Maryland Magruders & the Civil War #2

by susantichy

For an introduction to Maryland and Maryland Magruders in the Civil War, see my post of January 23: Maryland Magruders & the Civil War #1

A great resource for researching Marylanders in the Civil War is Kevin Conley Ruffner’s Maryland’s Blue & Gray: A Border State’s Junior Officer Corps. In-depth studies tend to focus on specific regiments or higher ranking officers, while simple lists and rosters provide no biographical detail. Ruffner’s book is a happy combination of the two approaches–a thorough discussion followed by a hundred pages of biographical sketches. His study sample is not exhaustive–it’s limited to the Eastern theater and excludes various categories, including career officers in the U.S. Army–but it’s large enough to show patterns.

Who Fought?

Sons of Maryland’s landed gentry did not exactly flock to the defense of the Union. Though the junior officer corps (lieutenants and captains) is just where we might expect to find the sons of planters and lawyers, in Ruffner’s roster of the Union’s junior officers we find few familiar names from Magruder family trees. A few sons of prominent Unionist politicians accepted commissions but in large part the junior officer corps was made up from the middle classes of northern and western Maryland–skilled workers, merchants, managers, and laborers. They claimed descent not from Maryland’s colonial families and Revolutionary patriots but from later arrivals who had settled in Baltimore or moved west from the original counties in search of land. The majority were born in Maryland, some in adjoining states, and some were immigrants, mostly from the German communities of Baltimore and western Maryland.

As you would expect from these demographics, their education level was not impressive. As noted by Ruffner, “More brigade officers were hotel or tavern keepers than lawyers.” Just four are known to have graduated from college before the war and five described themselves as students when enlisting, including two who were studying law. Lacking the wealth and connections of old families in Maryland’s southern counties, yet rich in skills and ambition, these men represented the future of Maryland and of the nation. As a group they had more in common with Union officers from the Midwest or Northeast than with Maryland officers who served in gray. In 1864, they voted heavily for Maryland’s new constitution and for Lincoln’s reelection.

Colonial families and the southern Maryland gentry made a better showing as junior officers in the Confederate States Army (C.S.A.). Nearly ninety percent of Ruffner’s Confederate subjects were Maryland natives, almost a third from Baltimore—notably from its most affluent wards, with none living in the heavily Irish or German sections. Just seven had been living in Washington, D.C., before joining. Of the eighty-seven men for whom prewar occupations were discovered, twenty-two were farmers or farm workers and four were singled out as planters, totaling just twenty-six who derived their living directly from agriculture. More than sixty percent can be classed as professional or paraprofessional, including nine lawyers, fifteen clerks, three bookkeepers, three engineers, an architect, a teacher, a medical doctor, and thirteen students, including two military cadets. Just seven Confederate junior officers in Ruffner’s study were skilled workers.

Accordingly, and in contrast to their Union counterparts, they present an impressive educational level. A dozen had attended or graduated from Georgetown College and another dozen had attended elsewhere, including St. John’s College, the University of Virginia, Princeton, Oxford, and Yale. Others had attended the top rank of Maryland’s “classical schools,” military schools, and academies. Though few junior officers owned slaves, many were the sons of enslavers, lived in homes staffed by enslaved servants, were supported by enslaved laborers—including blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, field hands, drivers, seamstresses, and nurse maids—and expected to inherit human property. Like other Confederate officers (and not a few enlisted men), many would have taken an enslaved body-servant with them into wartime service. As a group they represented the old Maryland, where land, slaves, and family connections defined a man’s status and his expectations.

The Magruder-Hilleary Connection

Young Prince George’s men descended from the marriage of Revolutionary War hero Henry Hilleary (1726-1783) and Cassandra Magruder (abt 1722-1808) seem to have been especially enthusiastic about risking all for the Confederacy. We are going to meet a pair of Hilleary brothers and three of their cousins, the Gwyns. Just one of these five young men was an officer, but all fit Ruffner’s demographic profile of Confederate volunteers from Maryland.

Brothers George H. Hilleary (1835-abt 1865) and Washington M. “W.M.” Hilleary (1837-1862) were doubly descended from Henry and Cassandra—through their daughter Anne (1762-1855), who married Samuel Magruder (1765-1826), son of Haswell Magruder Sr., and Anne’s brother George (1755-1815), who married Sarah Smith (abt 1759-1806). In the tradition of marrying cousins, two of George and Sarah’s sons then married two of Ann and Samuel’s daughters. The union of George Washington Hilleary and Rebecca Hilleary Magruder was childless but the other set of siblings–Matilda Magruder (1801-1871) and Henry Hilleary (1806-1858)—produced at least eight children, including George H. and W.M. Hilleary. (In case you can’t sort that out, George & F.M. bore the name Hilleary, but only one of their four grandparents was not a Magruder descendant.)

These Hilleary brothers served together in the First Maryland Light Artillery, George as a corporal and W.M. as a private. In the 1860 census W.M. Hilleary is identified as a physician though he never served the C.S.A. in a medical capacity. He may have joined the artillery to serve with his brother. W.M. was killed in 1862 in one of the Seven-Day battles around Richmond. George survived the war but died soon after.

In 1850, the brothers’ parents, Henry and Matilda (Magruder) Hilleary, were among the largest slave-holders in the county, holding forty people in bondage. Henry died in 1858 but in 1860 Matilda and her remaining sons together held a similar number in slavery. On 25 August 1865, a few months after the war ended, Matilda Hilleary went to the courthouse in Upper Marlborough and manumitted Abraham Henry and Archibald (alias Hannibal) Henson, two men she had formerly enslaved and whom she knew or believed to have joined the U.S. Army. In this she joined nearly fifty others in the county who hoped that manumission-after-the-fact would qualify them for compensation. Her claim may have failed, as two years later, when many of her neighbors filed claims for the enslaved people they had lost to Maryland Emancipation in 1864—the Slave Statistics of 1867—Matilda did not join them.

Magruder + Hilleary + Gwyn

In 1797, Susannah Hilleary (1758-bef. 1807), another daughter of Henry Hilleary and Cassandra Magruder, married Bennett Gwynn (1758-1826), descendant of a Welsh family that established itself in Maryland in the early eighteenth century. Their son John Hilleary Gwynn (1797-1857) and his wife, Ann Eliza Dyer (?-1855), lived in a large two-story house between the villages of T.B. and Piscataway, in southern Prince George’s, which they christened Pleasant Springs. (No one knows why T.B. was called T.B.) After the older children were married and settled, John’s will passed the property to their youngest son, Andrew Jackson Gwynn (1835-1908), with the proviso that he provide a home there for three of his four sisters, two of whom were young widows.

With Pleasant Springs lying near the Prince George’s / Charles County line, Gwynn family relations entwined through both counties. In the neighborhood of Bryantown, Charles County, lived Sarah Frances Dyer, a first-cousin-once-removed of Eliza (Dyer) Gwynn. Frances, as she was called, was the wife of Dr. Samuel Mudd. In 1865, this connection would bring to Andrew and Bennett Gwynn the unwelcome attention of Federal authorities investigating Dr. Mudd’s role in the escape of John Wilkes Booth.

Though never implicated in the Lincoln assassination plot, in August 1861 the Gwynn brothers had spent a few days camping in the woods on Mudd’s property in the company of other young men who were “dodging around” at that time for fear of arrest for their Confederate activities, including their second cousin Jeremiah Dwyer, who was Dr. Mudd’s brother-in-law. As Bennett would testify at Mudd’s trial: “I was there with my brother, Andrew J. Gwynn, and Mr. Jerry Dyer. At about that time General Sickles came over into Maryland, arresting almost everybody. I was threatened with arrest; told I was to be arrested, and I went out of the neighborhood a while to avoid it. I went down into Charles County; stayed about among friends there for a week or so, as almost everybody else was doing. There was a good deal of running about that time.”

In Bennett Gwyn’s telling, he and his brother Andrew slept for four or five days in a pine-woods near a spring, their bedding and food supplied by the household of Dr. Mudd. From there, they crossed the river to Richmond where Andrew enlisted, not to return home till the war was over. Bennett, however, quickly grew tired of exile and in November traveled north to Washington to give himself up, only to be told that no charges had been brought against him. He took the oath of allegiance to the U.S. and returned home to Prince George’s County.

Another line of questioning revealed that Bennett had seen Mary Surratt twice in Prince George’s County in the month before Lincoln’s death, including the morning before the assassination, and had acted for her as a go-between in a land sale. Nearly all witnesses at Dr. Mudd’s trial agreed that once Andrew Gwyn went south he had not returned until the war was over.

What occupied Andrew in Richmond over the winter of 1861-62 we do not know. He enlisted the following May and in October was elected Captain of Company F in the newly-organized 1st Maryland Battalion, renamed in 1864 as the Second Maryland Infantry (C.S.), commanded by Brigadier General George H. Steuart (known as “Maryland Steuart” to distinguish him from Jeb Stuart). After fighting at the Second Battle of Winchester, in June 1863, the Marylanders made a 130-mile forced march to Gettysburg, arriving late on the battle’s first day, July 1.

On the morning of the 2nd they were part of the attack on Culp’s Hill. On the 3rd, starting from their advanced position of the previous day, they were ordered forward in a suicidal bayonet charge (to which Steuart and others objected—one of his majors called it murder). In all, at Culp’s Hill the 2nd Maryland Infantry suffered almost fifty percent casualties, some by friendly fire after dark on the first evening. Among their opponents were Marylanders serving in blue.

Ten months later, after fighting and campaigning in Virginia, the regiment could muster just 324 men, versus 2,200 who marched to Gettysburg. Just fifty-nine survived to surrender at Appomattox Court House. The psychological toll of such losses, and the guilt of surviving, can hardly be imagined. Through it all, Andrew Jackson Gwynn remained Captain of Company K. Though three times wounded—at Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Peebles Farm (during the siege of Petersburg), the last being the most severe—he survived the war and later would relocate to South Carolina.

In his absence, the Gwyn family’s involvement in Confederate espionage had resulted in the burning down of Pleasant Springs–a story for another day.

The Youngest Casualty

Unmentioned in the trial of Dr. Mudd, and nearly lost to memory, was Bennett Gwynn’s eldest son, Clarence. Just seventeen when the war began, he ran away from school in Alexandria, Virginia, enlisted in the First Maryland Infantry (C.S.), and was posted to Fairfax County. In the weeks following the Union occupation of Alexandria on May 24, skirmishing was constant, as both sides rushed to build fortifications, establishing their lines just twenty-five miles apart. Clarence Gwyn was shot on a picket line at Munson’s Hill, a Confederate artillery position on the Little River Turnpike, one of just twenty deaths in Northern Virginia before the mass slaughter at Bull Run in July.

Though forgotten by all but their loved ones, young men like Clarence were immortalized in a popular poem of 1861, Ethel Lynn Beers’s “The Picket Guard.”

“All quiet along the Potomac to-night!”
     Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot, as he walks on his beat, to and fro,
    By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
Tis nothing! a private or two now and then
    Will not count in the news of the battle…”

Kevin Conley Ruffner,.Maryland’s Blue & Gray: A Border State’s Union and Confederate Junior Officer Corps (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).

Daniel D. Hartzler, Marylanders in the Confederacy (Westminster, MD: Willow Bend Books, 2001), 161, 175.

W.W. Goldsborough, The Maryland Line in the Confederate Army 1861-1865 (Baltimore: Guggenheimer, Weil, & Co., 1900), 86. Reproduced as Archives of Maryland Online, Vol 371, with Mrs. Charles Lee Lewis, Index to The Maryland Line in the Confederate Army 1861-1865. (Annapolis: Hall of Records Commission, 1945).

Effie Gwyn Bowie, Across the Years in Prince George’s County (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1975 [1947]).

The Hilleary Brothers

The Gwyn Brothers (& Sisters)

Re: the Gwyn sisters… In 1849, Margaret Emily Gwynn married Walter Alexander Edelen, who died the following year from the accidental discharge of a gun. Susan Ann Maria Gwynn was married to Alexander St. Clair Heiskell for ten years, until his death in 1851. They, plus a third daughter, Ann Eliza Gwynn, were the three sisters Andrew J. Gwyn was obliged to maintain at Pleasant Springs. After the war, Emily and Susan built a small house and remained on the property. Ann Eliza joined the order of Our Lady of Mercy in Baltimore. An older daughter, Harriet Clotilda, was the second wife of her first cousin, George Washington Hilleary, after the death of his first wife Rebecca Magruder.

“All Quiet Along the Potomac,” Civil War Poetry: Songs of the Confederacy.

  • Ethel Lynn Eliot Beers, “The Picket Guard,” first published in Harper’s Weekly on 30 November 1861, under the initials “E.B.,” was set to music in 1863 by John Hill Hewitt, becoming the popular song “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight.” Though others claimed authorship (including a Confederate soldier named Lamar Fontaine) Harper’s confirmed Beers as their “lady contributor.”
  • In a private letter, Beers said she wrote it on a “cool September morning after reading the stereotyped announcement, ‘All quiet,’ etc., to which was added in small type, ‘A picket shot!’” “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight,” Wikipedia.
  • Text, in slightly differing versions, widely available.
  • Regarding authorship, see Kathy Warnes, “Who Wrote All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight—the Confederate Soldier or the Yankee Poet?,” History? Because It’s Here
  • One version of the sheet music, with attribution to Lamar Fontaine, bears the slogan: “Dedicated to the unknown dead of the present revolution.”


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