Civil War Service
On May 22, 1861, Carruth, became captain of Company H by election. He first saw combat at First Bull Run in the brigade of Col. Israel B. Richardson. Carruth next served in the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign. The regiment was in the III Corps in the division of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. Carruth was present at the Battle of Yorktown (1862), where his company distinguished itself. The company also fought at the Battle of Williamsburg. Carruth was wounded in the arm at the Battle of Seven Pines, apparently missing the subsequent battles of the Peninsula Campaign.
Carruth returned to the field as a major in the newly-organized 35th Massachusetts Infantry, commissioned at that rank on August 21, 1862. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel on August 27 of that year. The regiment served in IX Corps in the division of Brig. Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis. Carruth was present at the Battle of South Mountain, where the commander, Col. Edward A. Wild was wounded. Carruth succeeded to command, but he was wounded at the Battle of Antietam near Burnside’s Bridge. Carruth was captured at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia on November 11, 1862, missing the Battle of Fredericksburg.
After being exchanged, Carruth next served in IX Corps in the Department of the Ohio. He became colonel of his regiment on May 1, 1863 and served with the corps in the Siege of Vicksburg, as well as in Eastern Tennessee. Carruth led the 2nd brigade, 2nd division, IX Corps from February 2 to March 3, 1864, before the Corps was transferred back to Virginia. In Virginia, he led the same brigade in April 1864. Then he led 1st brigade, 1st division, IX Corps from April 25 to May 6, 1864. On the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness, May 6, Carruth's brigade was involved in the fighting on the Orange Plank Road. Fighting in the Wilderness alongside the troops of Brig. Gen. Alexander Webb and Brig. Gen. James Wadsworth, Carruth was felled by sunstroke and carried from the field.
Col. Carruth returned to IX Corps in the Army of the Potomac late in 1864 during the Siege of Petersburg, command his regiment. He led a brigade in the second division from January 23 to February 11, 1865, in the absence of Brig. Gen. John I. Curtin. He did so again from May 4 to June 9 of that year, serving in the Department of Washington after the Confederate surrender. Carruth was mustered out of the volunteer service on June 9, 1865. On January 13, 1866, President Andrew Johnson nominated Carruth for the award of the honorary grade of brevet brigadier general, U.S. Volunteers, to rank from April 9, 1865, and the U.S. Senate confirmed the award on March 12, 1866. His brevet was awarded for gallant and meritorious services in the attack on Fort Mahone on April 2, 1865 during Battle of Petersburg III. Maj. Gen. John G. Parke, commander of IX Corps, recommended him; and two other officers commended his regiment for its role in that action.
Read more about this topic: Sumner Carruth
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil, war and/or service:
“During the Civil War the area became a refuge for service- dodging Texans, and gangs of bushwhackers, as they were called, hid in its fastnesses. Conscript details of the Confederate Army hunted the fugitives and occasional skirmishes resulted.”
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?
The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
Its echo in my heart.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)