The Casualties of War: a marriage, happiness and demise

 

This is my ancestor Henry Elias Munger. He was from Illinois, and fought with the 18th New York Infantry in the Civil War. He married Anne Snyder, also from Illinois, and a friend of Abraham Lincoln.

He became an alcoholic after the war. I imagine it was PTSD. He and Anne had three children: two boys and a girl.

After a few years, Anne could take his drinking and abuse no longer, and the last time she saw him, she was putting him on a train in Alton, Illinois, heading for Texas, where he was going to look for work on the railroad.

She was so worried that day. He was extremely drunk and she was scared to death he might pass out on the tracks and be run over by a train. But she managed to get him on his train. She never saw or heard from him again.

She sent her sons to live with her brother in Illinois and brought her daughter to Natchez to live with her relative, William Howard Pritchartt, who had built a house overlooking the river.

She was destitute and brought with her three items that had monetary value: a handwritten personal invitation written by Lincoln inviting her to his inauguration; a large portfolio of American Indian portraits, which she later sold; and her brother's naval commission signed by Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy and President Abraham Lincoln.

It's said she was a terrible housekeeper, and she lost the invitation, but we still have the naval commission.

His fate was a mystery in our family until a few years ago when a young man named Ryan A. Conklin contacted me. He was writing a book about the regiment Munger was in and what became of its members.

He was able to fill in the blanks for us, including a rather amusing description of an unexpected encounter with a group of Confederate soldiers when, far from both their picket lines while touring Mount Vernon, they engaged in a brief skirmish, which ended with a few shots being fired from both sides, after which they gave up and each fled back to their own picket lines, "...hopefully having gained some refined wisdom for their audacious minds." Conklin, Ryan A. The 18th New York Infantry in the Civil War: A History and Roster. North Carolina:  McFarland & Company, Inc. 2016. 

 According to Conklin's findings, Munger never regained sobriety and spent the rest of his days wandering from one railroad job to another, often fired for his drunkenness, which caused him to be cantankerous and violent. He earned a pension when an accident caused him to lose most of the use of both hands. It's not known how he died, but was discovered when he failed to collect his last pension check. He's buried in an unmarked grave in a pauper's cemetery in Lufkin, TX, called Stranger's Rest Cemetery, the only indication of his presence, his name engraved on a stone plaque placed in 1997, which lists the known names of those there interred. It took many years for Anne to go to Congress to prove his death and receive her "widder's mite," as being a devout Catholic, she never divorced him.