Episode 36. An uncivil war

The first member of our branch of the Pounds who came to America, was Richard Pound; he was born somewhere in England in about 1821. There are a lot of Richards who show up in the English records, but I can’t identify him or his wife Sarah, while they were living in England. She was English but I can’t find her maiden name. They came to America with son Charles and daughter Eliza some time before 1850. They first show up in the US in the Census of 1850 when Richard was about 30 years old. There is no ship record documenting the family’s journey. He was living in 1850 in Washington, Missouri in Buchanan County about 50 miles west of the Soulard Market area where he would later live. He apparently lived in Chester, Illinois in the 1860s and served in an Illinois unit during the Civil War. Richard was short [5’1”] with dark hair and blue eyes according to the record of his military service. He was a tiny man, not unlike his great granddaughter Lorraine, or her brothers Ed and Russ.

The Civil War had been triggered by the election of Lincoln, the first president from the recently formed “Republican Party,” a regional party that received no support in the South in 1860.   The South, both then and now, argued that the cause of the war was not slavery, but a fundamental disagreement about State’s Rights. The repeated mention of slavery in the Constitution of the South suggests otherwise. The South and the North have never come to much of an agreement about the war. They can’t even agree on its name: for the North it was “The Civil War” while for the South it was “The War Between the States.” I had never heard of the “War Between the States” until we moved to Virginia and Colonel Bird, a Virginia native, corrected me when I referred at some point to the “Civil War.”   The names to describe the war give a clue to the underlying beliefs of both sides about each other, and about the nature and causes of the conflict.

Eventually, more than 600,000 died [365,000 from the North, 260,000 from the South]; more than 400,000 additional soldiers were wounded. The South had expected to win because Europe and the industrial northeast were heavily dependent on cheap Southern cotton; using slave labor gave a competitive edge to the South against other cotton producers. The South supplied more than 75% of the world’s cotton before the war [India and Egypt also produced cotton albeit without the benefit of disposable human beings providing free labor]. Cotton represented more than 60% of US exports before the war. The phrase “King Cotton” may have originated in a statement by a southern senator, James Henry Hammond, in 1858 that said much about how Southerners viewed their status in the world:

Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the whole world to our feet… What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not to make war on cotton. No power on the earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.

But the expected European help never materialized. The Union blockade of Southern ports, Northern advantages of population and industrial strength, and the reluctance of Europeans to enter the war, sealed the fate of the South.

Even nearly 150 years after the end of the war, animosity between North and South lingers for multiple reasons. Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea” had deliberately targeted civilian populations and cities to punish the South and lessen its will to fight. After the destruction of much of the South, reconstruction efforts were stopped prematurely. The assassination of Lincoln left the North in no mood to deal leniently with the South. The imposition of reconstruction was heavy handed and never completed as contemplated by Lincoln. The assassination of Lincoln not only removed the South’s best hope for leniency and recovery, it gave the Radical Republicans the upper hand. The North spent significant resources to find and bury Northern dead after the war, but largely ignored Southern dead – an insult that rubbed salt in the raw wound to Southern Pride.   Even today the fundamental issue remains that many in the South have never accepted the concept that the amount of melanin in one’s skin has little to do with intelligence, the content of one’s character, or fundamental rights due to human beings.

It is hard to imagine Richard Pound’s degree of enthusiasm as an Englishman in his adopted land, required to fight in a war to free black men. He shows up on the Civil War Draft Registration Records of 1863-65 in a list of men living in Chester, Illinois [the 12^th Congressional District] “subject to military duty” during the summer of 1863. As a 42-year old with a family, he didn’t join during the first years of the war; so perhaps he joined only after it became clear that he was going to be drafted. However, his inclusion in the listing of draft eligible men from Chester in 1863 perhaps reflects a clerical error since he actually had volunteered, and been in and out of service, by the time he was listed as “available.” He had been enlisted by Col Morrison for a 3-year tour of duty starting on 18 Aug 1862. Richard served as a Private in Company H, 22^nd Regimen of the Illinois Infantry.  He was released 23 Apr 1863 after only 8 months of his 3-year tour by order of General William S. Rosecrans [1819-1898].

Rosecrans was a notoriously arrogant general who publicly disagreed with his superiors. He particularly got under General U S Grant’s skin. The timing of Richard’s dismissal from the Army suggests several possibilities. Gen. Rosecrans had waged the Battle of Stone River Dec 31, 1862-Jan 2 1863 in Tennessee while Richard was serving. The next major engagement was the Tullahoma [or The Middle Tennessee] Campaign that began June 24, 1863. So Richard was sent home from Murfreesboro, Tennessee [southeast of Nashville and currently site of the Stone River National Battlefield] between battles. Richard may have been wounded in the Battle of Stone River or become ill due to non-injury related physical or mental illness [until recently, military wartime deaths were often due to infection rather than to actual battle-related injuries]. He was sent home on a pension that began Apr 23, 1863, the date of his discharge from active duty. The nature of his wounds is unclear but he received the a high pension [$8/month while most injured low rank soldiers received $2-6/month] suggesting that he was badly disabled by his war injuries. His release from the army was an “honorable discharge.”

After the war it is not clear where Richard Pound went or how he cared for himself. There are many spellings of “Pound” [Pond, Pounde, Poind,,Pounds, Pownd, Pund, etc], but it appears that the spelling of his name does not explain the lack of records. In 1860 and 1870 he eluded the census takers (regardless of what spelling variant you look for). Edward Pound [Lorraine Pound Cleary’s grandfather] was born in about 1864 to Sarah and Richard. Sarah worked as a cook in 1872-1873 at the Marine Hospital about a mile south of Soulard Market. Some time after that time Richard married a woman named Mary, who had been born in Germany. Richard and wife Mary lived near James Street about one mile from Soulard Market. She died on Feb 19, 1884 of dropsy [a term that meant generalized fluid accumulation in the tissues; this usually that meant heart failure but could also reflect a kidney disease called nephritic syndrome.]

Richard received care in the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Leavenworth, Kansas and eventually died [5 Feb 1894] there. His death was listed in the Report of the Board of Managers for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1895 as due to “general debility.”   It’s hard to know what exactly that meant in a 72-year old man. The report lists his “place of admittance” as Missouri, so he was evidently shipped to this facility in Kansas when he became too ill or feeble to care for himself. The facility had been founded in 1884 primarily as a home for the care of disabled volunteer soldiers. It shifted from an emphasis on serving as a home, to functioning as a hospital in the early 1930s.

These early Pounds were not a prosperous lot. Serious illnesses and injury put them in dire straights. The frequent moves suggest some difficulty paying the rent. Mom’s grandfather (i.e. Richard’s son) Edward Pound moved often, usually in the area around Soulard Market. In 1881 he lived at 1837 Arsenal [0.9mi from Soulard], in 1886-89 at 2433 Carondalet [10mi west of Soulard], in 1895-96 at 1884 S 11^th [0.4mi north of Soulard], in 1896-97 at 2620 DeKalb [0.8mi southeast of Soulard], in 1897-98 at 2859 Wisconsin [0.9mi southwest of Soulard], and in 1898 at 1900 south 3rd [0.4mi north of Soulard]. Eventually he lived at 158 Victor Street less than a mile from Soulard Market, where he died at age 34 of chronic nephritis [Dec 30 1899]. Chronic illness was just as effective in those days at making a family destitute, as it is nowadays. The Missouri Death Records 1834-1910 state that he was buried in “Pottersfield” with the undertaker listed as “City.” His wife Elizabeth Zamrazil eventually married Otto Ruegger who raised mom’s aunt Josephine [1897-1957], uncle Richard [1893-1962], and her father Edward Pound [1895-1938].