The Lucky Card Player

Playing Cards in Camp
LOC

       It was common for Civil War soldiers to toss away certain items just before going into battle. Dice, playing cards and pipes were often flipped away along the road or the brush while marching towards a fray. If a soldier were killed in battle, his personal belongings would be sent home to his family; many soldiers did not want their mothers to know that they had engaged in such habits as gambling or smoking.
       Corporal David Miller of Company B of the 85th Pennsylvania apparently did not hold such assumptions about his deck of cards. Perhaps he did use them to gamble. Maybe he thought he would be spared from injury or death. It could have been that his mother was no longer living. Or perhaps he just did not care. In any event, his decision to keep his cards may have saved his life.
      The 34-year old Miller, at the time a resident of Washington County, had already been wounded once, in the side and in the hand, at the Battle of Seven Pines in Virginia on May 31, 1862 when his deck of cards became a lifesaver. During this battle, about 75 men of his regiment suffered wounds, and about 25 died. Miller recovered and continued his service with his regiment.
     Six months later, in December of 1862, the 85th Pennsylvania was sent to New Bern, North Carolina to become part of the Goldsboro Expedition. This two-week mission, led by General John G. Foster, was tasked with disrupting the Confederate railroad center at Goldsboro sixty miles to the west and to interrupt the supply line for Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Battle of Kinston
Reunion of the 45th Massachusetts Regiment
December 14, 1887
Post by Jason Tomberlin

     Foster's 10,000-man force was on their way to Goldsboro when they received word of the disastrous Union loss at Fredericksburg, Virginia.
    It is unclear whether or not Foster's goal was to simply stop supplies from reaching Lee (which did not matter now that the Fredericksburg battle had been fought) or whether he was to capture and occupy Goldsboro. With the federal army already badly defeated at Fredericksburg, the threat loomed of Confederate reinforcements being sent from northern Virginia to assist General Nathan "Shanks" Evans and his undermanned troops in North Carolina against Foster's command,
       Foster altered his plan. Staying in Goldsboro, he determined, was now out of the question. He decided he had time to march on to Goldsboro, destroy a railroad bridge and safely return to New Bern before Confederate reinforcements could arrive.
        On their way to Goldsboro, the 85th Pennsylvania was involved in two engagements in and around Kinston, At Southwest Creek, four miles south of the city, Companies B (including Miller) and D of the 85th Pennsylvania were sent, along with the 9th New Jersey, to force an opening through a thin Confederate artillery position. Both Union regiments made it across the creek at separate locations, gaining a pathway for Foster's force to continue on to Kinston.
     The next day, the 85th Pennsylvania as part of Henry Wessells' Brigade, slogged through a thinly  guarded swamp southeast of city towards the Kinston Bridge that spanned the Neuse River. This is where Miller's deck of cards came into play.

From a Kinston, NC Historical Marker
The yellow circle shows the position of  the 85th PA

       While part of Foster's force marched up the road towards the bridge from the south (the left of the picture below), the 85th Pennsylvania advanced towards the bridge from the southwest through the swamp (top left of the picture).

Kinston Bridge across the Neuse River
Harper's Weekly

      In this part of the assault, the 85th Pennsylvania and their brigade were slowed by the chest-deep waters. Confederate sniper fire also made the passage difficult. The Union troops were slowed by trying to advance through the water. On the other hand, as one member of the 85th Pennsylvania later commented, with the lower two-thirds of their bodies in water, the Confederates had less of a target to shoot at.
      During this advance, Sergeant Miller was struck. Nearly four decades later 85th veteran Manaen Sharp wrote a brief tract about veterans in the area around Amity, PA in Washington County.
      Of Miller, Corporal Sharp wrote,  "At Kingston [sic] while charging through a swamp he [MIller] was badly hurt and helped to solid ground by a comrade, who, examining his wound, found the ball had passed through a deck of playing cards and buried itself in his side." [Sharp, Amity in the Great American Conflict, p. 24]

         How badly was Miller wounded? Records are inconclusive.  Historian Luther Dickey, in his 1915 history of the 85th Pennsylvania, listed the names of the three soldiers from the regiment killed on the expedition but not the names of  five more who were wounded along the way. Miller may or may not have been one of these five. A later biographical sketch noted that Miller was treated for his wound in a field hospital. [Presidents, Soldiers and Statesmen, 1894, p. 1263]
        Miller either marched or rode the sixty miles back to the Union base at New Bern. The regiment stayed there for six weeks through the end of January before being transported to St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Their next military movement was not until April of 1863 when they launched an invasion of Folly Island, South Carolina.  This gave Corporal Miller four months to recover and rejoin his regiment.
        Miller stayed with his regiment for the next 18 months, finishing his three-year enlistment in November of 1864. 
       Later, in the 1890 Veteran Schedule, a special census of Union Civil War veterans which detailed their service and physical conditions, no mention was made of Miller having suffered from a permanent wound at Kinston.
        Miller lived in Jefferson, PA in Greene County at the time of the Veteran Schedule. No record of his burial could be found in either Greene or Washington Counties. Was Miller a gambler and/or did he continue his card-playing habit following the war? Suffice to say, he may have made his best gamble of his by keeping his cards close at hand at Kinston in 1862.