Sgt. Harmon Bloodgood: The Only Regular Army Civil War Soldier Buried at St. Paul's

The south elevation of St. Paul's Church, Eastchester, drawn for the Historic American Buildings Survey. The stone and brick steeple dates from the late 1880s, when Bloodgood was probably among its masons. HABS, Library of Congress.

Harmon Bloodgood is the only Civil War veteran in the St. Paul's cemetery who served in the regular U.S. Army rather than a state volunteer regiment. He joined the cavalry ten months before the attack on Fort Sumter.

Enlisting as "Harry Black"

• June 1860: at 21, he signed on for five years in the First Mounted Rifles (founded 1846), posted across New Mexico and Texas fighting the Comanche and other nations. Policing the frontier was the main job of a regular army of about 16,000.
• Background: most recruits were recent Irish and German immigrants. Bloodgood was American-born — one of five children of a laborer in Monmouth County, New Jersey, listed as a mason, perhaps pushed toward steady pay by the slump after the Panic of 1857.
• The alias: he enrolled in New York City as Harry Black. Aliases could hide an ethnic background, a young recruit's age or occasionally a criminal past, but nothing suggests more here than a wish for a simpler name.

The 3rd U.S. Cavalry

In August 1861 his regiment became the Third U.S. Cavalry. Secession had cost the regulars dearly: more than 300 officers resigned to join the Confederacy, and the regiment lost 13 — a third of its officers — including its commander, Col. William Wing Loring of North Carolina, who left on May 13, 1861, telling his men the South was his home and each of them could do as they thought best.

State volunteer regiments soon dominated the Union army. The regulars — about 3 percent of the force — kept their own identity: tighter discipline, stricter chain of command, standard uniforms and equipment, and a wider geographic and ethnic mix. Private Bloodgood of Company D stood 5 feet 9 inches, with grey eyes and light hair.

Valverde and Glorieta Pass, 1862

Company D fought in two key battles of the Confederate drive to seize the Southwest and its minerals:

• Valverde (February 20–21): Brig. Gen. Henry Sibley's army marched from Texas into New Mexico Territory and won a tactical victory over Col. Edward Canby's regulars, volunteers and militia from New Mexico and Colorado. Bloodgood was one of 3,000 Union soldiers there; his own part is unknown.
• Glorieta Pass (March 26–28): the "Gettysburg of the West," the decisive battle of the region. On the first day the regular cavalry threw back a Confederate charge and took about 70 prisoners. On March 28 the Texans held the field, but Union troops reached their rear and destroyed their supply wagons and drove off their horses and mules. Two weeks later the Confederates retreated to Texas.

Arkansas

The regiment then served in Missouri and Tennessee with no mention of Bloodgood. He resurfaces by late 1864 as a corporal in Company K at Little Rock, Arkansas, where the cavalry broke up rebel units, chased guerrillas, escorted supply trains and scouted constantly in small, risky detachments. By November he was a sergeant, detailed to build winter quarters; in mid-April 1865 he joined an ambulance corps. He was honorably discharged at Little Rock on June 25, 1865, his five years complete.

A mason at St. Paul's

• Family: back in New Jersey he returned to masonry in the postwar building boom around New York, living in Jersey City with his wife Mary Jane Carter. Two baby daughters, both named Georgiana, died — one at four months in 1887, the other in 1891 at a year and three months — and were buried in the Carter family plot at St. Paul's, his wife's link to the church.
• The steeple: in the late 1880s he lived in a boardinghouse on Mt. Vernon Avenue, two miles from the church and near the Harlem line — under two hours from home by train and ferry. That matches two big masonry jobs marking the 100th anniversary of the church's first service after the Revolution (1788). A widow's gift of $3,000 (about $80,000 today) replaced the old wooden cupola with the stone and brick steeple still standing, and a masonry carriage house, now the base of the museum, replaced the 1830s wooden horse shed. Bloodgood apparently worked on both.

Last years

An 1898 directory places him in Brooklyn on another job. Mary Jane died in 1908 and was buried near her daughters. He moved to the Togus soldiers' home in Chelsea, Maine, and died there of heart failure on April 29, 1912, aged 72. His daughter Martha had him buried at St. Paul's, where a soldier's stone marks the grave.

Sources

Based on "Cavalry sergeant Harmon Bloodgood: The only regular army Civil War soldier buried at St. Paul's," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source spells the battle "Glorietta." Drawing: Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress (public domain).