Note: Updated 23 March 2013

Lewellen [sometimes spelled Llewlyn or Louelen] Crook’s Civil War history is surprisingly well documented, with two service records and multiple pension applications.  That said,  while there is a lot of information, there are still unanswered questions about how many times he was wounded and whether he deserted or not.

Here are the basics:

• He served in two units during the war: C Company of the 35th Georgia Infantry Regiment and Joe Thompson’s Artillery (Hanleiter’s Company)

• He was captured in action on 2 April 1865 at Fort Gregg, during the siege of Richmond. He was shot pretty badly during the battle, with the bullet entering under his right arm and exiting his left hip.

• He spend two months at Hart’s Island prisoner of war camp , in New York City, before being released in mid-June 1865

So what’s so confusing? A couple of things, the first of which is that his records show him deserting twice, but the rest of the available evidence is not entirely clear. He first enlisted in the 35th Georgia Infantry Regiment on March 10th, 1862 . He was present there through the end of April, according to his first consolidated service record, after which he’s listed as absent without leave (AWOL) through the end of 1862.  In his second pension application (filed in 1899), however, he says that he was wounded and discharged because of the disability associated with his wounds in June 1862.  I'm not sure how much confidence to put in that claim, though, because his unit carried him as AWOL for the next six months  and I cannot find a primary source that supports the idea that he was wounded.

There is one secondary source: a narrative on an online genealogy site says that he was wounded and admitted to the 1st Georgia Hospital on June 27, 1862.  That's the day after the 35th fought in the Battle of Mechanicsville and the day of the Battle of Gaines' Mill, so it's plausible that he would have been wounded then. The only "on topic" primary source I've found, though, is an article from the June 30th edition of the Richmond Dispatch that lists the wounded who arrived at various hospitals over the previous four days.  Lewellen is not listed (under any variation of his name), but that's obviously not conclusive since even the article says up front that obtaining "a perfectly accurate list seems almost impossible."

So, at the end of the day, the 35th carried him as AWOL for six months  after he claims to have been wounded, which at the very least calls into question his discharge. It's also worth noting that in 1899  he had an obvious motivation to put a positive spin on how he came to not be in the 35th GA at that point, so I’m not sure what happened.

However he became separated from the 35th GA (either by desertion – sometimes euphemistically called “French leave” – or because he was discharged), he reenlisted in Joe Thompson’s Artillery (also called Hanleiter’s company) on 9 February 1863, according to his second consolidated service record  (he got a new service record when he rejoined the Army, with a different spelling of his first name). He also claims to have reenlisted about this time in his 1899 pension application. 

His commander, Col Cornelius Redding Hanleiter, records in his diary that he had been away on a recruiting trip in February 1863, in which he “got twenty-three recruits.”   One was probably Lewellen.  Lewellen is mentioned twice more in Hanleiter’s diary: on March 26th 1863, Private Crook was placed in charge of a detail conducting unspecified work around the battery ; and on 26 May 1863, Hanleiter notes that “Private Crook’s wife and children arrived this afternoon.”   According to National Park Service records, Lewellen was the only Crook in the unit at this time, so these likely are references to him.

A review of Hanleiter’s diary shows that he spent his time in artillery building, maintaining, and manning coastal defenses near Savannah. 

His second service record shows him with his artillery unit through 31 October 1863 (when he was last paid), and then lists him as deserting on 11 January 1864.  Unfortunately, this portion of Hanleiter’s diary did not survive, because it’s not entirely clear what happened.  In his 1899 pension application he says that 13 months after he reenlisted he transferred back to his old unit, C Company 35th GA.  He also has a witness, who served with him in the artillery, who says the same thing, but it’s easy to imagine that they talked before his filing, so it’s not clear his “witness” is really corroboration.   And obviously he had a motive to make this part of his record sound good, since he was asking the state of Georgia to pay him a pension. 

So did he desert a second time, or did he transfer back to the 35th Ga and the artillery folks screwed up the paperwork? It’s worth noting that his 35th Ga service record also shows him being paid on 31 October 1863,  when he was with the Joe Thompson Artillery. If the whole thing was paperwork confusion, then would the 35th have known that he had been paid in October? The fact that they did know suggests that the Army had the big picture on where he had been and still considered him a deserter. (There is a good, but brief, discussion of desertion in the Civil War at this link; it was not as clear cut as you might think).  A review of Hanleiter’s diary suggests that desertion was not uncommon in the unit. 

Whatever happened, he next shows up in General Hospital 13, in Richmond, suffering from pleurisy and pneumonia on 14 February 1864, according to his 35th GA service record.  General Hospital 13 is a prison hospital,  and when he’s released on 4 July 1864,  his service record says he is transferred to Castle Thunder prison, a prison in Richmond where the Confederate Army kept deserters and spies (as well as general political prisoners). 

That’s obviously not a good sign—it was a pretty brutal place, from everything I’ve read —and in September and October 1864 his service record says that he is “present” but charged with desertion and will stand trial.   I could not find any trial records (but record keeping in Richmond in 1864 is probably not entirely dependable), and in November he’s listed as “present” in his unit with no mention of a trial.   That raises three possibilities: he was tried and found innocent; he was tried and given some punishment short of being kicked out of the army (or shot); or he was just sent back to the army to fight without bothering to deal with the whole desertion thing.

The last option is the most intriguing because in the Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, I found an 8 October 1864 dispatch from Union General Butler to his boss General Meade where Butler makes reference to capturing two Confederates who had been held in Thunder Castle prison for desertion, but “had been, in the exigency, taken out of Castle Thunder and put into the local defense.”  No record says that’s what happened with Lewellen Crook, but it’s a good possibility given that deserters usually get fairly harsh punishments. . .and the Confederates were fairly desperate by this point.

So maybe he deserted once, maybe it was twice, maybe not at all and his records were just terribly screwed up. There is also some confusion about where exactly he was captured by Union forces. It was certainly in or around the fighting at Fort Gregg, to the south of Petersburg, but I’ve been trying to figure out where exactly on the battlefield he was taken (if you're not familiar with it, Fort Gregg is an amazing story. . .there is a recent book about it that’s well worth reading: The Confederate Alamo: Bloodbath at Petersburg’s Forth Gregg on April 2, 1865 by John Fox).

My cautious conclusion is that he was most likely captured in the morning on April 2nd, on the outer line southwest of Fort Gregg during the Union 6th Corps breakthrough or during their mop up of the outer line several hours before the Fort Gregg defense. I cannot completely rule out that he was captured inside the Fort when it was taken, but it seems less likely.

So why do I think that? Lewellen was fighting with the 35th Ga Infantry Regiment on April 2nd , and the unit only saw limited fighting that morning, before being involved in the fighting in the Fort itself later in the day.  That would lead you to conclude that he was most likely captured in the Fort. 

Looking at the records from Hart’s Island Prison (where he was taken in the first batch of prisoners at the camp), though, suggests he was most likely captured before the final assault on the Fort: the induction records say he was captured at “Petersburg” and not “Fort Gregg,” unlike some of the other folks listed, suggesting he was not at the fort. 

A third data point: he was wounded during the fight. His 1899 pension application  that says he was shot under the right arm, with the bullet exited his left hip (a doctor also mentions it in his pension application, based on the scars and not on actually being there when it happened). That's important because while all of the unwounded soldiers captured at Fort Gregg were sent to a different prison, according to a review of prison induction records, the wounded from Fort Gregg were sent to Hart’s Island Prison. So that suggests he could have been taken at the fort.  

So with three data points why do I think he taken before the fighting at the Fort itself? I found one person that John Fox's book lists as wounded at Fort Gregg who showed up at Hart’s Island prison at the same time as Lewellen, according to the induction records , and he was listed as captured at Fort Gregg. So if Lewellen had been wounded and captured at the Fort, I would expect his induction record to also say "Fort Gregg" as his place of capture. Based on that, I concluded that the Union listing his capture at Petersburg as meaning he was captured earlier in the day, outside the fort. It's not rock solid, but it's a reasonable conclusion, I think.

The camp itself was pretty brutal, which makes his survival from such a severe wound all the more impressive.  This description was written by a solider from the 14th Georgia Infantry Regiment:

We were conveyed to our prison quarters, twenty-one miles above New York City, and placed in an inclosure of about four acres in company with about forty-four hundred other representatives of our cause. . . We were placed in wards of a hundred to each ward, with three rows of bunks and two men to a bunk. The first ward was composed mostly of jail birds, blacklegs, and toughs from Petersburg, and their nocturnal rounds of robbery and thieving were a terror to the camp.

We were kept in prison until the 17th of June, and our rations consisted of four hard tacks, a small piece of pickled beef (or mule), and a cup of soup per day. Often have I eaten my two days' rations at one meal and subsisted upon water and wind until the next drawing. Many of the men would peddle their crackers for tobacco, giving a cracker for a chew. This led to a reduction of rations on the plea that we were getting too much. We drew fresh beef at intervals which was carried to the cook house (two in number) and cooked for us. At the window of these cook houses was a swill tub, or barrel, half filled with slop and refuse. Into these barrels was thrown the trimmings from the beef before cooking, and I often saw hungry men scratch, shove, and scramble for these raw /scraps of beef. I also saw them gather  up old beef bones, grind them between rocks, and then boil them for hours, making soup. A game of keno, with a cracker or a chew for a stake, was played with as much excitement, interest, and science as though hundreds of dollars were at stake. I could also hear hungry men munching beef bones in their bunks in the dead hours of night long after every vestige of meat had been eaten off, and when on the 17th of June we were turned out of the prison walls and marched to the boat landing" the men scattered like hogs turned into a cornfield and gathered up the old, stale, and moldy bread that had been thrown from the guards' tents and devoured it voraciously.

Louelen was probably shipped home on the steamer Fulton, which transported prisoners from New York to Hilton Head, according to the account by the soldier from the 14th Georgia.   From there they were sent down river to Savannah, where the soldier from the 14th GA writes about taking a train to Atlanta.

The pictures below show Fort Gregg when we visited in August 2011. If he was captured where I suspect, it would have been southwest of the fort -- about a half mile away -- across the road in an area that's now a mix of woods and houses. We did not venture out there, but did take some pictures of what remains of the fort.

#genealogy #civilwar #fortgregg

According to the Novermber 20th, 1903 edition of the Gainesville Star, I. U. Malphurs was accused of killing his nephew, probably in 1902. The article reported that the case could not be heard during the previous term of the court, and since he had been in jail for a year waiting for trial, the judge granted him bail. That begs a couple of questions -- who did he kill and what happened to him?

As for who he killed, I found the attached headstone in the Antioch Baptist Cemetery, in La Crosse, Florida. It says that Joseph W Malphurs (b 17 Oct 1874 d 30 March 1902) was "Killed by I U Malphurs." Seems pretty cut and dried. . . but there's a complication: there is no Joseph W Malphurs with those dates that I can find.

I can find a Joel Washington Malphurs Jr with those dates (both birth and death), who was also nephew to Isham Underhill Malphurs, all from La Crosse, Florida, according to the 1900 federal census and other sources. That seems compelling, especially since I don't have any other candidates for I U Malphurs than Isham Underhill. But there's also a problem there.

Muriel Ward Malphurs wrote the definitive genealogy on the Malphurs family and lists Joel Washington Malphurs Jr. In addition to census records, cemeteries, etc, one of her sources of information is an interview with Joel's brother, the Rev. Jasper Glen Malphurs. There's no mention in her book of Isham murdering his nephew Joel, something you would expect the brother to talk about, even decades later (Jasper would have been 16 when this happened, old enough for it to have been a formative event for him).

So we have two circumstantial pieces of evidence against Joel being our murder victim: his brother did not tell Muriel about it, albeit 80-some-odd years later, and the name from the census doesn't match the headstone. Neither of those is conclusive, of course: I don't know what condition Jasper was in when he was interviewed, and the census taker wrote down what he heard, or thought he heard, which does not have to be correct (although you would think that Jasper would have corrected Muriel on the name, if it were wrong). So then was there also a Joseph Malphurs?

I have not had a lot of luck finding him -- no census records, etc -- but there are three interesting data points that suggest there was a Joseph W Malphurs in Alachua County around this time. Court records show Joesph W Malphurs serving as a juror three times in 1897 and 1898 (http://goo.gl/NLYnR http://goo.gl/h7VN9 and http://goo.gl/07K8d) There are no other details, though, and unfortunately the online court records don't actually include Isham's trial.

OK, so I've got two candidates for victim, but what happened to the accused? That's also not clear. The only newspapers I've fond have been at the Library of Congress' website, and they either don't have anything after November 20th, 1903 or haven't digitized it yet. Our accused being released on bail is the last data point I have.

If it was Isham Underhill Malphurs, though, he wasn't in jail in the 1910 federal census, which suggests he was acquitted or did not spend significant time in prison.

Court records likely could settle the question, but nothing applicable is available online, and I'm not conveniently located to the Alachua County Courthouse.

#genealogy