Matthew J. Graham: Wounded at Antietam, Historian of the Hawkins Zouaves

Matthew J. Graham, buried in the historic cemetery of St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, never recovered from his wound at Antietam. He lived more than 40 more years in pain in New York — and wrote the classic history of his regiment, the 9th New York Volunteer Infantry, the Hawkins Zouaves.

Immigrant and Zouave

Born in northern Ireland on November 21, 1836, to Presbyterian parents, Graham came to New York with his family in 1843. About one in four Union soldiers was an immigrant. Weeks after Fort Sumter in April 1861, at 24, he enlisted as a sergeant in Company A of the 9th New York, commanded by his older brother, Captain Andrew Graham.

The 9th were Zouaves, copying the dress of Algerian soldiers who fought for France from the 1830s and were famed for bravery: short, usually blue open jackets, baggy red trousers, white sashes and fezzes. The uniform made the regiment a favorite of New York's papers and a conspicuous target in battle.

On a recruiting trip home, Graham married Maria Odell on August 22, 1861. He first saw combat on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in February 1862, and at South Mills in April, under Ambrose Burnside. Made a lieutenant on May 25, 1862, he took over more of the company as his brother fell ill and was wounded.

Antietam, September 17, 1862

At stake at Antietam, the deadliest single day of the war, were the safety of Washington, possible British recognition of the Confederacy, even emancipation. Late in the afternoon, at the south end of the field, Lieutenant Graham led his company in one of the last and farthest advances — about a mile over open ground against A. P. Hill's Confederates.

Years later he described looking back to see the field behind them strewn with dead and wounded, all lying with their heads toward the enemy like cornstalks rolled down for plowing. Cresting a rise, they met "a crashing volley of musketry," and "we all went down together." Graham was hit not by a bullet but by grapeshot, which broke his right leg. Surgeons amputated it four inches above the knee.

After the war

• 1862–1865: after six months' leave, on a shaky artificial leg, he did staff duty until the regiment mustered out in June 1863, then served in the volunteer reserves, recruiting, until his honorable discharge in June 1865.
• Postwar: in constant pain and needing new artificial limbs, he found work hard to get and became a clerk at the Customs House in lower Manhattan, a post often arranged for disabled veterans. He lived in Brooklyn; he and Maria had no children, and there is no record of her after 1885.
• The regiment's historian: an officer in a Grand Army of the Republic post and a faithful attender of reunions, he was chosen to write the 9th's history. Published in 1900 and written through years of "intense agony," it runs to more than 600 pages — practical jokes, barely edible food, camp baseball — and describes the regiment's 1889 visit to a Georgia regiment in Savannah, a sign of North–South reconciliation. It was reprinted in 1998.

Graham died a pauper on October 23, 1907, aged 71, in a New York hospital for the poor. Four days later he was buried at St. Paul's under a marble soldier's stone. He had no tie to the Mount Vernon church, but other men of the 9th lie there, among them a wealthy parishioner, John Logan, who may have arranged a place for his comrade.

Sources

Based on "Wounded at Antietam, Civil War Soldier buried at St. Paul's suffered for 40 years, but wrote history of his famed regiment," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Graham's recollection of the charge, from a letter of the 1890s, is paraphrased with short quotations. The cover of the 1998 reprint of his history is not reproduced.