Chapman's Roll of Honor, counted whole: two hundred and thirty names

1880

The pull: Chapman's 1880 county history closes its war chapter with a Roll of Honor — the county's Civil War dead as the county itself compiled them fifteen years after Appomattox. The banked Wars section prints the roll's ten officers by name and describes the rest without a total, declining to sum partial tallies into a false whole, and logs a roll-wide count as a mechanical pull. The count is now made, from the printed roll itself, pages 444 to 448.

The count: the roll opens under its motto — "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country" — with the officers: Captain James Houghton, killed at Shiloh 7 April 1862; Captain Isaac M. Pettit, died of wounds 19 March 1863; Captain Frank A. Hardman; Lieutenants Seth B. Parker and William H. Criswell and Captain James M. Holliday, all killed at Chickamauga on 19 September 1863; Lieutenant Solomon H. Fountain, died of wounds; Captain Thomas B. Roberts; Chaplain Joseph R. Albright and Surgeon Samuel Higginbotham, both dead of disease — ten officers. Then, under the printed head "Non-Commissioned Officers and Privates," the roll runs alphabetically from John Auten — killed at Bealington, Virginia, 10 July 1861, the county's first martyr, whose story the chapter tells next — to James Zeigler, killed at Iuka. Counted line by line, that list carries two hundred and twenty names. The Roll of Honor as Chapman prints it therefore names two hundred and thirty dead.

The one duplication, printed rather than smoothed: Captain Thomas B. Roberts stands twice in the roll — among the officers, "died July 4, 1863," and again among the privates as "Roberts, Thomas B — died July 4, 1862." It is the same name and the same day of the year, with the year in conflict between Chapman's own two printings. Counted as printed lines, the roll is two hundred and thirty; counted as distinct men, if the two Roberts entries are one man printed twice, it is two hundred and twenty-nine. Chapman does not resolve his own conflict, and this history does not resolve it for him: both figures stand here with the reason, and any use of the roll's size should carry the same note. What the roll is, at either figure, is the county's own nineteenth-century accounting of its Civil War price — compiled from the community's knowledge, carrying men the regimental tallies miss and arranged as a memorial, not an audit; the Wars section's company-by-company losses stand beside it, and the two records are not interchangeable.

Sources:

1. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), ch. VII, the Roll of Honor at pp. 444–448, read entire and counted line by line from the printed volume (the archive.org copy, historyofstjosep00chap).