I like to spend Sundays doing historical and family history research. I made a kind of big find this past Sunday, so that is the thrust of this post. It’s longer than most and off topic of mildly humorous family incidents. But it is family—Benjamin Franklin Carter is a distant cousin, as is his wife.
Benjamin Franklin Carter and Henry Johnson. It’s a story that seems to illustrate the American divide while harmonizing the country. A Union officer is killed in a battle; a Confederate officer so admires his opponent’s bravery that he buries the officer in his own coat. Later, that same Confederate officer is mortally wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg, and the family of that fallen Union officer takes the Confederate in and nurses him till his final hospitalization and death. All the while, the Confederate officer’s enslaved body servant remains faithfully at his master’s side and helps to ensure his master’s Christian burial. Friendly foes divided only by ideas and ideals but brothers at heart; enslaved people who are part of a family that they remain loyal to even as an outdated institution fades away.
This is Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Franklin Carter.
He was the beau ideal of southern aristocracy. His father Franklin held dozens of enslaved people on their property in Maury County, Tennessee. One of those enslaved was a young man who would become Henry Johnson. Benjamin Carter moved his young family to Austin, Texas, where he became mayor of the young city and where he was a prominent attorney. When Texas became one of the original six to secede, young Carter helped lead the creation of the Tom Green Rifles (named for the Texas Revolutionary, friend of Sam Houston, and Texas Supreme Court justice). The group became Company B of the famous Texas 4th Regiment—part of John Bell Hood’s famous Texas Brigade.
Carter was married with two daughters, though only one would live to adulthood. He was wounded at Gaines Mill but returned to duty some months later. As the story goes, at the Battle of Second Manassas, Carter’s men were helping to sweep the field of the federals when they met stubborn resistance on Chinn Ridge. On the Union side, Captain Mark Kerns led his battery in this resistance until he was killed. Carter was so impressed with Kerns that he had Kerns buried in his personal coat, the story of which eventually reached Kerns’s mother Naomi. Naomi later married a second time and moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a town over from the Civil War’s most famous battlefield.
On July 2, 1863, Kerns was part of the field staff overseeing the 4th Texas’s attempt to overrun the federal left flank. The 4th Texas ascended the western side of Big Round Top where several of its officers, Carter included, were wounded or killed. Carter took shrapnel to the face and leg; he never made it to the saddle that connected to Little Round Top (some accounts suggest otherwise). He was collected by his men, and when they retreated, he went with them.
Finding that Carter was mortally wounded, Confederate surgeons elected to leave Carter in the hands of a Union family. Henry Johnson, his body servant, heard of Carter’s plight and made his way through the lines to be with his master. When Naomi (Kerns) Fisher learned of Carter’s wounding, she and her husband, Reverend Dr. Samuel Reed Fisher sent for Carter and took him in. Johnson remained with him, and when his condition grew severe, he was transferred to a nearby hospital where he pleaded with the locals to ensure he got a Christian burial. Carter died July 21, 1863, and was buried in the Methodist Cemetery; later that cemetery’s occupants were moved to Cedar Grove Cemetery where Carter rests today.
Forty-seven years later, the men of the Texas Brigade came together to dedicate a monument to the group. Speeches and prayers were offered, and histories were collected into a book, which is available free online at the Library of Congress. Note this paragraph describing Henry Johnson.
Note further the approving paragraph written just above it about John Price, another formerly enslaved man: “He was faithful to the end, although he had many opportunities to go to his so-called friends, the federals.” An American Civil War forum does its best to see the events through the eyes of the enslaved. You can find a number of their stories here, including this paragraph on Henry Johnson, which cites the book for the unveiling of the monument.
Henry Johnson, slave of Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin F. Carter, 4th Texas. Henry was primarily a body servant to Carter, although at least earlier in the war he also served as a barber for Carter’s former company (B). Late on July 2, after Carter’s wounding south of Devil’s Den, Henry stayed by his side at the field hospital, then in the wagon train of wounded. However, Carter had to be left behind owing to the severity of his injuries, and ended up at the Academy (school house) hospital in Chambersburg, where he died on July 21. Henry stayed with him until the end, behind enemy lines, then saw Carter decently buried at the Methodist cemetery. His duty done, Henry decided against returning to bondage under a stranger. Instead, he proceeded to Baltimore to open a new chapter in his life, which unfortunately was short. Henry reportedly died the following year. (Unveiling and Dedication of Monument to Hood’s Texas Brigade, by F. B. Chilton; Peculiar Pairings: Texas Confederates and their Body Servants, Thesis of Brian A. Elliott, 2016)
This story leaves a large number of open questions. Why did Johnson go to Baltimore? After all, Maryland did not emancipate its enslaved people until 1864. How did he die? To serve as a body servant and follow Carter everywhere, he had to have been young and in prime physical condition. The apparent answers appear to be both surprising and unsurprising.
Search any database for Henry Johnson, black, in Baltimore, Maryland, at the time, and you will get many entries but nothing that fits easily. Search Find-a-Grave, and you get an interesting entry: a young man buried in a Freedman’s Cemetery in Virginia. Notes on Find-a-Grave indicate that he was a member of the 39th US Colored Troops. And it turns out that the 39th US Colored Troops were organized March 22-31, 1864, . . . in Baltimore, Maryland. That might be about the only compelling reason for a newly emancipated black man to go to a slaveholding city that he had never visited and could have only known through reputation. It’s hard to say for sure, but I believe Henry Johnson settled in Pennsylvania for a while. He may well have fallen in with the black settlements around Matthews Hill; he may well have met the children of the Biggs, Butler, and Warfield households who would eventually join the USCT.
The silence around his death in pro-Confederate publications also serves as evidence. Henry Johnson did not die in Baltimore, though he went there. He died of illness while part of the Siege of Petersburg. He was not buried in a national cemetery because black veterans remained segregated, so he was buried in a freedman’s cemetery. Just two weeks after his death, his unit would be involved in the infamous Battle of the Crater. They would see further combat at Weldon Railroad and then participate in the capture of Wilmington, North Carolina.
This is not the story that pro-Confederate publications want to tell. They do not want to talk about a body servant—the elite of the enslaved who were involved in the intimate details of the lives their masters—who is freed, does not return to his owner’s family or cause, but instead takes up arms against that family and cause. And so, the history is elided, erased even. Today, we are left with so little of Henry’s life. The following are the artifacts we have. The first is the 1850 Slave Schedule. Milton Carter is the second name from the top of the right hand column—those he enslaved are listed below his name, and Henry Johnson is almost certainly one of these, probably about thirteen years old at the time.
We have a story about him that I noted above, which attempts to capture a well-known incident from his perspective. We have his service record. We have the location of his burial, though no picture of his headstone.
We do not known Henry’s parents; we do not know how he got his first name or his surname; we have no reason to suppose he was married; we find no trace of any children. Until today, we had the pro-Confederate story of his “loyalty” to his master, then erasure thereafter. Today, we can suppose that there was far more to Henry Johnson than that.
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