Book Review: The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole’s America: A Tale of Manhood, Sex, and Ambition in the Civil War Era
The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole’s America: A Tale of Manhood, Sex, and Ambition in the Civil War Era. By Michael deGruccio. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025. Hardcover, 369 pages. $32.95.
Reviewed by Mark Dunkelman
George Washington Cole was born in 1827 and grew up in rural Seneca County, New York. He attended a local district school and academy, matriculated at Wesleyan University, and studied at a medical college in Geneva, New York. He started his practice in 1851 in Trumansburg, New York, and married a local woman, Mary Barto. They settled in nearby Havana, where George opened a combination pharmacy and bookstore. Soon, he opened a daguerreotype studio on the building’s second floor. By 1855 the couple had two daughters and had moved to a farm in Lodi.
Mary inherited a substantial amount of money in 1857. With the windfall came a move of the Cole family to the region’s largest city, Syracuse, and a friendship with an attorney and politician named Luther Harris Hiscock, whose wife died of tuberculosis just weeks before the firing on Fort Sumter.
George Cole was in the first wave to enroll when the war began. He left Syracuse as captain of a company of the 12th New York Volunteer Infantry, a regiment raised in the city and surrounding area. The unit’s baptism of fire, on July 18, 1861, at Blackburn Ford, Virginia, was a disaster, with the 12th driven from the field. Demoralized, Cole requested a transfer and was assigned to the 3rd New York Cavalry. In April 1862, the 3rd was sent to North Carolina. That July, while chasing Confederate guerillas, Cole’s horse was shot and rolled over him, crushing his chest and groin and “squeezing part of his lower bowels and the mucus membrane out of his rectum” (52). Despite the serious nature of his injuries, after recuperating at home in Syracuse, Cole returned to the front in November 1862.
He was promoted to major at the end of 1862. Early in 1863, his command engaged in brutal raids that sowed despair among the local populace. But in the summer of 1863, the 3rd Cavalry was assigned to the future Army of the James in Virginia. Cole sought promotion—he wanted to be a general. He enlisted the help of his older brother, Cornelius, a newly-elected member of Congress. The result was a commission as colonel of the 2nd United States Colored Cavalry, a regiment he recruited in coastal Virginia and North Carolina. The relationship between the unit’s white officers and Black enlisted men was dysfunctional, marked by drunkenness, insubordination, courts martial, and the murder of a soldier by one of his lieutenants. After Appomattox, Cole was ordered to command a brigade of mutinous African-American troops bound for Texas. He was discharged at City Point, Virginia, in February 1866, having been brevetted both brigadier and major general.
Cole was appointed a customs agent in New York City and split his time between there and Syracuse, where he was known as “the General.” Suspecting his wife and their mutual friend Luther Hiscock were having an affair, he confronted Mary, who confessed but said Hiscock had initially raped her. Whereupon in June 1867 George and Mary Cole took a train to Albany, where Hiscock was attending a convention. Leaving Mary at a hotel, George strode with purpose to another hotel, where he spotted Hiscock in the lobby, walked up to him, and shot him in the face. With its lurid backstory, the murder caused a sensation, as did Cole’s imprisonment and the subsequent trial, the result of which was a hung jury. At a second trial in November 1868, a jury found Cole not guilty. Cut adrift, he wandered from Washington, where he took a Black common-law wife, to New Mexico, where he died in 1875.
On an early page of his book, Michael deGruccio promises the reader “an unconventional narrative” (x). He delivered. His voice is singular. His portrait of Cole is impressionistic. Descriptions of certain events feel like the hazy sketches of artists of the Civil War era’s illustrated newspapers. Dates are seldom found. A substantial trove of Cole correspondence survives, but is seldom quoted. The notes are straightforward, but they and the bibliography use abbreviations for the various sources, rather than standard style, which is unwieldy. There is, however, an excellent companion website which offers a bonanza of additional material.
This book escorts the reader through the turbulent, troubled life and times of a vivid character. It is often an ugly and distressing story, but it is always well told and interpreted. Michael DeGruccio has given us a gift in uncovering, deciphering, and sharing the fascinating if fraught life of “the General.”
Mark H. Dunkelman has written, published, and lectured extensively the 154th New York Infantry. He also created the mural at Coster Avenue in Gettysburg depicting the action that occurred there on July 1, 1863.
