Joseph Lee Heywood - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Joseph Lee Heywood was born August 12, 1837, the sixth of seven children born to Benjamin Heywood and Sarah Cutler. He grew up on a farm near Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, which he thought of as his hometown although his birthplace and that of his siblings was recorded as Royalston, Massachusetts, a city just a few miles away. Joseph’s grandfather and great grandfather were both soldiers in the American Revolutionary War.

One brother, John, was a farmer; two brothers, Silas and Charles, enlisted in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

Joseph left home at about 20 years of age, living a year each in Concord and Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He worked as a clerk in a drug store in New Baltimore, Michigan for another year and then according to his military records, he moved to Davenport, Iowa. Joseph enlisted in the army on August 21, 1862 in Chicago and mustered into Captain Adoniram Judson Burroughs’ Company (later designated Company B and known as the “Woodworth Rifles”) of the 127th Illinois Infantry. He had just turned 25 years old, about the age of the average Union recruit.

He received about 2½ months training at Camp Douglas in Chicago, which included some duty guarding Confederate prisoners who were being held to be exchanged for Union prisoners of war from the Battle of Harpers Ferry. The Union guards were treated as if they were prisoners themselves and suffered from many of the same privations as their Confederate prisoners: insufficient food and clothing, poor sanitation and victimization by violent gangs among them. They became restive and burned their quarters three or four times.

Before his regiment was sent to the front, 40% of Heywood's company had deserted and 14% had been discharged.

Joseph remained with his unit, traveling first to Cairo, Illinois by train and then by steamer to Memphis, Tennessee where he was promoted to corporal. His initial duty chasing Generals Price and Van Doran did not result in any actual combat but he was soon drawn into the disastrous Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, where he functioned as a skirmisher along the edge of the bayou and received intense fire from the Confederates on the bluff above the “Valley of Death" as well as some accidental friendly artillery fire.

The troop transport steamer that picked him up after the withdrawal from Chickasaw Bayou took Joseph directly to the very middle of the battle at Arkansas Post. After making multiple assaults on the fort over open level ground, “The earth was literally blue from one end of their line to the other,” according to one Confederate participant. The 127th Illinois was one of the first to plant their flag on the enemy fortifications.

While working in the disease-infested Desoto Peninsula on the Williams-Grant Canal project, the 127th Illinois was called upon to rescue Admiral Porter’s gunboat fleet that had been ambushed by rebels in Deer Creek. Colonel Thomas Kilby Smith remarked about his men (which included Joseph Heywood), “The whistling of bullets is as familiar to their ears as household words. Danger they scorn, and the cheerfulness with which they encounter hardships is beyond all praise.”

Heywood endured the long and arduous march down the west side of the Mississippi, across to Jackson and back to the east side of Vicksburg. He helped to destroy the enemy war-making capabilities in Jackson, and then moved on to the bloody battle of Champion Hill, serving temporarily under the command of General John McClernand. Although his unit was not in the most intense fighting, it did participate in the initial skirmishes along the Raymond Road and was involved in skirmishes with the retreating rebels.

Heywood and his comrades traversed some very treacherous terrain to advance to a position under one of the defender’s parapets at Stockade Redan in the first of two bloody assaults on Vicksburg. They were receiving enfilading fire and taking heavy casualties while the Confederates were rushing reinforcements to that area as T. K. Smith’s soldiers fixed bayonets and prepared to charge. Smith ordered them to withdraw when he realized it was impossible to scale the steep, high walls without special equipment. Later that night the rebels dropped grenades on the positions that had been occupied by the 127th Illinois Voluntary Infantry.

The next day, Colonel T. K. Smith’s men moved along a ravine, encountering similar obstructions to those of the previous day, and advanced to the face of the enemy fortifications. However, their ranks were thinned by withering enfilading enemy fire and their advance was halted. Colonel Giles A. Smith, in his after action report, credited the 127th Illinois as being “first with the foremost.”

Joseph became ill and was hospitalized, along with 400 other members of his regiment, at the division level hospital northwest of Vicksburg in Walnut Hills, overlooking the site of his initial exposure to combat at Chickasaw Bayou. The day before Vicksburg capitulated, Joseph was transported by hospital steamer to Adams Army Hospital in Memphis.

His initial diagnosis was diarrhea, one of the intestinal disorders that accounted for 50% of the disease deaths during the Civil War. In the middle of August, 1863 Joseph went on furlough and overstayed his leave by 17 days. When he was readmitted to the hospital steamer R. C. Wood, he was labeled a “deserter.” He was subsequently admitted to the City U. S. Army General Hospital in Chicago on October 24, 1863 with a diagnosis of chronic diarrhea and was returned to duty (“refronted”) on November 30, 1863. Colonel Deland, commander of Fort Douglas, labeled him a “straggler.”

By December 4 he was back in Adams U. S. Army General Hospital in Memphis where he was called a “convalescent” with the notation that he had returned from “Desertion, furlough.” After three months he was considered fit for duty, even though he still carried a diagnosis of chronic diarrhea, and was back aboard the R. C. Wood bound for Nashville. When he got there on March 19, 1864 he was admitted to Cumberland U. S. Army General Hospital with a diagnosis of chronic bronchitis. Twelve days later, he was apparently still not considered able to return to combat and was made an “Attendant at Large” within the hospital. After only a month and a half of being an attendant, Joseph was diagnosed with anasarca, a severe edema associated with kidney or liver failure that could be fatal.

Upon receiving the diagnosis of anasarca, Joseph was discharged from the army. Six months later, just before the Battle of Nashville, he again showed up at Cumberland U. S. Army General Hospital and was readmitted into the army. It is not clear what he did for the remainder of the war. Three letters from the Surgeon in Charge of Volunteers at the Cumberland Hospital, dated December 31, 1864, February 8, 1865 and March 31, 1865, were written on his behalf stating that he was a patient or was sick in hospital. It is hard to say whether or not he was actually so sick that he had to be hospitalized or the surgeon wanted to keep him as an attendant because he was good at his duties.

After his discharge in 1865 he spent a year with his brother in Illinois and then moved to Minnesota, living in Faribault and Minneapolis and finally arriving in Northfield in 1867. He married Martha Ann Buffum in 1869 and they had a daughter, Lizzie May born April 25, 1871. Martha died on May 3, 1872 and Joseph, following his wife’s wish, subsequently married her best friend and his daughter’s namesake, Lizzie Adams, to provide a good mother for their child.

Joseph worked as a bookkeeper for the Solomon P. Stuart Lumber Yard, near the railroad depot, from the time he arrived in Northfield until he accepted a position with the Bank of Northfield in 1872. (Stuart was mayor of Northfield at the time of the raid). Heywood continued with the First National Bank when it took over the assets of the earlier bank in 1873.