After the War

Monday, March 7, 2011

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, I would like to honor my great-great grandfather Michael McDonald in a series of blogs including his written accounts of his Civil War experiences.

Michael McDonald mustered out on October 9, 1865 at Mobile, Alabama. 

Upon his return to Ahnapee, (now Algoma, Wisconsin), his home, Michael captained the first regularly organized militia company ever perfected in the county.  It was organized in the spring of 1866.  Comprised of late veterans of the Civil War, it numbered some 60 men.  Their uniforms consisted of bright red flannel shirts with black trousers and the company, according to "Pioneer Story" written and printed by George Wing in the Algoma Record Herald in 1914, "made quite a natty appearance when it appeared upon the streets for drill."

Veterans, who were bonded like brothers by their Civil War experiences, held reunions for many years after the war. 

Michael McDonald (center) and his brother John (right)

In the summer of 1866, at 21, Michael married Ella Louise Elliott, the 17 year-old daughter of George W. and the late Juliana Elliott on July 23 in Ahnapee. 

The Civil War had taken a toll on Ella's family as well.  All of her four brothers: David, 26; Charles, 20 (of the Iron Brigade); Park, 17; and Irving, 16, served in the Civil War.  Only two returned.  Park was killed on the battlefield at Chaplin Hills, Kentucky on October 8, 1862.  Charles was wounded but recovered and went on to be a prominent newspaperman in Pennsylvania.  Irving was in Washington, D.C. and shouted with the others as President Abraham Lincoln and his wife passed on the way to Ford's theater and wept with the rest of the soldiers as they passed his bier where the body of the martyred president lay.  A month later Irving, in the 32nd Wisconsin, took part in the Grand Review.  A printer, Irving was also in the newspaper business and published the Algoma Record from 1908 to 1918.  He was the oldest surviving Civil War veteran of Kewaunee County and perhaps the oldest Mason (member of the Masonic order) in years of membership at the time of his death in 1941.  (Read Irving Elliott's letters home from the war here.)  David never came home.  Some claimed that David deserted over a disagreement with his superiors.  He may have died--as so many soldiers did--from illness.  I've never found a definitive explanation for David's disappearance.      

Charles Elliott of the Iron Brigade (from THE OWL)

(The amazing story of Park Elliott is told in my September, 2000, volume 3, issue 9 of Family Times, "Ancestor Anthology--Park Benjamin Elliott:  A Boy Lost Too Soon.")

After the war, Michael, barely 21, bought the Sherman House and became a hotel proprietor, then sailed upon the lake on the "Bessie Boalt" and fished for a few years with his brother John (the one-armed ship captain who lost his arm in the Civil War) and bought and attempted to clear a farm near Brummer's Mills.  Then Michael conducted a store in the village and, finally, studied law and opened a law office with Judge Parker.  He was a police justice of Ahnapee and deputy sheriff of Kewaunee County and active in politics.  He established and edited the Algoma Press and finally, broken in health, almost totally blind, and so deaf that he could only hear with the greatest effort, and stricken with paralysis, he gradually dropped out of the life of the town.  He died at the National Soldier's Home in Milwaukee on May 20, 1914 at age 69.
       

Michael McDonald

The End.