The Scars Of The Civil War Arrived In Hawaii Along With Many Of The Men Who Fought
Hawaii became home to many veterans of the war between the North and the South. The islands’ close ties to New England put Hawaii on the side of the Union.
Jonathan Bates Dickson of Massachusetts, a Harvard College graduate, sprang into action when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. The threat to the Union was clear: Within days, facing starvation, the federal troops surrendered.
Dickson, 28, enlisted two weeks later, on May 2. A promising young man, he was promptly commissioned as a first lieutenant, which made him an officer who would command a group of enlisted men.
He rose rapidly in the ranks. Within one year, he was promoted to captain and by the end of the war, he had been named a brevet major, a promotion that is commonly awarded on the spot for outstanding service.
But when he arrived in Honolulu in 1867, after four grueling years of war, Dickson was described as a broken man. He could barely see and he was too debilitated to hold a job, his physician recounted in a consular report at Dickson’s death in 1877. He was 43 years old.
Veterans of the Civil War flooded into Hawaii after the fighting ended. Some of their deaths are recorded in a largely forgotten set of documents shipped to the East Coast from distant Hawaii during the 1800s.
Their records are among about 160 packets sent to the U.S. State Department by consuls representing the American government in Hawaii in the 1800s. The packets, brown butcher paper tied with string, contain the last possessions of people who died far from their mainland homes. The contents were never delivered to next of kin and ended up in storage in a National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland.
The records chronicle the final days of at least seven American Civil War veterans who came to Hawaii after 1865, when the war ended and Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia.
When Dickson arrived in the islands, Dr. John S. McGrew, a Honolulu physician who had known him early in his military career, described his patient’s poor condition in an affidavit that ended up in the consular records.
“His general health was extremely poor so that he was at no time able to perform much physical or mental labor, and he began to be afflicted with chronic diarrhea attended with weakness of the optic nerve seriously affecting his eyesight,” McGrew wrote in the affidavit, which may have been intended to help Dickson’s wife and infant son secure a federal pension. “His death was the result of no acute or inflammatory disease but of the causes above named, which in my opinion derived directly from his exposure and overwork during his aforesaid military services.”
Some of the men whose last days are recorded in the National Archives died at a relatively young age.
Edward Gravier, a French immigrant who had fought with the 4th Infantry, California Volunteers, died in Honolulu in 1881, at the age of 39.
E. L. Harvey, who fought with the 42nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, was only 38 when he died of consumption.
George Smith, who was a member of the 4th New York Volunteer Infantry, lived into his 70s, but the consular records said he had been granted a pension of $8 a month because he was only partially able to work as a manual laborer as a result of his war injuries.
The records also suggest that the men were suffering from trauma. Gravier had drifted to Hawaii, where he had a license to drive a commercial conveyance, but his family, including his wife and children in Mendocino County, didn’t know what had become of him. Twenty-four years after his death, on Feb. 21, 1905, the French consulate put out a request for information about his whereabouts, according to the Honolulu Advertiser. They didn’t know that Gravier had died and his possessions had been auctioned off on Oct. 10, 1881. His family’s records on ancestry.com describe his death as “unknown.”
Harvey went from job to job, unable to hold a position very long because of recurring ill health. Hoping a change of climate would help, he went to Alaska, “but the voyage did not seem to do him any good,” the Honolulu Advertiser reported on July 4, 1885. He returned to Honolulu, checked into The Queen’s Hospital and died.
Many Civil War veterans had developed conditions that today would be called post traumatic stress disorder, but the consular records suggest the long years of war under conditions of extreme hardship, cold and hunger, had exacerbated underlying conditions as well.
“I am not surprised to hear that they suffered from physical and psychological damage after the war,” wrote Eric Stratton Mueller, a living history coordinator for the Hawaii Civil War Round Table. “They lacked the terminology to describe the impacts of their experiences on their psyche, and, of course, medicine was not what it is today. As in many areas, the concept of ‘manliness’ meant that they were supposed to put the war behind them and move on. It has only been relatively recently, as we’ve moved past the events and leaders of the time that these individual stories and, through them, their collective sufferings, come to light.”
About 10% of the American population took up arms during the Civil War, including a number from Hawaii that underscores the way that ties between Hawaii and the United States were growing in the mid-1800s. In the decades after the war, they celebrated the North’s victory, viewing the fight against slavery as a battle for social justice.
At least 100 Native Hawaiians willingly chose to risk their lives by enlisting in the war effort, according to research by local historians Nanette Napoleon and Anita Manning.
About 90% of the Hawaiians who fought joined the Union, researchers believe.
J.R. Kealoha joined the 41st United States Colored Infantry Regiment, whose other members were recruited largely out of the free black community of Philadelphia, according to Mueller.
George Smith’s enlistment papers were found among the records of deceased Americans at the National Archives, shipped from Hawaii to the United States after his death.
Photo: Kirstin Downey/Civil Beat/2024
So many Civil War veterans converged on Hawaii after the war — either local people returning home or newcomers — that a special section was created in the Oahu Cemetery to house their remains. Some are buried elsewhere in the graveyard, but the Civil War section contains 34 graves, set off for emphasis by four cannons serving as boundaries. The cannons were a gift from Hawaiian King David Kalakaua, according to historian Ralph Thomas Kam, the director of the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives.
The Civil War section at Oahu Cemetery is where Harvey, who had enlisted at age 16 is buried.
So is Dr. George T. Shipley, who had been an assistant surgeon in the U.S. Navy. According to the consular records, both men had at least some assets when they died in the 1880s.
Kealoha is buried at Oahu Cemetery too, under a headstone erected there recently to honor him. Until then, his grave had gone unmarked.
The Hawaiian government proclaimed itself neutral in the Civil War. King Kamehameha IV, Alexander Liholiho, and his wife Emma had negative feelings about the United States and were seeking a closer alignment with England instead. Liholiho was worried about growing economic and military encroachment from America and Emma was the grandchild of an English sailor, John Young, who had been a close wartime ally of King Kamehameha, operating cannon that helped the Hawaii-based chief conquer his foes.
They liked the British monarchy, which was withholding diplomatic support and financial assistance to both the North and the South. They too were waiting and watching to see how things would turn out before taking a stand.
The Civil War severely damaged the American whaling fleet, essentially destroying the industry which had fueled an economic boom in Hawaii. The government bought 45 whaling ships, and sunk 40 of them at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, in an effort to prevent the South from getting sugar and cotton crops to outside markets.
The Confederacy responded by dispatching warships to the Pacific to take out the rest of the whaling fleet, the lifeblood of New England. Southern forces in the Pacific captured 38 whaling ships, burning most of them. The industry was never able to recover.
The loss of the whaling industry hit Hawaii’s economy when what had been a steady stream of vessels arriving at Honolulu and Lahaina stopped. Many Hawaiians had been employed by whaleships and it has been estimated that about 20% of ships’ crews were Native Hawaiian. Ships rosters from the period are filled with Hawaiian names.
Many ended up living in New England, where most of the whaleships had come from, including Nantucket and New Bedford, both in Massachusetts. That state also became the hub of the abolitionist movement, the most committed to seeing the end of slavery in America.
The American missionaries, who had an outsized impact on Hawaiian culture by introducing literacy and the Christian gospel, had overwhelmingly hailed from New England as well. They, too, tended to be profoundly abolitionist.
Rev. Lyman Beecher was one of the founders of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which brought some 180 missionaries to Hawaii starting in 1820. Beecher was the father of the famous novelist, Harriett Beecher Stowe, whose stirring novel about the horrors and banal cruelties of American slavery, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” had electrified the nation.
The ABCFM declared its work done in the Hawaiian Islands in 1863, and most of the original missionaries went home to the United States. Those who stayed considered themselves to be subjects of the Hawaiian kingdom but at least 15 missionary sons also chose to enlist in the Civil War; three of them are known to have died as a result.
Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a child of missionary parents who was born in Hawaii, was sent to the mainland to attend college. As a Hawaiian subject, he did not need to take part in the war but he chose to enlist, serving alongside Kealoha.
Photo: Library of Congress
There were so many Civil War veterans in Hawaii that they had their own Grand Army of the Republic chapter, the only one located outside the United States, the Honolulu Advertiser reported in an article on May 31, 1888.
But despite the celebrations of their accomplishments, many veterans did not adjust to their post-war world easily.
Life spiraled downhill for Algernon Sidney Nichols after the war, according to the consular records. A Harvard medical school graduate, he had served with the 17th Massachusetts Volunteers, fighting battles at Bachelor’s Creek, North Carolina, and Kingston, Tennessee.
He was discharged in July 1865, got married and moved with his wife Clara to Hilo to practice medicine. But things weren’t going well. His parents urged him to come home. His wife went back to Massachusetts, but Nichols stayed in Hilo.
A local minister, Rev. Claudius Buchanan Andrews, tried to warn Nichols of the risks of living without a wife. The pressure toward what he called “concubinage” would be too difficult to avoid because “temptations to, and facilities for it are everywhere … everyone knows to what severe tests we have to be subjected.”
“I speak not in a religious sense but as a worldly wise man,” Andrews wrote to Nichols on April 12, 1871, in a letter that Nichols kept among his possessions.
But Nichols was not inclined to a life of celibacy or self-restraint, as other letters suggest.
A sailor who Nichols had treated for venereal disease in the past wrote the doctor in July, asking for an additional box of “clap” medicine.
“How’s your pecker? And what gal are you keeping now?” the jovial sailor asked, in a letter stored in the consular records.
Nichols was accused by the Hawaiian government of providing illegal intoxicating liquors to natives, a charge he appealed, but the government confirmed the conviction and fined him $50.
In October 1876, Hawaiian officials in the Ministry of the Interior canceled Nichols’s license to practice medicine and surgery, posting a legal notice to that effect in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser.
Nichols died, in February 1877 at the age of 35. The cause was not identified in the consular records.
His friends buried him at Oahu Cemetery. His family erected a gravestone for him at Pentucket Cemetery, near their home in Haverhill, Massachussetts.
A family friend, who signed the letter “T.L.,” wrote to Nichols’ father that his son had died with many bills unpaid and his medical records in disarray. “His wardrobe consisted of very little — very much worn,” he wrote.
Nichols’s assets were not enough to pay off his obligations, he wrote.
“His account books are in such a deplorable state that I cannot find any charges in them,” he wrote. “What should I do should the estate fall short of payment on the debts? Be pleased to answer the question.”
The man cut off a lock of Nichol’s hair to send to his mother. He also promised to send to the family “a beautiful wreath of flowers made by one of his lady friends, which I have preserved.”
He added a postscript to the letter: “I herewith enclose one half of the lock of hair. (It is for his mother.) It is the last remains of him that she nursed and cradled. Oh that he might be living today to receive the tender affections of the one that bore him. He was a darling child and I mingle my grief with hers for the departed. He was worth loving in spite of all his faults.”
