Like all Civil War soldiers, like soldiers of any war, 18-year old Marquis Lafayette “Mark” Gordon of Greene County pondered how he would react to being subjected to enemy fire for the first time. Would he show bravery or cowardice or something in between? Would he stand and fight to protect his comrades and his cause or would he freeze or “skedaddle”? Gordon, a highly thoughtful young man and a member of Company G the 85th Pennsylvania Volunteers, got his answer in 1862 on a chilly night during a battle in Virginia.
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Battle of Williamsburg
85th PA is in Keyes Corps
Map Courtesy of Hal Jespersen www.cwmaps,com |
On May 5, 1862 at Williamsburg, Virginia, Gordon’s regiment was called forward in reserve after the start of the first pitched battle of the Peninsula Campaign where Union divisions under Joseph Hooker and Philip Kearny attacked the rearguard of the Confederate army during its escape from Yorktown. (The overall Union goal of the campaign was to make a water landing at Fort Monroe, march up the Virginia peninsula formed by the James and York Rivers and capture Richmond, the Confederate capital).
The 85th Pennsylvania volunteer regiment had been organized in the fall of 1861 by Joshua Blackwood Howell, a prominent attorney from Uniontown, PA. Howell’s soldiers came from four counties in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania: Greene, Fayette, Washington and Somerset.
Gordon hailed from Waynesburg, the county seat of Greene County. Gordon was a young school teacher when the war broke out. He chose to volunteer into the Union army to help suppress the rebellion of eleven southern states and preserve the 85-year old republic.
The "Pursley Guards" which became a part of Company G were organized by Gordon’s father, John “Adam” Gordon, a prominent Waynesburg citizen. Adam Gordon was serving as the first superintendent of schools for Greene County when hostilities broke out. Also serving in Company G were Mark Gordon, his uncle, John Crawford and two cousins, Reason Strosnider and Owen Pitcock.
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John Adam Gordon
Experiences in the Civil War |
When they arrived at training camp in Uniontown, Adam Gordon and his son along with the rest of the Pursley Guards were consolidated with another undermanned company to form Company G. Isaac Abraham of Smithfield in Fayette County was chosen as captain and Adam Gordon became the new company’s first lieutenant.
Seven months later, at Williamsburg, Mark Gordon was called forward during a cold, misty rain with the rest of his regiment. The 85th Pennsylvania, stationed on the edge of a wooded area, was advanced 500 yards to relieve another Pennsylvania regiment, the 93rd. Some men in Gordon’s regiment had to step over the dead bodies of fallen soldiers to get to their assigned position, surely a sobering sight for these untested men. The 85th PA and their brigade remained in reserve for the rest of the battle. The entire brigade stood in formation for eighteen hours during a bone-chilling night until the fighting ahead of them finally ceased. The battle ended in a draw, and Confederates continued their movement up the peninsula towards Richmond.
The 85th Pennsylvania was not directly engaged in the battle. They were subjected to cannon fire from a Confederate battery about a half-mile away. Most of these projectiles fell harmlessly in the trees in front of them or in their rear as the regiment fired several blind vollies of musket balls towards the Confederate position at Fort Magruder.
Two men in the regiment were nonetheless wounded, one severely. A piece of shrapnel cut the face of Captain John Morris of Company F, who was also from Greene County. More seriously, a shell struck down Sergeant Daniel Miller of Company K. Miller’s lower body was badly mangled. Both of his legs were amputated and he soon died in a Philadelphia hospital.
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William Elliott Finley
from his memoir The Private's Life |
The wounds suffered by Morris and Miller were the only two casualties in the 85th Pennsylvania regiment that night. But Corporal William Elliot Finley of Company I wrote that the experience was terrifying for these green troops. He wrote, “The cries of the wounded and dying, the incessant and doleful patter of the falling rain together with the irregular picket firing in front, all conspired to make it a night of horror and unrest.” [1]
The briskly cold night also had a harmful effect on scores of troops, including Mark Gordon. Many became ill. One member of Company A, John Neill of Washington, PA, remembered hearing his comrades’ teeth chattering up and down the line during the long night of standing in formation.
M.L. Gordon later wrote of this first battlefield experience nearly thirty years later in his memoir called “Experiences in the Civil War.” This account was privately published after M.L. Gordon’s death by his son, Donald.
Gordon was raised in a religious environment at Waynesburg. He attended church and sat in as his father taught a Bible class to adults on Sunday afternoons. At Williamsburg, Mark Gordon found that he was not overcome with a paralyzing fear of battle, nor sacrificial bravery either. Instead, he was enveloped by a sense of spiritual serenity. “I can remember now the thought came to me, ‘What if I should be killed?’ I think I had been a Christian before, but I can remember how clearly the thought came to me that while my death might be a loss to my friends, it could bring no loss to me.’”
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| Civil War ambulance LOC |
Gordon became ill from exposure at Williamsburg and was sent to a nearby camp hospital. He was recovering at a larger hospital in Newport News when many sick men were transferred to New York City to make room for casualties from the battle of Seven Pines [also known as Fair Oaks] that began later that month. Gordon therefore missed this fight in which his regiment suffered close to a hundred men killed and wounded.
Of his illness, Gordon later remembered, “I began to feel the effects of the night before Williamsburg. A heavy fever set in, and as we had no way of transport for sick men, I fell behind. From the time we left Yorktown, it had been raining much of the time, and the roads were simply awful. Late that night I fell in with an ammunition train, and one of the drivers was kind enough to let me ride on one of his wagons, though he had no right to do so. I suppose he saw how sick a boy I was.” [2]
After some time at home in Waynesburg following his stay in New York City to recover, Gordon rejoined his regiment after an absence of three months. Ironically, his father by this time had been transferred to an ambulance corps and the two would spend the rest of the war apart from each other.
Mark became ill several more times over the next two years. But unlike 300 men from the 85th PA who were discharged for medical reasons between 1861 to 1864, Gordon returned to the regiment after each sickness and eventually finished his three-year enlistment.
Gordon would be shot at and shelled many times during the campaigns in Charleston, South Carolina in 1863 and Bermuda Hundred, Virginia in 1864. The life-or-death realization of combat brought some soldiers closer to their faith. Others saw the horrific destruction around them and questioned a belief in a higher being. For his part, Gordon’s faith in God was strengthened by the war. Half of his postwar years would be spent overseas as a Christian missionary.
Two years after his return from the war, Gordon finished his degree at Waynesburg College. He went on to achieve advanced degrees in both theology from Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts and in medicine from Columbia University. He spent 17 years of his postwar life in Japan and wrote two books about his time there. Prior to leaving for Japan, he married school teacher Agnes Donald in 1872. Together the couple had three children.
In 1889, while serving in Japan, he was encouraged by his son, Donald, to write about his time in the Civil War. Mark Gordon died in Massachusetts in 1900 at the age of 57.
Gordon’s Civil War memoir includes a dozen letters written to his uncle, William Gordon. It therefore offers the reader a contrast between Mark Gordon’s thoughts in real time (his letters and diary notes) and his narrative written a quarter-century later.
Gordon occasionally offered political observations in his war letters. In 1863, referring to the Emancipation Proclamation which went into effect a few weeks earlier, he wrote, as a pro-Union Democrat, “He [Lincoln] has adopted measure which we believe ruinous, yet for his misdeeds shall we desert our country [?]” [3]
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1863, western Pennsylvania was threatened with invasion as Confederate General William “Grumble” Jones led an expedition through western Virginia as far north as Morgantown, just five miles from the Greene County border. This Confederate raid had three purposes: to discourage western Virginians from carrying through with separation and statehood, to disrupt Union transportation and supplies, and to capture livestock for the Confederate cause.
It was the latter goal that most alarmed the people of southwestern Pennsylvania, who were afraid that the raid would proceed up through their counties to the federal arsenal in Pittsburgh. Consequently, temporary militias were formed, bank holdings were sent away to safe locations, and farmers tried to hide their horses and cattle among the rolling hills of the area. In the end, the raiders stopped at Morgantown and then veered back into the western counties of West Virginia.
Stationed on Folly Island near Charleston at the time, Gordon got a big chuckle when he read hometown newspapers of the panic caused by Jones’ marauders. He wrote to his uncle, “Our boys had a great time after the arrival of the last mail, laughing over the scare some of the people in Greene Co. had at the time of the threatened invasion by the Rebels, although I suspect, it was no laughing matter then…I think there were some men who should have shown more pluck than to run off with their horses and cattle & [potentially] leave their wives and children in the hands of a merciless, vagabond band of guerillas.” [4]
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| Union Camp on Morris Island LOC |
While stationed on Morris Island, home of the famous Confederate stronghold Battery Wagner, Gordon crossed paths with Clara Barton, the most famous nurse of the Civil War and later the founder of the American Red Cross.
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| Clara Barton LOC |
Barton was in the Charleston theater of the war to tend to the soldiers and also out of concern for her brother, David, a northern entrepreneur who had stayed in North Carolina when the war began to guard his various business ventures. Clara Barton set up a field hospital on Morris Island. While she tended to a wounded comrade from his company, Gordon wrote, “Away in the night Miss Barton came in and went round among the wounded, talking to them in such a nice way, that I could hardly repress the mental ‘God Bless You!’ that came to my lips and if I had followed my heart would have went up and kissed her right there before them all!” [5]
While stationed on Morris Island, Gordon witnessed two failed infantry assaults on Battery Wagner in July of 1863 that resulted in thousands of Union casualties. In both cases, the 85th Pennsylvania was slated to participate in secondary attacks on the battery once the battery walls were breached, but in each case, the follow-up assaults were called off due to massive Union losses.
The second assault was led by the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of African Americans that suffered over 250 casualties but earned the respect of a generation of white Union soldiers like Mark Gordon. Shortly after the assault, Gordon wrote, “In regard to…arming the Negroes…I was opposed to many if not all of them but a close observation of the progress of the war has convinced me that in some instances, I was wrong.” [6]
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| 54th storming Battery Wagner LOC |
A year later, the 85th Pennsylvania became part of the newly formed Army of the James under General Benjamin Butler and was transferred to the Bermuda Hundred peninsula in Virginia between Richmond and Petersburg. On May 20, 1864, the regiment became engaged in a vigorous skirmish with the enemy at Ware Bottom Church. Gordon wrote, “Here we had the hardest direct fighting of my whole experience. They advanced within a hundred yards of us determined to drive us, but we were as determined to hold our ground. I here shot so fast as to make my gun-barrel so hot that it was uncomfortable to hold – the only time I ever had such an experience.” [7]
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Marquis Lafayette Gordon
Experiences in the Civil War |
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Doshisha U. regents
from Thirty Eventful Years |
Gordon's postwar career showed a commitment to his now strengthened religious ideals. In Japan, Gordon lived in Osaka and became a professor of theology at Doshisha University in Kyoto. Gordon’s arrival came just after the Mejia Restoration when Japan became less isolationist and opened its borders to western visitors and ideas. Christianity was allowed after a ban that lasted two centuries.
In 1889, while the time of his service in Japan was coming to a close, he was encouraged by his son, Donald, to write about his time in the Civil War. Mark Gordon died in Massachusetts in 1900 at the age of 57 shortly after his return from overseas.
Prior to his death, in 1891, he had began writing “An American Missionary in Japan.” In the preface, he gave two reasons for writing this book. One was to record “the wonderful manner in which the religion of Christ is approaching the minds and hearts and lives of the Japanese people.” The other reason was to “outline the way in which missionaries…carry on to success the work for which they are sent out.” [8]
During his time in Japan, the Asian nation was swinging back and forth between opening up to foreigners to acquire more technology and knowledge on one hand, to on the other shutting down its borders to outside influences. As a doctor as well as a religious teacher, foreigners like Gordon had been welcomed more for their medical knowledge than their Christian teachings. By the time he left Japan, Christianity was seen as a threat to a growing Japanese nationalism movement.
During a trip to Massachusetts in 1892, Gordon delivered a church sermon gave a sermon, comparing his trip to America to a soldier in the field. Gordon “came [home] as a soldier who visits another part of the battlefield and tells his comrades how the battle is going.”
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Gordon as a medical missionary
Thirty Eventful Years |
Gordon added, “We are working for a civilized people…The Japanese ideas of etiquette must be respected if we would influence them. Etiquette requires me to remove my hat when I enter an American house; the Japanese remove their shoes. The Japanese are a progressive nation. Railroads and telegraphs have been introduced…Two years ago, it seemed as though the days of the Japanese missions were nearly ended, but the pendulum has swung the other way and there is an earnest demand for American missionaries.” [9]
The last year of his life, 1900, was an active one. He finished writing his second book on his missionary experiences called “Thirty Eventful Years: The Story of the American Board Mission in Japan, 1869-1899” which was posthumously published in 1901.
In the preface to this second work, Gordon's son, Donald, wrote: “The toil of these years had unmistakenly left its mark upon him, and many of his friends wished he had spared himself this new labor... Later, he himself clearly recognized the unwisdom of the undertaking but kept himself bravely at his task though with great weariness of the flesh and although there was even then creeping in upon him the fatal disease which ended his life on November 4, 1900.” [10]
In “Thirty Eventful Years in Japan,” Gordon was overwhelming upbeat about his missionary experience. Gordon nonetheless included one vignette that demonstrated the danger faced by his family and fellow western missionaries towards the end of his mission. The group had received a chilling letter from some Japanese citizens who wished to expel all foreigners from Japanese soil.
The anonymous letter stated, “You have come from a far county with the evil religion of Christ... With bad teaching you are gradually deceiving the people but we know your hearts, and hence we shall soon with Japanese swords inflict the punishment of Heaven upon you...In ancient times, when Buddhism first came to Japan, those who brought it were killed; in the same way you must be killed. But we do not wish to defile the sacred soil of Japan with your abominable blood. Hence take your families and go quickly.” [11]
Perhaps due to this admonition or to his failing health (or both), Gordon came home to the United States. Seven months prior to his death, Gordon delivered an address at an evangelical conference entitled, “The Best Method of Dealing Personally with Unconverted and Inquirers.” One month later, he was invited by the American Board of Missions to lead missionary efforts in the Hawaiian Islands (that had a large population of Japanese field workers) but had to turn down the offer due to his declining physical condition.
In September of 1900, Gordon conducted the marriage of his son, Donald, to Louise Ayer in Boston. Gordon died a few weeks later from anemia at age 57 and is buried in Andover, Massachusetts.
Today, M.L. Gordon’s legacy of achievement lives on among numerous descendants. These include his great grandson and namesake, Mark Gordon, who in 2018 was elected governor of Wyoming.
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| Governor Mark Gordon of Wyoming |
Endnotes
1. 1 The Private’s History, William Elliot Finley, 1867, p. 10
2. 2 Experiences in the Civil War, M.L. Gordon, edited by Donald Gordon, 1922, p.31
3. 3. Experiences in the Civil War, M.L. Gordon, p.7
4. 4. Experiences in the Civil War, p.34
5. 5. Experiences in the Civil War, p.39
6. 6. Experiences in the Civil War, p.41
7. 7. Experiences in the Civil War, p. 59
8. 8. An American Missionary in Japan, M.L. Gordon, 1892, Cambridge, MA
9. 9. The Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel, March 17, 1892, page 6
1 10. Thirty Eventful Years in Japan, M.L. Gordon, 1901, Boston
11. Thirty Eventful Years, p. 12
