What’s in a Name? Solving the Mystery of an Italian Confederate
Emerging Civil War welcome guest author Joseph Casino…
Rev. Patrick Reilly, headmaster of St. Mary’s College in Wilmington, Delaware, often received letters from his former students during the Civil War years. Some had gone off to fight for the Union, while others had done so to support the Confederacy. Most of the letters came from, or were about, individuals with Irish surnames, like his own. However, on July 23, 1863, he received one that was especially perplexing because of the names of the people involved. The letter was about a concerned father, identified merely as “Signor George,” who was worried about his Confederate son recently imprisoned in Fort Delaware (not far from Wilmington), who was identified simply as “young George.” All that the letter disclosed was that the father formerly lived in Richmond, Virginia, but now resided in Baltimore serving as the choir leader in St. John’s Catholic Church there, and that the son, described as “a stout, well built boy about 18 yrs. old,” had been serving in an unspecified Virginia regiment at the time of his capture by Union troops shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg. Most significantly, both were described as Italian citizens! As a presumably Italian Catholic, “Signor George’s” an appeal to a prominent Catholic priest and educator who regularly administered the sacraments to the prisoners at Fort Delaware would have seemed prudent.
Source: https://www.legendsofamerica.com
For Father Reilly and for modern historians, identifying any Italian in 1863 America would be like finding a needle in a haystack.[1] There were only about 12,000 Italians in a total U. S. population of 31 million, and recent research on Civil War Italians has focused almost exclusively on prominent individuals, especially those who became officers.[2] Very little is known about the common soldier of Italian background. Moreover, because Italian “national” identity was still very new and fragmented, many of them in the U. S. might have been identified in census records as Austrians, French, or Spanish. Many Italian names were Anglicized, thus making them forever invisible as Italians. A list of Italian American officers in the Union Navy contains such un-Italian sounding names like James Berry, George Roberts, William Brown, John Green, Joseph Rice, Martin Mitchell, Andrew Smith, Jacob Nixon, Stephen Thomas, Hugh Donnelly, and Michael Bridge. In the Confederate army, there were some Italian-American soldiers (perhaps veterans of the Army of the Two Sicilies from 1860) with Italian companies within regiments from Louisiana, Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama, as well as parts of a company from South Carolina.[3] However, with only “Signor George” (“Mr. George” in Italian), and “young George” (“George” who?) to go on, and with no Virginia regimental identification provided, it would have been nearly impossible to identify the young prisoner. For the historian, searching through the records of thousands of Fort Delaware prisoners for an Italian boy with the first name of George would have been a fool’s errand.
Fortunately, historians have more and better resources at their disposal than did Father Reilly: city directories, censuses, and other Ancestry.com references. None of these resources, however, would have easily led to anyone called “young George” without this author’s lucky discovery of a newspaper item from Long Island on August 11, 1880.[4] On that date The Sun reported on the discovery of the headless corpse of a “Signor George,” a Brooklyn music teacher formerly of Richmond, Virginia. The police and coroner’s investigation of the presumed murder of the elderly man revealed that “Signor George” was in fact Gennaro Giuseppi Carmina Primicherio, born around 1810 into an Italian noble family in the Kingdom of Naples. A gifted musician at a college in Naples, he was forced to flee Italy in the 1820’s because of jealous competitors. While on a U. S. Navy vessel taking him to the United States, the sailors dubbed him “George” (perhaps because they misunderstood his Italian name Gennaro). He and his descendants continued to use “George” as the family name in America.[5]
Linking this information to other sources revealed that in 1850, Signor George became a music teacher in Richmond, Virginia and by 1857 had also become professor of music at the Virginia Male and Female Collegiate Institute in Portsmouth, Virginia. There, among his students, was to be found a son, Joseph D. George, born in 1845 and a private in the institute’s Cadet Corps.[6] Based on available evidence this was the “young George” of Father Reilly’s letter.
The Virginia Collegiate Institute’s educational philosophy reflected the militaristic fad of that time before the war. The Catalogue of the Institute declared that “as far as practicable the regulations of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington will constitute the code of the Collegiate Institute.” The institute in Portsmouth followed a modified version of “Partridge’s American System of Education,” which held that “knowledge of military science…should constitute a part of the education of every man who bears the proud appellation of ‘Citizen Soldier.’”[7]
Despite the significant military emphasis in his educational preparation, however, Joseph D. George seems to have developed into a somewhat lukewarm Confederate warrior. He enlisted at Camp Talbot near Norfolk, Virginia, on August 13, 1861 for one year in Captain Moore’s Company, Virginia Light Artillery, attached to the 41st Virginia Infantry. Soon after that he was reported missing. A little later, George re-enlisted for the war to get the $5 bounty. On March 25, 1862, he transferred to the Virginia Norfolk Light Battery. Reported sick in a Richmond hospital in September 1862, George was then listed as a deserter in November and December 1862. He was back in Richmond hospitals in February 1863, April 1863, and May 1863, with scabies and acute diarrhea.[8] While still missing again in June 1863, he was taken prisoner in a skirmish at at Fayetteville, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1863. It appears he may have deserted or had intentionally allowed himself to be captured in order to get himself out of the war. By August 1, 1863, he was a prisoner at Fort Delaware, and while there he galvanized and joined the Union Army, perhaps the 3rd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery, as so many Confederate prisoners there did, although that is not certain. It appears that, according to one source, a Joseph D. George remained in the United States Army after the war, but then deserted from Company A, 1st U.S. Cavalry on January 29, 1870.[9]
A native of Philadelphia, Joseph J. Casino earned his B.A. in Honors Humanities (1968) and M.S. in Library Science and Archival Administration (1991) from Villanova University, and his M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. Candidacy in History (1972) from the University of Michigan. Following residence at U. S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, DC (1972-73) and work on The Papers of Robert Morris in New York (1974-76), he served as the Director of the Catholic Historical Research Center from 1981 to 2015. He taught various history courses at St. Joseph’s University from 1981 to 2015 and at Villanova University from 1978 to the present. His current course offerings at Villanova include War and Society in the Pre-Modern World, American Military History to 1900, and Twentieth-Century Military History. His most recent publications are “‘Plenty of Work to Do’: Correspondence of an Illinois Farm Girl during the American Civil War,” Civil War History 65:1 (March 2019) and “Panic in Philadelphia, 1777: Civilian Behavior and British Military Failure,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 88:4 (Autumn 2021). He is now seeking a publisher for a completed book entitled Weathering the Storms: The Life, the Diary, and the Turbulent Times of Philadelphia Quaker Cabinetmaker James Kite, 1830-1856, and he is completing a book-length work entitled Disrupted Lives: Teachers, Students, and Parents Confront the Civil War, 1861-1867.
Notes:
[1] Ella Lonn’s Foreigners in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968) barely mentions Italians at all, and Frank W. Alduino and David J. Coles’ Sons of Garibaldi in Blue and Gray: Italians in the American Civil War (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2007) focuses on the few prominent Italians who took part in the war. The same is true of Valentino J. Belfiglio’s “Italians and the American Civil War,” Italian Americana 4, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1978): 163-175. At least Belfiglio was able to discover eight Italians who were not officers, but all of them served in the Union Army. Ibid, 166-167. It is also typical of any of these studies to focus on Italians who emigrated to the United States in order to fight for the Union and then perhaps returned to Italy after the war, as in Howard R. Marraro’s “Volontari d’Italia per l’esercito di Lincoln,” Il Ponte (Italia) 12, No. 19 (1963): 1546-1561. Attempts to draw parallels between Italian unification and the American Civil War frequently include scattered references to Italian volunteers in the American war. See Daniele Fiorentino, “Re-Building the Nation-State: The American Civil War in a Transnational Perspective, Hispania Nova, 13 (2015): 201-217, http://www.uc3m.es/hispanianova (accessed 22 June 2022).
[2] David T. Dixon, “The Astonishing Life of an Italian American Civil War Soldier,” Emerging Civil War, 2 November 2020, https://emergingcivilwar.com/2020/11/02/the-astonishing-life-of-an-italian-american-civil-war-soldier/ (accessed 22 June 2022). Despite their small population, Giovanni Schiavo, in The Italians in America Before the Civil War (New York: The Vigo Press, 1934), 279, maintained that, proportional to their total population in the United States, Italians made up the largest ethnic group of any in Civil War armies.
[3] Alduino and Coles, Sons of Garibaldi, 293-294, 393-405.
[4] Thanks to Richard N. Jiuliani, author of Building Little Italy (1998) for this lead.
[5] The Sun (New York), 11 and 24 August 1880, nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83030272/1880-08-11/ed-1/seq-1/, and nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83030272/1880-08-24/ed-1/seq-1/. See also, The Daily Dispatch (Richmond), 12 August 1880, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024738/1880-08-12/ed1/seq-1/; The Indianapolis Sentinel, 3 November 1880; The Cambria Freeman (Ebensburg, PA), 5 November 1880, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83032041/1880-11-05/ed-1/seq-2/ (all accessed 20 June 2022).
[6] 1850 U. S. Census: Richmond (Independent City), Virginia; Roll: M432_951, Page: 337B, Image: 207. 1850 U. S. Federal Census. [database on-line]. Ancestry.com. Provo, UT, USA (accessed 11 September 2019); 1870 U. S. Census: Indianapolis Ward 4 (2nd Enum), Marion, Indiana; Roll: M593_338, Page: 237B. 1870 U. S. Federal Census [database on-line]. Ancestry.com. Provo, UT, USA (accessed 19 January 2019); Baltimore City Directory, 1865, 156; The Maryland State Business Directory, 1866, 72; Baltimore City Directory, 1868, 192; Evansville, Indiana, City Directory, 1875, 143; Brooklyn City Directories for 1882 through 1907, U. S. City Directories, 1822-1995 [database on-line]. Ancestry.com. (accessed 1 November 2019). NARA M1953 Roll 33 FHL Film No. 2383582.
[7] Sixth Annual Catalogue of the Virginia Male and Female Collegiate Institute, Portsmouth, Va. For the Scholastic Year Ending July 4, 1857 (Portsmouth, VA: Daily Transcript Steam Book & Job Office, 1857), 3, 5-6, 8, 14. The Institute was established in 1840 by Captain Alden Partridge, Superintendent of West Point from 1814 to 1818, and a strong proponent of physical education and the revival of the moribund militia system in the United States. “Alden Partridge,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki (accessed 19 January 2019).
[8] National Park Service, Civil War Soldiers and Sailor’s System, online. http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/; Fold3.com. http://www.fold3.com/image 307515206 (accessed 24 January 2019).
[9] Fold3.com. http://www.fold3.com/images 9091691-9091721 (accessed 25 January 2019); “List of Names of Prisoners and Sums of Money, July-November 1863,” Selected Records of the War Department Relating to Confederate Prisoners of War, 1861-1865. NARA M58, RG 109; “Prisoners of War at Fort Delaware, Delaware. Roll 598_40. The Virginia Regimental Histories Series. Ancestry.com. Provo, UT, USA (accessed September 11, 2019).
Great article. Italians punched above their weight in the ACW. Luigi DiCesnola received the Medal of Honor and later headed the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Francis Spinola served in Congress after his military service. I wonder about General Edward Ferrero of Crater fame. He seems to have been an effective and brave combat leader till that fateful day. I think he gave good service afterwards also. I think he just got influenced by the incompetent Ledlie at the Crater. I like to see your emphasis on people further down the socioeconomic ladder. I know it’s post war but the last man to see Custer alive was a recent Italian immigrant who became a career enlisted man. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was born on a western post where his dad was stationed.
Future New York Governor Al Smith’s father served in a New York regiment. His father was Italian.
Did they ever find out what happened to Signor George?
Pat,
This was a shortened version of Part One of a 2-part article. I can send you the second part which deals with what happened to Signor George.
Thanks Joe. I’d love to see it. I checked on Al Smith. His father served in the 11th New York Infantry. Al’s grandfather was Italian.
Al Smith — sounds real Italian! I’ll have to dig out my 11th New York material from another work I’m preparing. I think I need some tutoring on how to include the visuals and the endnotes. Also, there are several newspaper accounts of the police and coroner’s investigation into Signor George’s death that I did not include in this section. I can send the references if you want them.
What’s in a Name? The Mystery of the Italian Confederate (Part Two)
by
Joseph J. Casino
Villanova University
Now to the discovery of that headless corpse found on Long Island. As it turns out, the saga of Joseph George’s father is much fuller and mysterious than that of his son. In August 1880, newspapers in New York, Virginia, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, printed the macabre story of the discovery on August 8, in Mattinicook (Matinecock) Woods, Locust Valley, near Oyster Bay, Long Island, of the corpse of an old gentleman. Apparently, the body had been there for several weeks before the discovery, and the disposition of the clothing and possessions left no doubt that he had been robbed. He seems to have been a very religious man, since around his dead body were found a Catholic scapular and religious prayer cards, in which the thieves showed no interest. He was eventually identified as “Signor George.”
Headline, The New York Sun, August 11, 1880. Source: nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83030272/1880-08-11/ed-1/seq-1/.
Could this have been the Signor George of twenty years before in Father Reilly’s letter? Various individuals were questioned by the police under suspicion of having done the old man in. Two women said they had discovered the decomposed body while out searching for wild berries. Apparently, because of the angle of the terrain where the body was found, the head had become detached as it decayed. Two workers testified that they had seen the old man in that area with a woman some time before the discovery. However, the coroner’s report eventually determined that he had wandered off from his home in Brooklyn, became disoriented, and collapsed from exposure and exhaustion. Not being able to regain his footing, he died there from starvation, and his body was probably robbed of any valuables sometime after his death.
Until the coroner’s verdict, the investigation proceeding on the assumption of homicide revealed the long and fascinating history of Signor George. It turned out that his real name was Gennaro Giuseppi Carmina Primicherio, born around 1810 into an Italian noble family in the Kingdom of Naples (after 1816 part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies). His father had at one time been the Mayor of Naples. Primicherio was a very gifted musician at the college in Naples when he attracted the attention of the king of Naples, who recruited him for his personal band. Violent jealousy on the part of the other students, however, caused Primicherio to flee the college in 1824. While in hiding, he was discovered by sailors from one of the U. S. ships (perhaps the sloop of war USS Erie then patrolling the Mediterranean from 1823 to 1826), who persuaded him that they would take him to safety and freedom in America. Perhaps unable to understand his name in English, the sailors dubbed him “George,” a name he and his descendants continued to use in America. Passed from ship to ship for the next two years, and apparently brutalized by Commodore Matthew C. Perry because of his (Primicherio’s) ignorance of English, the young musician finally made it to Baltimore in 1826. There he became a famous teacher of music until 1837 when he relocated to Norfolk, Virginia. In that year, he composed “Norfolia Grand March for the Piano Forte” for Norfolk Junior Volunteers dedicated to Captain Hunter’s Light Infantry (Norfolk Junior Volunteers) during the centennial anniversary of Norfolk Borough.
Frontispiece to sheet music by Signor George, 1837.Source: The Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries & University Museums, https://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/collection/034/036
By this time, he had married Elizabeth Virginia Bentley (1814-1878) with whom he eventually had eight children: Amelia (1830-1883), Mary Agnes (1832-?), Michael Alexander (1837-1911), Francis A. “Frank” (1839-1909), Angeline Lucretia “Cressie” (1842-1923), Joseph D. (1845-?), Virginia “Jennie” (1849-1900), and Augustus “Gus” (1855-1913). One newspaper account has him in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1850’s with five children, and a teacher of “the best of Richmond’s people.” There he supposedly formed a drum corps and instrumental band of a military regiment “whose successor was the famous First Virginia.” People remembered seeing Signor George leading public parades, and as the organist at Saint Peter’s Catholic Church where “his daughters Amelia and Mary lent their voices to sacred music.”
Sometime during this period, he also became the leader of the U. S. army band at Fortress Monroe and apparently served as a private during the Seminole War in Florida. When Confederate troops evacuated Norfolk in 1863, Signor George moved to Baltimore where he spent the next seven years as a music teacher and perhaps as a choir director at St. John’s Catholic Church as mentioned in Cahill’s letter. This was the year that his son, Joseph D., spent a very short stint as a Confederate prisoner at Fort Delaware.
By 1870, the sources also revealed that Signor George had moved to Marion, Indiana, to take up teaching music there, while his daughter, Lucretia, followed in her father’s footsteps both geographically and occupationally. The critical middle period of Signor George’s life is nearly a blank in the newspaper accounts, with some having him located Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1879, and then in Evansville three years later. The 1870 Census for Indianapolis lists two daughters (Lucretia, age 22, music teacher, and Virginia, age 18, at home) and one son (Augustus, age 15, at school), but no mention of Joseph D. George, supposedly because that former Italian Confederate had moved on to other places and other pursuits. In Evansville, Signor George taught vocal music to several prominent artists. When his wife Elizabeth died in 1878, he returned to Baltimore, reportedly in an “enfeebled” state because of a stroke he had suffered in Evansville that year.
Then, sometime in the late 1870’s, he left Baltimore for the last time to live in Brooklyn with daughter Virginia “Jennie,” a choir director there, who had married tobacco merchant George Villeroy Watson. Supposedly, Signor George was employed as a music teacher by many wealthy families in Brooklyn. It was from his daughter’s home that he wandered away on June 3, 1880, perhaps suffering from dementia; and, after several attempts to locate him, his decomposing body was found the following October. The newspaper accounts do not identify the daughter in Brooklyn (we know it was Virginia), but they do name two other daughters: Mary, and Amelia, who taught music and led the St. John’s choir in Baltimore (a connection mentioned in Rev. Reilly’s letter but related to her father instead). Two sons are also mentioned, one of which, Francesco A. R. Primicherio, was an engineer at the Gosport Navy Yard and was in charge of the U. S. gunboat Sebago, part of Admiral Farragut’s squadron blockading Mobile harbor in 1864. Identified in some newspaper accounts as F. A. Georgio, who had been absent “in the West” for several months, he reappeared in Baltimore around the time of the discovery of Signor George’s body. It is exasperating to read, however, that a Joseph D. George, a butcher born in Staunton, Virginia in 1845 (the correct birth year for Signor George’s son), had enlisted in Baltimore in the U.S. Navy in May 1869 for three years, and in the same year in San Francisco enlisted in the First U. S. Cavalry, but deserted on January 29, 1870 (this also sounds like Signor George’s son).
Such loose ends are the bane of historians but are probably the majority of searches based on such enigmatic references as Rev. Reilly’s letter. Persistence in research often pays dividends, but not always the ones we are expecting. To the adventurous mind, open to the unexpected, history is (if we may borrow Forrest Gump’s oft-quoted line in the 1994 movie), “like a box a chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” To which we might add: “you still might get something interesting.”
If it had not been for a mention in two letters to an Irish college president in Delaware and the newspapers reports of a decapitated body along Long Island Sound, we would never have known anything about an Italian Confederate soldier in the American Civil War or about the fascinating life of his Italian immigrant father. In their incomplete details, however, the results still reveal some of the complexity, richness, and twists in the many unheralded lives of the people who went before us during that tragic era.
Now to the discovery of that headless corpse found on Long Island. As it turns out, the saga of Joseph George’s father is much fuller and mysterious than that of his son. In August 1880, newspapers in New York, Virginia, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, printed the macabre story of the discovery on August 8, in Mattinicook (Matinecock) Woods, Locust Valley, near Oyster Bay, Long Island, of the corpse of an old gentleman. Apparently, the body had been there for several weeks before the discovery, and the disposition of the clothing and possessions left no doubt that he had been robbed. He seems to have been a very religious man, since around his dead body were found a Catholic scapular and religious prayer cards, in which the thieves showed no interest. He was eventually identified as “Signor George.”
Could this have been the Signor George of twenty years before in Father Reilly’s letter? Various individuals were questioned by the police under suspicion of having done the old man in. Two women said they had discovered the decomposed body while out searching for wild berries. Apparently, because of the angle of the terrain where the body was found, the head had become detached as it decayed. Two workers testified that they had seen the old man in that area with a woman some time before the discovery. However, the coroner’s report eventually determined that he had wandered off from his home in Brooklyn, became disoriented, and collapsed from exposure and exhaustion. Not being able to regain his footing, he died there from starvation, and his body was probably robbed of any valuables sometime after his death.
Until the coroner’s verdict, the investigation proceeding on the assumption of homicide revealed the long and fascinating history of Signor George. It turned out that his real name was Gennaro Giuseppi Carmina Primicherio, born around 1810 into an Italian noble family in the Kingdom of Naples (after 1816 part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies). His father had at one time been the Mayor of Naples. Primicherio was a very gifted musician at the college in Naples when he attracted the attention of the king of Naples, who recruited him for his personal band. Violent jealousy on the part of the other students, however, caused Primicherio to flee the college in 1824. While in hiding, he was discovered by sailors from one of the U. S. ships (perhaps the sloop of war USS Erie then patrolling the Mediterranean from 1823 to 1826), who persuaded him that they would take him to safety and freedom in America. Perhaps unable to understand his name in English, the sailors dubbed him “George,” a name he and his descendants continued to use in America. Passed from ship to ship for the next two years, and apparently brutalized by Commodore Matthew C. Perry because of his (Primicherio’s) ignorance of English, the young musician finally made it to Baltimore in 1826. There he became a famous teacher of music until 1837 when he relocated to Norfolk, Virginia. In that year, he composed “Norfolia Grand March for the Piano Forte” for Norfolk Junior Volunteers dedicated to Captain Hunter’s Light Infantry (Norfolk Junior Volunteers) during the centennial anniversary of Norfolk Borough.
By this time, he had married Elizabeth Virginia Bentley (1814-1878) with whom he eventually had eight children: Amelia (1830-1883), Mary Agnes (1832-?), Michael Alexander (1837-1911), Francis A. “Frank” (1839-1909), Angeline Lucretia “Cressie” (1842-1923), Joseph D. (1845-?), Virginia “Jennie” (1849-1900), and Augustus “Gus” (1855-1913). One newspaper account has him in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1850’s with five children, and a teacher of “the best of Richmond’s people.” There he supposedly formed a drum corps and instrumental band of a military regiment “whose successor was the famous First Virginia.” People remembered seeing Signor George leading public parades, and as the organist at Saint Peter’s Catholic Church where “his daughters Amelia and Mary lent their voices to sacred music.” Sometime during this period, he also became the leader of the U. S. army band at Fortress Monroe and apparently served as a private during the Seminole War in Florida. When Confederate troops evacuated Norfolk in 1863, Signor George moved to Baltimore where he spent the next seven years as a music teacher and perhaps as a choir director at St. John’s Catholic Church as mentioned in the letter to Rev. Reilly. This was the year that his son, Joseph D., spent a very short stint as a Confederate prisoner at Fort Delaware.
By 1870, the sources also revealed that Signor George had moved to Marion, Indiana, to take up teaching music there, while his daughter, Lucretia, followed in her father’s footsteps both geographically and occupationally. The critical middle period of Signor George’s his life is nearly a blank in the newspaper accounts, with some having him located in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1879, and then in Evansville three years later. The 1870 Census for Indianapolis lists two daughters (Lucretia, age 22, music teacher, and Virginia, age 18, at home) and one son (Augustus, age 15, at school), but no mention of Joseph D. George, supposedly because that former Italian Confederate had moved on to other places and other pursuits. In Evansville, Signor George taught vocal music to several prominent artists. When his wife Elizabeth died in 1878, he returned to Baltimore, reportedly in an “enfeebled” state because of a stroke he had suffered in Evansville that year.
Then, sometime in the late 1870’s, he left Baltimore for the last time to live in Brooklyn with daughter Virginia “Jennie,” a choir director there, who had married tobacco merchant George Villeroy Watson. Supposedly, Signor George was employed as a music teacher by many wealthy families in Brooklyn. It was from his daughter’s home that he wandered away on June 3, 1880, perhaps suffering from dementia; and, after several attempts to locate him, his decomposing body was found the following October. The newspaper accounts do not identify the daughter in Brooklyn (we know it was Virginia), but they do name two other daughters: Mary, and Amelia who taught music and led the St. John’s choir in Baltimore (a connection mentioned in Rev. Reilly’s letter but related to her father instead). Two sons are also mentioned, one of which, Francesco A. R. Primicherio, was an engineer at the Gosport Navy Yard and was in charge of the U. S. gunboat Sebago, part of Admiral Farragut’s squadron blockading Mobile harbor in 1864. Identified in some newspaper accounts as F. A. Georgio, who had been absent “in the West” for several months, he reappeared in Baltimore around the time of the discovery of Signor George’s body. It is exasperating to read, however, that a Joseph D. George, a butcher born in Staunton, Virginia in 1845 (the correct birth year for Signor George’s son), had enlisted in Baltimore in the U.S. Navy in May 1869 for three years, and in the same year in San Francisco enlisted in the First U. S. Cavalry, but deserted on January 29, 1870 (this also sounds like Signor George’s son).
Such loose ends are the bane of historians but are probably the majority of searches based on such enigmatic references as the letter to Rev. Reilly. Persistence in research often pays dividends, but not always the ones we are expecting. To the adventurous mind, open to the unexpected, history is (if we may borrow Forrest Gump’s oft-quoted line in the 1994 movie), “like a box a chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” To which we might add: “you still might get something interesting.”
If it had not been for a mention in two letters to an Irish college president in Delaware and the newspapers reports of a decapitated body along Long Island Sound, we would never have known anything about an Italian Confederate soldier in the American Civil War or about the fascinating life of his Italian immigrant father. In their incomplete details, however, the results still reveal some of the complexity, richness, and twists in the many unheralded lives of the people who went before us during that tragic era.
Really interesting. I live about 10 miles from Locust Valley and often brought my kids to a heavily wooded nature preserve there when they were younger. The preserve is bordered by Long Island Railroad tracks. The LIRR Locust Valley station was the end of that particular line in 1880. You can see how someone with dementia boarded a train in Brooklyn and wound up there.
Endnotes:
1) The Sun (New York), 11 and 24 August 1880, nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83030272/1880-08-11/ed-1/seq-1/, and nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83030272/1880-08-24/ed-1/seq-1/; The Daily Dispatch (Richmond), 12 August 1880, chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024738/1880-08-12/ed-1/seq-1/; The Indianapolis Sentinel, 3 November 1880; The Cambria Freeman (Ebensburg, PA), 5 November 1880, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83032041/1880-11-05/ed-1/seq-2/ (all accessed 20 June 2022).
2) Frontispiece to sheet music, The Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries & University Museums, https://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/collection/034/036 (accessed 23 June 2022).
3) The Daily Dispatch (Richmond), 12 August 1880.
4) Baltimore City Directory, 1865, 156; The Maryland State Business Directory, 1866, 72; Baltimore City Directory, 1868, 192; Evansville, Indiana, City Directory, 1875, 143; 1870 U. S. Census: Indianapolis Ward 4 (2nd Enum), Marion, Indiana; Roll: M593_338; Page: 237B; Family History Library Film: 545837. 1870 U. S. Federal Census [database on-line]. Ancestry.com. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.1870 U.S. census, population schedules. NARA microfilm publication M593, 1,761 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. (accessed 19 January 2019).
5) 1870 U. S. Federal Census for Indianapolis, Indiana. Ancestry.com. Provo, UT. USA (accessed 1 November 2019).
6) Brooklyn City Directories for 1882 through 1907. U. S. City Directories, 1822-1995 [database on-line]. Ancestry.com. (accessed 1 November 2019).
7) NARA M1953 Roll 33 FHL Film No. 2383582. U. S. Naval Enlistment Rendezvous, 1855-1891 [database on-line]. Ancestry.com. (accessed 1 November 2019).
Great article. You are right about the Italians. Of the 93 identified foreign-born soldiers in the 12th Mississippi, only three were Italian, and all served in Co. G – the Natchez Fencibles.
Sgt. Paul Botto’s occupation on the 1860 census was fruit vendor, but he also wrote for one of the Natchez papers and sent letters from the front. He enlisted in March 1861 as a private but was promoted to 1st Sergeant in April of 1862. He was one of many captured at the Weldon RR in August of 1864. Released from Point Lookout in early 1865, he was on leave when his unit surrendered at Appomattox Courth House. Botto continued writing after the war and helped found the Natchez Democrat newspaper.
Pvt. Louis Podesta served the entire war. He was wounded at Cold Harbor, but returned after his recovery. He was with the 12th at Fort Gregg on April 2, 1865, but wounded before the Union drove the Mississipians into the fort. He was captured at a hospital in Richmond and released in June of 1865. Podesta would settle in Memphis after the war.
Pvt. Francisco Rocco enlisted in 1862. He was detailed as a cook in early 1864, and went through the lines in January 1865 during the seige of Petersburg. He died in California in 1887.
For reference, the 12th served in the Featherston/Posey/Harris Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Shelly,
Great items on the three Italians in the 12th Mississippi. Do you have more details on their post-war experiences?