Brothers in Arms

Left: Confederate artillery battery, 1863.

On the bright spring morning of May 18, 1863, a group of Marylanders, far from home, stood watchfully at a bend in the Mississippi River. It was a carefully-chosen spot where the rapid current would draw steamboats close to shore, and where a clump of thick brush at the water's edge hid the men and their four powerful cannons that sat loaded and aimed across the water, packed with canister shot and explosive shells. The artillerymen picked ripe blackberries among the brambles while they waited.

They did not have to wait long. A sidewheeler steamboat soon hove into view. She was the Crescent City, a big vessel that in peacetime plied the route between Memphis and New Orleans. Now pressed into service as a troop transport, her tiered decks were blue with soldiers of the U.S. Army - packed as thickly as daytrippers on a pleasure outing, eyewitnesses later recalled. As the Crescent City, followed closely by five more vessels, rounded the bend, the Confederate gunners opened fire. The effects of their close-range canister shot - deadly fragments of metal designed to kill and maim in as wide a swath as possible - on the crowded, unsuspecting men can probably be better imagined than described.

One of the Marylanders manning the Confederate guns that morning was Albert T. Emory, born and raised at Poplar Grove, Queen Anne's County.

That morning, 300 miles or so down the same river, Albert's older brother, William H. Emory, was commanding some of the Union soldiers struggling for control of the Mississippi. For all that Albert knew, he could have been firing canister shot against his brother's own troops - or even against his brother himself.

In the Emory family, as we are gradually discovering, the Civil War cliché of "brother against brother" is neither a cliché nor even a metaphor. It is quite literally true.

The discovery that William H. Emory, the famous Union commander, had a brother fighting on the Confederate side came to light just this week. It is not mentioned in William's biographies. Oddly, the official family genealogies state that Albert Troup Emory, born in 1821 (ten years younger than William), died in 1854. But this week, thanks to some wonderful new Readex newspaper databases that Washington College has just acquired, I found Albert's obituary from the Baltimore Sun (right) dated almost half a century later - March 27, 1896. The article's biographical details made it clear that this was the same man - and also mentioned his active service in the Confederate Army.

That reference, in turn, quickly led me to a postwar memoir by the captain of the Third Maryland Artillery, CSA (also known as Ritter's Battery). It noted that one of the unit's sergeants was "Albert T. Emory, of Queen Anne's county, Md." By way of further confirmation, the captain mentioned that Sgt. Emory was "a relative of General Emory, of the United States army." Far from being a secret, Albert's close family tie to a prominent Union officer seems to have been a matter of interest, perhaps even a source of pride, among his rebel comrades.

The Third Maryland Artillery, histories note, was one of the few Maryland Confederate units to serve in the Western theatre of the war. It was also "one of the most traveled units in the Civil War, seeing action in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee." The 90-odd Marylanders participated in the battles of Vicksburg, Resaca, Atlanta, and Nashville, along with many lesser clashes.

Albert and William - among eleven siblings who lived to adulthood - had at least two other brothers with Confederate leanings. John Register Emory (1818-1880) served as a delegate to the States Rights' Convention in Baltimore in 1861, a gathering that pushed unsuccessfully for Maryland to secede. Frederick Emory (1829-1901?), the family's black sheep (more on him later) was a "Border Ruffian" in Kansas shortly before the war, terrorizing and even murdering abolitionist settlers. At the end of his life, he lived in a Confederate veterans' home; further research may confirm his wartime service.

Moreover, William, the Union general, experienced another family division that struck even closer to home.

In 1861, William had two sons of military age, Campbell and Thomas. Campbell, a freshly-minted West Point graduate, joined the Union Army and was brevetted for gallantry at Petersburg. Thomas, a medical student in Richmond, was commissioned an assistant surgeon in the Confederate Navy and served aboard one of the most famous rebel raiders of the war, the CSS Florida. After his ship's capture, in 1864, he was marched as a prisoner through the streets of his own hometown, Washington, D.C. In the Emory family, then, it was not just brother against brother, but also son against father.

Present-day historians are sometimes all-too-fond of reducing people from the past into neat categories defined rigidly by class, race, region, and the like. But family stories like this one restore their individuality and free will. What motivated some of the Emory men - despite their similar backgrounds and upbringings - to fight for the North, while others went South? Did it have to do with their particular political leanings, their temperaments, their friendships and enmities, their ambitions and opportunities? What made some Americans turn weapons of death against their own flesh and blood?

We hope that the documents may continue to provide clues.

(The description of the Third Maryland Battery and its ambush of the steamer Crescent City is based on William W. Goldsborough, The Maryland Line in the Confederate Army, 1861-1865 [Baltimore, 1900]; also W.H. Ritter, "Sketch of the Third Battery of Maryland Artillery," Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. X [July, 1882]. The divisions within the Emory family go wholly unmentioned in the recent scholarly biography by L. David Norris et al., William H. Emory, Soldier-Scientist [University of Arizona Press, 1998], as well as in other accounts of Gen. Emory's life.)