My Rebel Canteen

The Story of an Object and the Men Who Used It

BY CHRISTOPHER GRAHAM

A notice appeared in a 1909 issue of the Union veteran’s newspaper, The National Tribune: “Comrade C.K. Leach, Cambridge, Vt., has a Confederate canteen on which is the name of C. Palfrey, C.S.A. on one side; on the other side a Confederate flag. He will be pleased to hear from Palfrey or his relatives.” Amazingly, Charles Palfrey of New Orleans knew the answer. It was his.

This connection, made 44 years after the close of the war, capped a remarkable career for this canteen that not only witnessed so much, but also whose owners themselves witnessed so many momentous events in the Civil War era. We don’t know exactly how Palfrey acquired the canteen (finding or capturing and using enemy equipage was a common occurrence during the American Civil War), but we have learned much about the canteen, its onetime owner, and its one-time captor.

Charles Palfrey served in a Louisiana Confederate command and the object – although it was used by a Confederate – is a United States Army 1858 model oblate spheroid canteen. Confederate arsenals did not make this type of canteens, but because they were of the highest quality – much more so than leaky Confederate versions – they were among the most sought-after items captured on Civil War battlefields.

Palfrey, a young cashier at the New Orleans branch of the Bank of Louisiana, first enlisted in Company B of the 1st Louisiana Battalion (Rightor’s) on April 15, 1861. He accompanied this command to Pensacola, Florida, and then to the Virginia Peninsula, where they remained until May 1862. Palfrey served as the Battalion’s quartermaster sergeant.

The 1st Battalion – a 12- month command – disbanded on May 1, 1861, coincidently the same day that New Orleans surrendered to the United States Navy. Palfrey returned to his home city at some point and was sick in the hospital when captured on June 17, but he was soon paroled.

His whereabouts between that summer and the following spring are unknown, but he responded to a recruiting party from the Washington Artillery of New Orleans – a prestigious command in the Army of Northern Virginia in which Palfrey’s brother served as an officer – and arrived in camp near Fredericksburg in late April 1863. Within a week, Palfrey and the Washington Artillery unlimbered for action at the “Second Battle of Fredericksburg” (a segment of the larger Chancellorsville Campaign). He later wrote that “[I] took off my blanket, haversack, cartridge bag and my canteen and laid them on the ground by the side of the gun.” In just moments, Palfrey and his crew fled before the onslaught of the United States’ 6th Army Corps.

Driving the Washington Artillery from their positions was a brigade that included the 2nd Vermont Infantry, with a company commanded by Chester Leach. After the fight, the young officer – who at home in the Green Mountain State had been a married farmer – penned a lengthy letter to his wife describing the combat between his regiment and Palfrey’s battery. “Our Co was deployed as skirmishers in front & pushed on up to their earth works where we came in sight of the rebs artillery but they soon hauled off on a double quick.” He named the two men – Monroe Bingham and H. Maxfield – who had been wounded “by shells before we came to the heights.”

In a subsequent letter, dated May 10, 1863, he wrote that “I lost nothing in the late move but have got a number of little notions which belonged to the rebels. One is a canteen & a nice one, the mans [sic] name worked on one side & a rebel flag on the other. I shall carry it home if ever I go home. I also got a good pair of socks out of one of their knapsacks. I foraged a little on purpose to see what I could find.”

Leach, Palfrey, and the canteen remained in relatively close proximity to one another for the next three months. Both men marched north toward Gettysburg, where the Washington Artillery again lobbed artillery shells at the enemy. One of them – Leach’s cousin Julius Spafford later claimed – shattered his rifle stock. If Palfrey lamented the loss of his customized canteen, or if he imagined that it might be present across the lines in a baggage wagon or on the body of the man who captured it, is unknown.

After Gettysburg, Leach’s regiment was in the vanguard of the pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia back across the Potomac. At that point, Palfrey moved further and further from his canteen. Upon arriving back in Orange Courthouse, the artilleryman broke his femur and was sent to a hospital in Richmond.

As Palfrey crossed the Potomac, Leach witnessed the destruction that Confederate soldiers had left in their wake. At a barn near Williamsport, Maryland, he observed a young Black man whom Confederate soldiers had tortured and grievously mutilated – still alive though evidently near death. “I understood the reason of the act,” Leach reported, “because he would not go over the river with them.”

Near the same time, in a letter dated July 9, 1863, from Boonsboro, Maryland, Leach noted “I sent my rebel canteen by [cousin] Julius Safford [of the 13th Vermont], I did not give it to him myself for I did not think of it when I saw him but sent it to him by another & if he got it I guess he will get it home safe & you can get it there.” He could rest assured. Safford successfully carried it home to Vermont.

Wartime image of Chester Leach

Vermontcivilwar.org

Palfrey’s broken leg had healed much shorter than his good leg, thus making continued service in the field impossible. The War Department detailed him to work as a clerk in the Engineer Bureau Hospital in Richmond, the hospital that treated the enslaved people whom the Confederate government had forced to work digging the entrenchments that circled Richmond.

At the expiration of his term, Leach was discharged on June 20, 1864. He returned to Vermont and served as an officer in the Vermont State Militia. He continued to farm, eventually becoming a prosperous dairy and maple syrup farmer, and served in a variety of local government positions, including that of Vermont state senator in 1878.

We do not know how the war ended for Palfrey, but we do know that he continued the fight through Reconstruction. Palfrey, according to a history published in 1914, was an enrolled member of the White League (“Pleasants Co. E”), a paramilitary organization explicitly devoted to removing Republicans from state government and intimidating Black people. It was not a secret organization and did not hesitate to precipitate murders and massacres to achieve its goals. Palfrey was present when the White League attempted a coup against the Republican administration of Louisiana at the “Battle of Liberty Place” in New Orleans on September 14, 1874. Thereafter, he resumed work as a banker, serving as the cashier for the Hibernia National Bank in his hometown.

When the notice that Chester Leach had placed in The National Tribune came to his attention, he asked that “if Mr. Leach is willing to return to me my canteen, I shall feel much obliged.” Julius Safford replied to Palfrey, noting that Leach was rather ill and infirm, but that he would return the canteen. Leach died shortly after the canteen arrived in New Orleans. Palfrey held onto it for a short time before turning it over to the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association of New Orleans, who in turn donated it to Richmond’s Confederate Museum in 1912. Palfrey died in 1923.

The canteen can now be seen on exhibit in the American Civil War Museum’s exhibit, A People’s Contest, where it still bears witness to the momentous history that its owner and captor both witnessed.

Christopher Graham is the Museum’s Curator of Exhibitions. For this article he used Chester Leach’s wartime letters published as “Dear Wife”: the Civil War Letters of Chester K. Leach, compiled by Edward J. Fiedner (2002). The military records of both men are drawn from the Compiled Service Records available on Fold3.com, and other biographical information has been gleaned from Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com