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1862 – 1865
The battery: the Twenty-first Independent Indiana Battery was the county's artillery; Chapman prints its roster, and among its privates stands "Jennings, Samuel." Its sergeants Henry C. Baird and William M. Whitten head a county list that runs through the county's German and farm families alike. Henry Hain's part in raising it — recruiting for it, accompanying it to Indianapolis, serving as its sutler under Captain Andrews — stands in his article above. The battery's war ran through Kentucky and Tennessee to the defense of Nashville in December 1864, and the township's named man in it was there at the end.
Samuel R. Jennings, Jr., whole: he was the son of Samuel R. Jennings, senior (born at Monroe, Orange County, New York, in 1807; died in this county 4 January 1874), and Matilda (Barkdoll) Jennings (died 25 March 1864) — the gunsmith's daughter of this section's 1812 article. "In December, 1862, when but seventeen years of age, Samuel R. Jennings, Jr., enlisted for service in the Civil war, becoming a member of the Twenty-first Independent Indiana Battery, which he joined at Nashville, Tennessee. About November 1, 1864, he participated in the engagement at Columbia, Tennessee, thence to Nashville in advance of Hood, and was under fire there on the 15th and 16th of December" — the two days of the Battle of Nashville, in the battery line of Thomas's army. "He was discharged at Indianapolis in June, 1865. During his service he was twice in the hospital at Columbia, Tennessee, and once at Indianapolis, and at the time of his return home was ill with typhoid pneumonia." After the war: four years in Missouri at farming, painting and school-teaching; two years at Edwardsburg, Michigan; two more in Missouri and Kansas; home again in 1874; and in 1876 onto the farm that closes his record — eighty-eight acres in Section 30 of Clay Township, "known as The Willows," which he made, in his biographer's phrase, from "a wild tract into one of the best improved farms in the township." His township offices — assessor for four years, trustee in his second term when Howard wrote — stand in the Government leg; what belongs here is that Clay Township's battery boy came home to be its trustee, which is a service record of a second kind and is printed as the sketch prints it.
The family's second loss, at clause strength: Jennings's elder brother James "was killed at Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1865, while in the United States detective service under Theodore Coquillard" — the South Bend founder turned federal detective chief. That is the whole record reached: a war-service death in government employ, in the war's last year, in the state's capital, with no date, circumstance or record beyond the clause. It is printed at exactly that strength, as a death in the Union's service by a son of this county's Jennings family — not a soldier's death, and not dressed as one. The settling sources are the federal detective service's records and the Indianapolis press of 1865.
Sources:
- Howard (1907), vol. 2 — the Samuel R. Jennings, Jr., sketch whole, including the clause for James Jennings.
- Chapman (1880), ch. VII — the 21st Battery's printed roster, "Jennings, Samuel" among the privates.