maryland, in March 1865. War Department Special Orders No. 119, dated March 11, granted Second Lieutenant Andrew J. Raymor, identified as a paroled prisoner of war, thirty days’ leave.

By May 1865 he had returned to duty with the 19th Regiment. His absence had lasted from the Battle of the Crater through most of the remaining war. He had missed the regiment’s later Petersburg operations and the final campaigns in Virginia, but he returned in time to accompany it on its postwar assignment.

Texas and Promotion

In June 1865 the 19th U.S. Colored Troops was ordered to Texas as part of the large Federal force sent to the Rio Grande after the Civil War. Raymor went with the regiment to Brownsville. In August 1865 he was transferred from Company G to Company K.

Raymor’s wartime experience and continued service brought further advancement. He was promoted to first lieutenant and assigned to Company A on October 28, 1865. The Maryland roster later summarized his career in the regiment: he entered as second lieutenant of Company G, transferred to Company K, and was promoted to first lieutenant of Company A.

His surviving papers also include family correspondence from Brownsville. The letters show the ordinary anxieties of a soldier separated from home after the great battles had ended—concern about illness in the family, money, mail, and the hope of returning home. They are a reminder that the 19th Regiment’s service did not end with Appomattox.

Mustered Out

Raymor remained with the 19th until the regiment was mustered out at Brownsville, Texas, on January 15, 1867. By then he had spent more than three years with the regiment, including combat before Petersburg, seven months as a Confederate prisoner, and the long postwar occupation duty in Texas.

The Lasting Effects of Captivity

The hardships of imprisonment followed Raymor into civilian life. In later years he sought a federal pension for disability that he and his witnesses attributed to his wartime captivity. The pension evidence repeatedly returned to the rheumatism that began after exposure, cold, inadequate shelter, and sleeping on the ground as a prisoner.

One former comrade recalled that Raymor’s feet became swollen and painful and that he suffered recurring attacks after his release. Another witness described him as a strong, healthy man before the war but said his health was impaired afterward. Such testimony must be read as evidence submitted in a pension proceeding, yet the consistency of the accounts and their connection to the known conditions of Confederate imprisonment give them considerable historical value.

After the War

Raymor returned to civilian life with Emma and their family. By the late nineteenth century they were living in Michigan. Andrew J. Raymor died on June 5, 1893, at age fifty-five. He is buried in Saranac Cemetery in Ionia County, Michigan. His wife, Emma A. Raymor, who had endured the uncertainty of his capture in 1864, died in 1905 and is buried there with him.

Raymor’s story is unusual even among the officers of the 19th Regiment. He began the war in a New York unit, accepted a commission to lead Black soldiers, fought with them at the Crater, disappeared into Confederate captivity, survived Camp Asylum, returned to the regiment, and then served with it on the Rio Grande until 1867. His military and pension files preserve not only the official outline of that career but also the voices of the people around him—his captain writing to his wife after the Crater and fellow prisoners remembering his suffering decades later.

A Surviving Photograph

The above wartime portrait of Andrew J. Raymor survives in the Library of Congress’s Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs. The photograph identifies him with his earlier New York service and his later commission in the 19th U.S. Colored Troops. It is a particularly valuable survival because identified photographs connected with the 19th Regiment are uncommon.

Sources Consulted

• Andrew J. Raymor, compiled military service and pension records, National Archives and Records Administration (file supplied for this profile).

• Robert P. Summers, Maryland’s Black Civil War Soldiers.

• History and Roster of Maryland Volunteers, War of 1861–1865, Vol. II, roster of the 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, Maryland State Archives.

• James H. Rickard, accounts of service with United States Colored Troops and the 19th USCT, used as supplementary context for the regiment and the Battle of the Crater.

• Library of Congress, Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, portrait of Andrew J. Raymor.

• Saranac Cemetery records, Ionia County, Michigan, for Andrew J. and Emma A. Raymor.