Oliver Otis Howard
In the summer of 1862 this Union general led two New York regiments in a gallant charge at Fair Oaks that cost him his right arm
This pious Union officer earned a fearless reputation on Civil War battlefields
As the German soldiers from the 11th Corps rushed piecemeal away from the Confederate onslaught, Major General Oliver O. Howard did what he thought best to curb the hysteria of his fleeing men. Thousands were routed when a strong column of Confederate soldiers under the legendary leadership of General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson smashed into his corps’ exposed flank and collapsed the Union line. Howard received plenty of criticism (and still does to this day) for his men’s flight during the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, but no one ever questioned Howard’s bravery on that day.
Mortified at his men’s cowardly behaviour, Howard grabbed the nearest Union standard and slid the pole between the pinned-up sleeve of his frock coat where his right arm used to be, having lost it in battle one year before. He shouted words of encouragement and gallantly rode among the blue tide, exhibiting his trademark steadiness and valour.
Throughout his career as an officer during the American Civil War, Oliver O. Howard acted as if he cared little for his life when the bullets began to fly. This carelessness could easily be attributed to “rashness or fatalism,” as one observer noted, but this attitude actually sprang from Howard’s religious beliefs. Some mocked the polished, virtuous and intellectual officer, judging him to be a better fit for the seminary or a classroom rather than leading soldiers into battle. But Howard found religion to be his greatest strength, allowing him to face the dangers, horrors and carnage of battle in a collected and plucky manner.
Oliver Otis Howard was born into a farming family on 8 November 1830 in Leeds, Maine. His father Rowland died while he was only ten, leaving his mother with the task of supporting his brothers. To help relieve this burden, Howard moved in with his uncle, the Honourable John Otis of Hallowell. He decided at a young age that he didn’t want to spend his days tilling fields, so he prepared for college between periods of working on a farm. He enrolled at Bowdoin College at the age of 15, graduating in 1850 after four years. He received an appointment to the United States Military Academy that same year, graduating fourth in the class of 1854.
Howard was appointed a brevet second lieutenant in the ordnance department of the United States Army upon graduation. He bounced between different arsenals in New York and Maine before being dispatched to Fort Myers, Florida, in 1856 to serve as Colonel William Harney’s chief ordnance officer. Soon after he returned to the United States Military Academy and served as the assistant professor of mathematics. Howard began to seriously contemplate entering the ministry, but the outbreak of the American Civil War halted these ambitions.
Howard resigned his army commission to accept a position from the governor of Maine as colonel of the Third Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment in May 1861. He commanded a brigade at the Battle of Bull Run, where the
Union army was shamefully driven from the field in its first major battle. During the reorganisation of the Army of the Potomac, Major General George B. Mcclellan retained Howard as a brigade commander after he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in September 1861.
General Mcclellan transported and landed the Army of the Potomac (numbering around 100,000 men) in Virginia outside the Confederate capital of Richmond in the spring of 1862. He hoped his offensive would catch General Joseph E. Johnston’s outnumbered army off-guard and lead to the capture of the Confederate capital. Two divisions of the Union IV Corps were carelessly thrown across the Chickahominy River and divided from the rest of the Union army as Mcclellan crept towards his objective. Johnston took the initiative and attacked the isolated divisions near Fair Oaks Station on 31 May 1862. The defenders were pushed back, but they stabilised their position and waited for reinforcements.
The next day the Confederates renewed their assault, and Howard’s brigade of four regiments – the 61st New York, 64th New York, Fifth New Hampshire and 81st Pennsylvania – formed part of the fresh reinforcements that arrived. Two of Howard’s regiments were detached from his command. Howard personally led the two remaining regiments
(the 61st and 64th New York Regiments of around 800 men) forward through the woods and underbrush to support the hard-pressed Fifth Pennsylvania to his front. The New Yorkers rushed past the Pennsylvanians and slammed into the Confederate line. Howard’s New Yorkers managed to drive the Confederates back to the ground they had captured the previous day.
The conspicuous Yankee general made an easy target for Confederate infantrymen. Early on Howard, one of the few mounted men, tumbled into the dirt, his horse shot dead from under him. The general called for a second animal. Soon after a ball from a Mississippi rifle tore into the flesh of Howard’s right forearm.
His brother Lieutenant Charles Howard, serving on his staff, bound up the wound with a handkerchief to stop the flow of blood.
Howard pressed on with his men, wishing to lead by example. “Howard led his men with the greatest gallantry close up to the enemy,” Colonel Edward E. Cross of the Fifth New Hampshire recalled, who was himself twice wounded during the fight. Cross commended
Howard for being the only general to lead his men into battle. He wrote that Howard “nobly acted with a bravery bordering on rashness and nobly sustained his reputation as a brave and efficient officer”. Upon reaching the deserted Union camp from the previous day’s fighting and nearing the enemy, the left foreleg of Howard’s horse was broken by a ball.
Howard was hit again in the right arm, the bullet lodging into his elbow and shattering the bone. A lieutenant rushed over and helped Howard dismount but was killed in the act. With his limb dangling at his side and growing faint, Howard relinquished command to his subordinate officer. Three of Howard’s regiment commanders and 713 men were casualties from the 2,000 men who engaged.
As he staggered to the rear Howard bumped into a fellow brigade commander’s medical surgeon, the New Jersey native Gabriel Grant. The surgeon was operating on wounded officers and soldiers he had personally pulled from the frontline next to a large tree stump (he won the MOH for this deed). Recognising Howard, he called the general over and wrapped a compress around his mangled arm.
A sympathetic soldier whose fingers were broken and bleeding helped Howard along to the Union hospital located at Courtney
House. There, Howard encountered an old
acquaintance, Dr Hammond. Hammond grabbed hold of Howard’s tender arm and could tell it was broken. Hoping to provide Howard with something more comfortable than a wooden floor, Hammond led him to a small cabin occupied by an old slave couple. Howard lay down on a bed in the cabin and awaited a formal medical examination.
His brigade surgeon Dr Palmer and several others arrived to assess Howard’s wound as he rested on the bed caked with blood, sweat and gunpowder. “At last Dr Palmer, with serious face, kindly told me that my arm had better come off,” Howard later recalled. To the surgeon’s grim news Howard replied, “All right, go ahead.” Dr. Palmer told him he would have to wait another six hours before the amputation could be performed to allow for the reaction to set in.
Howard waited in agony to have his arm sawn off. When the time came, Palmer and four soldiers solemnly walked into the cabin with a stretcher. They lifted Howard onto its canvas frame and ferried him back to the hospital’s amputation room, a place Howard described as a gruesome den with “arms, legs and hands not yet all carried off, and poor fellows with anxious eyes waiting their turn”.
Palmer pulled a tourniquet tightly around Howard’s shoulder above the wound. Dr Grant joined the operating crew. They strapped the general to the table and administered a mixture of chloroform and gas, knocking him out cold. Howard was one of the lucky ones. When he woke he found a nub where his right arm had been. He later mentioned that the limb was discarded somewhere “in Virginia soil”.
Howard and his brother, wounded in the leg during the battle, departed on leave the next day with certificates of disability. The general rode beside the driver of an ambulance wagon filled with a cargo of wounded officers. The wagon was halted by General Philip Kearny, a Union division commander, who dismounted to greet the party. Kearny had a reputation for being one of the most fearless soldiers in the army, losing his left arm in the Us-mexican War and fighting alongside the French in North Africa and Italy.
Kearny shook hands with Howard and in an attempt to console him blurted out, “General, I am sorry for you, but you must not mind it; the ladies will not think the less of you!” Howard laughed and stated optimistically that, “There is one thing that we can do, general, we can buy our gloves together!”
Howard’s time back in Maine to recuperate was far from relaxing. He spent two months on the road lecturing the citizens in the principal cities and villages in the state to help fill the quota of volunteers badly depleted by the losses sustained in Virginia. Even though he was “pale, emaciated, and with one sleeve tenantless” one acquaintance admired how Howard stood up before his audiences, “the embodiment of all that is good and true and noble in manhood”. Howard never intended for the loss of an arm to keep him out of the war.
He returned to the frontline and fought in 22 battles before the close of the American
Civil War. Following the Chancellorsville debacle, many called for Howard’s removal from command. But President Abraham Lincoln vouched for him and calmed the uproar by asserting, “He is a good man. Let him alone; in time he will bring things straight.”
Howard did bring things straight as Lincoln promised and became one of General William T. Sherman’s most trusted officers. “In
General Howard throughout I found a polished and Christian gentleman,” Sherman wrote, “exhibiting the highest and most chivalrous traits of the soldier.”
Howard was presented with the Medal of Honor in March 1893 for heroically leading his New Yorkers in the successful charge at Fair Oaks that led to the loss of his right arm. He retired from the United States Army after 44 years of service in 1894 at the mandatory age of 64.
“[HE] ACTED WITH A BRAVERY BORDERING ON RASHNESS AND NOBLY SUSTAINED HIS REPUTATION AS A BRAVE AND EFFICIENT OFFICER” Medal of Honor citation