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Two Deaths in the Family
Part One
This article quotes from letters and diaries using the original spelling, grammar, and punctuation, providing words or punctuation in brackets only when necessary for clarification.
By Dr. John M. Coski
James Agee’s 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, chronicles a father’s death in an automobile accident and his family’s emotionally wrenching reactions, as revealed through his six-year-old son. The posthumously published novel comes to mind in reading through a collection of letters and diaries donated to the Museum last year.
Even before the outbreak of a civil war that took more than 750,000 lives, death was a way of life in mid-19 th -century America, as historian Drew Gilpin Faust detailed in her 2007 study, This Republic of Suffering. The scale of death in the Civil War can inure us to the countless human tragedies those numbers represent. The news of two deaths that the Paden family of Trumbull County, Ohio, received from a Washington, D.C., military hospital humanizes the numbers and offers a poignant story worthy of Agee’s novel.
Pennsylvania-born farmer Robert T. Paden and his wife, Irishborn Sarah West Paden, and their seven children moved from Pymatuning, Mercer County, Pennsylvania (where he owned a small farm) across the state line to Orangeville, Ohio, just before the outbreak of civil war in 1861. The three oldest sons, James (born 1837), William (born 1839), and Thomas Francis, or “Frank” (born 1841), enlisted eventually in different branches of Pennsylvania troops. Possibly a result of reduced family circumstances, the eldest daughter, Mary Ellen or “Mollie” (born 1843), worked as a domestic servant with other families, and youngest daughter, Melissa Jane or “Millie” (born 1846), lived with relatives during the war years.
On February 17, 1863, Robert Paden died at the age of 50. Mollie wrote to her brother William, a corporal in the 10 th Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry in Virginia, to break the news and assure him that their father “died happy,” endured his suffering without complaint, and was resigned to his death.
In contrast, “it was all the neighbors could do to keep mother alive when he died she fainted three times and then cramped but they got her up and gave her cloroform and put her asleep when she awaked she was perfectly calm and reconciled,” Mollie wrote. “Wm just imaggin our feelings Father a corpse on the bed and Mother so bad of we have bin through that we never did before and we are alone and oh how lonely for he was always here being sick so long and now he is no where to be found. bee a good boy write often I stil hope you can get a furlow…”
William replied that he could not obtain a furlough to come home and noted that his father had not told him to “take a French” (“French leave,” or go AWOL). “I am sure that Father is gone where there is no storms where it is summer all the time and where there is no war, nothing but joy and peace for ever.”
"Crossing the North Anna River." Pencil illustration.
Library of Congress
With three sons in the army, the opening of another season of military campaigns gave Sarah Paden and her daughters renewed cause for anxiety. On April 5, William told sister Mollie that “an early campaign and a heavy move” seemed imminent but assured her that “The army appears to think they will be successful.” He notified Millie on April 28 that they “have marching orders to start tomorrow morning for the front.” Because their mail was to be stopped for 60 days, he asked her to “Please tell our folks that if they do not hear from me that that is no sign that I am dead.”
Then the waiting began.
William wrote again on May 3, days before the Battle of the Wilderness and the beginning of the grueling Overland Campaign. “Sister Mary, it is with the blessing of god that I have the power to inform you that I am still alive,” he wrote Mollie “in haste” on May 13 “from Rifle Pit in the Woods.” He told her that they had eight days of fighting and marching, without heavy loss. On May 20 he acknowledged receipt of seven letters. “This is the hardest campaign we ever had,” he told sister Mollie, but leavened that report with good news: “I have the pleasure to invite you to not write any more to me, for we expect to go to the state [Pennsylvania] as soon as this campaign is over.”
Instead of a joyous reunion with their brother, the Paden siblings received the kind of news they had long dreaded. In her diary entry for June 5 th Mollie noted that, after a busy day of activities, she “came home in the evening & heard Wm was wounded” Two days later, her diary offered an ominous update: “letter in the afternoon mail from Finly Hospital Wm severely wounded” Having survived the brutal fighting in the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, William had been wounded on May 23 rd , on the first day of the three-day battle of the North Anna River.
The letter was from W. W. Winchester, the chaplain of the Finley Hospital in Washington, D.C. Dated June 3rd, it informed Sarah Paden that William was “very low & not likely to live many days, He has a fearful wound on his right leg from a shell bruising very severely. It has started bleeding, & a few days ago, the surgeons were obliged to tie an artery at the thigh to prevent his immediate death But he is too weak to bear amputation.”
“He does not complain now of pain, but grows weaker,” Winchester continued. “I can assure you Madam he speaks like one who is trusting in the Savior, I see him every day & pray with him. He is comforted & calm.”
William’s sisters wrote him a letter on June 8. “Oh dear what news this is My dashing Brother,” wrote Millie. “I pray to God that you will be spared to come Home…Your dear Mother is weeping all the time. Oh if you could come home with one limb” Mollie reiterated that “Mother is taking it very hard it seems as thought she could not give you up for as long as there is life there is hope”
An Illustration of Finley U.S. General Hospital, Washington D.C. 1864
Library of Congress
Although he was stationed in Alexandria, Virginia, a few miles away from Finley Hospital, eldest brother James learned of William’s wounding in a letter from his sister. The day after receiving the letter, he went “on hunt of him” and found him. The account he gave was much more optimistic than that of Chaplain Winchester. William “was glad to see me…I think that he will get well a gane….He has quite a good nurse. I am going to see him to morrow a gane or next day William told me to wright and tell ma not to fret for he thought he would get well in corse of a month….”
“[G]lorious news letter from James & a young man in the Finly Hospital,” gushed Mollie in her diary on June 18th . “Wm living & likely to recover” June 20 was William’s [23rd] birthday. “Williams birth day poor boy hes far from here suffering Oh! that I was with him,” Mollie noted.
Chaplain Winchester confirmed to sister Millie that James was visiting William often, but also confessed “surprise and indignation” at James’ failure to keep his family informed about William. Winchester also dissented from James’ prognosis. Winchester repeated that William was “very low” and “must die.” The leg had become so mortified that it proved necessary, after all, to amputate it above the knee.
The chaplain waxed poetical about his love and admiration for William, who is “worthy the love of any sister.” After apologizing that “you have been kept in such suspense,” Winchester penned an addendum that could only have exacerbated the suspense and anxiety. “I have just seen your brother since writing the above,” he wrote the next morning. “He is better than I expected, He is stronger than he was a few days ago, I should say it is possible he may survive. I dare not state my hope any stronger”
Nurse Leonora Clark expressed similar guarded optimism in a letter to Mrs. Paden. The surgeon in charge “has taken a most kind and Brotherly interest” in William, and she has “felt from the first day that he came in to the Ward that I could not do to much for him I can well imagine that all that know him love him…I have been thinking today that the kind Father has been moved by your prayers and tears and so has moved my heart to try constantly to fill so far as possible your place too him I cannot give you much incouragement he is so very weak I can only hope for your and his sake that he may recover”
Sister Millie wrote to William on the evening of Sunday, June 26 th , reacting to the “good news” conveyed by a returned comrade that William was improving. She confirmed that “James dont write very often he has not written to us but once since you was wounded” and that they had not heard anything in almost two weeks. Mother “would like to go to you but I fear the Travels & excitement would overcome her.” But, she added, “you need not be surprised if you see me walking up to your bedside some day I wish you would speak to your Nurse & tell her to write and let me know what chance there would be for me there. …I have always had a desire to go to the Hospital & do something for the soldiers & I think that now is the time to go while you are there. Oh if I could just go & take care of you.”
Millie’s resolution to “do something for the soldiers” may not have been out of character, but it was not something she expressed in her earlier surviving letters. The portrait that emerges from those letters is of a 19 th -century “material girl” concerned primarily with dresses, bonnets, perfumes, and flirtations with young men. She soon got her wish and left a few days later for Washington as the family emissary and to try to obtain work in the hospital.
The letter written to Sarah Paden by Chaplain Winchester on June 26, 1864, informing her that William had died of his wounds.
ACWM Collection
“Independence day Oh! day of trouble,” wrote Mollie in her diary on July 4 th . “Received the sad sad letter from the chaplain Wm gone to rest” She also appended a note to her entry for June 25 th : “Oh! William died tonight we knew it not oh dear dear”
The letter from Chaplain Winchester, dated June 26 – the same day that Millie had written to her brother – informed Mrs. Paden that “Your dear Son Wm Paden, for whom you & we have been anxious these past few weeks finished his Earthly sufferings & Entered into rest last night.” He described William’s final hours and assured his mother that “I can not doubt that he died the death of a true believer, His language from the first has been uniform & full of trust in Christ.” James had been to visit but was not present at William’s deathbed. “Your Son appeared to be gaining in strength slowly until this fearfully hot weather. He was a noble hearted boy. May God comfort & sustain you in this great loss is the prayer of Your’s in Christ.” END
Dr. Coski served as the Museum’s staff historian and the Director of the Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library and Archives for more than 30 years.
The next issue of the magazine will include part two of "Two Deaths in the Family."
