The "once splendid" Colonel John Algernon Baker, 3rd North Carolina Cavalry, picture downloaded from Find-A-Grave.
No obvious place to post this, so it will stay in blog format.... Bryce Suderow pointed out this reference in Theodore Lyman's notebooks (how did we miss this?), for June 21, 1864:
“Rode out to meet Barlow coming back. A little beyond the Browder house descried him coming along at the head of his column, arrayed in a checked shirt and lolling about on his horse, more suo! “Hullo! See here!” shouted he “I’ve caught a Cambridge man!”- sure enough, there was a stout, handsome man, mounted on a fine white horse, and daintily dressed, with the stars of a Colonel on his collar and a fanciful sort of helmet of grey felt. It was a certain Baker, in the law school at the time of Daves &c. His effect was spoiled by Barlow’s quaint device of mounting a most scaly looking Adjutant, en croupe, behind him! The wounded were carried to the Williams house” (pp 218-219).
And the next day, June 22, 1864:
“At Gen. Patrick’s found the once splendid Col. Baker, dusty & exhausted under a tree. Barlow had relieved him of his horse”….(221).
Meade's Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman, edited by David W. Lowe, Kent State University Press, 2007.
Col. Baker was amongst Confederate cavalry captured by Barlow's Division of the U.S. II Corps on June 21, 1864, during the first day of what became known as the Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road. Apparently he was recognized as a fellow Harvard man by Barlow and Lyman.
Baker's fine white horse seems to have been the horse Barlow bought from a Confederate colonel. The horse may have been one of those sketched at Petersburg by Winslow Homer. The sketch was later used in the famous painting Prisoners at the Front, which shows Barlow and three Confederate prisoners. The "handsome" colonel, however, looks nothing like any of the three Confederates. See https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=42651889 for more about Baker, including his six marriages.
Winslow Homer, Special Artist See this page for more about the painting and the horse.
“Rode out to meet Barlow coming back. A little beyond the Browder house descried him coming along at the head of his column, arrayed in a checked shirt and lolling about on his horse, more suo! “Hullo! See here!” shouted he “I’ve caught a Cambridge man!”- sure enough, there was a stout, handsome man, mounted on a fine white horse, and daintily dressed, with the stars of a Colonel on his collar and a fanciful sort of helmet of grey felt. It was a certain Baker, in the law school at the time of Daves &c. His effect was spoiled by Barlow’s quaint device of mounting a most scaly looking Adjutant, en croupe, behind him! The wounded were carried to the Williams house” (pp 218-219).
And the next day, June 22, 1864:
“At Gen. Patrick’s found the once splendid Col. Baker, dusty & exhausted under a tree. Barlow had relieved him of his horse”….(221).
Meade's Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman, edited by David W. Lowe, Kent State University Press, 2007.
Col. Baker was amongst Confederate cavalry captured by Barlow's Division of the U.S. II Corps on June 21, 1864, during the first day of what became known as the Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road. Apparently he was recognized as a fellow Harvard man by Barlow and Lyman.
Baker's fine white horse seems to have been the horse Barlow bought from a Confederate colonel. The horse may have been one of those sketched at Petersburg by Winslow Homer. The sketch was later used in the famous painting Prisoners at the Front, which shows Barlow and three Confederate prisoners. The "handsome" colonel, however, looks nothing like any of the three Confederates. See https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=42651889 for more about Baker, including his six marriages.
Winslow Homer, Special Artist See this page for more about the painting and the horse.
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