Gettysburg by Nussbaum Ben;

Author:Nussbaum, Ben; [Nussbaum, Edited by Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing Company, Incorporated
Published: 2014-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

This carte de visite image of Alexander Newton, left, and Daniel Lathrop is engraved on a monument honoring the 29th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry in New Haven, Connecticut.

This was the first of many narrow escapes from death for Newton. Perhaps his closest call occurred on August 29. On that day he stood in the trenches, talking with his comrades, when an artillery shell struck the ground and exploded. It killed the private next to him. The force of the blast threw sand and dirt into Newton’s face and temporarily blinded him. He never fully recovered his eyesight and later wore glasses.

About this time, he became a quartermaster sergeant and joined the regimental staff. He was serving in this capacity on April 3, 1865, when the Twenty-ninth numbered among the first Union forces to enter Richmond after Confederate troops withdrew. The next day, Abraham Lincoln visited the fallen Confederate capital. Newton noted, “We were present in Richmond when President Lincoln made his triumphal entry into the city. It was a sight never to be forgotten.”

The Twenty-ninth left the Richmond area about two weeks later and, after a brief stint guarding prisoners at Point Lookout, Maryland, sailed for Texas. In October 1865, the regiment mustered out of service and returned to New Haven.

Newton rejoined his wife, Olivia, the daughter of Weekly Anglo-African newspaper editor Robert Hamilton, and his young daughter and son. He abandoned his profession as a mason and became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. After Olivia died, in 1868, he tended to the faithful at various places across the country. In Little Rock, Arkansas, he met a Sunday school secretary named Lulu Campbell. They married in 1876. Newton fathered another boy and girl with Lulu.

Newton rose to become an influential and respected church elder based in Camden, New Jersey. At the pinnacle of his career, personal tragedy devastated him. Over a six-year period beginning in 1899, he suffered the deaths of both of his daughters, his younger son, and his mother. He paid tribute to his family in a 1910 book, Out of the Briars. The title, he explained in the preface, is a metaphor that represents his emergence, torn and bleeding, from the thorns and briars of prejudice, hatred, and persecution of slavery.

Newton lived until age eighty-three, dying of heart problems in 1921.

In 2008, eighty-seven years after his death, families of the veterans in the Twenty-ninth dedicated a monument to the regiment in New Haven. It is composed of eight stone tablets marked with the names of those who served. The tablets surround an obelisk. Engraved on one face of it is a portrait of Newton and fellow quartermaster sergeant Daniel Lathrop taken from this carte de visite image.

From African American Faces of the Civil War:

An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories

by Ronald S. Coddington, Copyright 2012

by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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