by Yunte Huang
Arriving too late for the intended addressee, His Majesty’s gifts and missives fell into the hands of the bachelor president’s successor, Abraham Lincoln. On February 3, 1862, three days after issuing General War Order No. 1, calling for all United States naval and land forces to begin a general advance by George Washington’s birthday, Lincoln replied to King Mongkut and declined the generous offer. With a hint of condescension, the president touted the superiority of steam power over animal strength: “I appreciate most highly Your Majesty’s tender of good offices in forwarding to this Government a stock from which a supply of elephants might be raised on our own soil. This Government would not hesitate to avail itself of so generous an offer if the object were one which could be made practically useful in the present condition of the United States. Our political jurisdiction, however, does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce.”
This friendly exchange has elicited some fanciful what-ifs from Civil War buffs: What if the Union or the Confederate Army had used battalions of war elephants? Could there have been herds of angry pachyderms at Pickett’s Charge or emerging from the forest lines at Shiloh? In ancient Siamese warfare, elephants were indeed mighty weapons for frontal assaults and for cleaning up battlefields by stomping the life out of the luckless and wounded.8
While Lincoln employed his presidential jurisdiction to prevent the military use of Siamese elephants, thus consigning them to circus rings and menageries, he could not stop a sprinkling of Siamese-descended men from entering the war. On April 1, 1863, a week before he turned eighteen, Christopher Wren Bunker, Chang’s first son, enlisted in the Confederate Army to fight for a cause that his father and uncle cherished. On that spring morning, Christopher said teary farewells to his family and rode across the state line into Wythe, Virginia, where he joined the 37th Battalion of the Virginia Cavalry as a private.9 Unlike Union cavalrymen, who were usually provided with a government-owned horse, Confederate officers and mounted troopers were required to bring their own animals, for which they were partially reimbursed. Always fond of horses, Chang and Eng had quite a collection of steeds from which Christopher could choose. The Bunkers would also have to pay for the upkeep of the horse, costs that would rise to a few hundred dollars in Confederate money by the end of the war.10 They also gave Christopher a rifle with the initials “CWB” inscribed on the stock.
Christopher would not be the last Bunker to join the war, nor was he by any means the only Asian soldier involved in the conflict. The Civil War has always been remembered as a struggle between the Union Blue and the Confederate Gray, a fratricide committed by white brothers and aided by black soldiers on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line. But, as recent research reveals, there were at least several hundred soldiers of Asian descent who participated in the bloodbath. The real number perhaps was higher, but anglicized names have made it hard for historians to identify and track them down in the records. In fact, the Civil War was not the first time we saw Asian participation in the nation’s military affairs. During the War of 1812, several Filipinos had fought in the Battle of New Orleans against the British, a dramatic episode that turned Major General Andrew Jackson into a folk hero and paved his way to the presidency.
There were, however, fewer than forty thousand Asian men and women living in the United States during the Civil War, a small number in a nation that by the 1860 census had a population of 31,433,321. This figure included more than thirty-seven thousand Chinese living in California and fewer than a thousand living east of the Mississippi. Judging by this ratio, as Ruthanne Lum McCunn points out in her pioneering research, “The number of Asian men who volunteered to serve in the [Civil War], proportionately speaking, is remarkably high.”11 Most of the Asian volunteers served in the navies—prior to the war, many had already been working on ships as stewards, cabin boys, cooks, and sailors. Among those whose identities have been verified, many had adventuresome life stories that could have been fine fodder for historical fiction.
Take, for example, Thomas Sylvanus, whose Chinese name was Ah Yee Way. Born in Hong Kong, he was rescued from an orphanage by an American missionary and brought to Philadelphia for schooling at the age of eight or nine. The 1860 census showed his age as fifteen; for the question of race, the census taker “made something akin to an exclamation mark.” Still a minor, he enlisted in Company D, 81st Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, on August 31, 1861. Repeatedly battle-tested at Fair Oaks, Allen’s Farm, Savage’s Station, Charles City Crossroads, and Malvern Hill, he went partially blind and was discharged on December 10, 1862. Living in Philadelphia, he heard that the city was threatened by a possible Confederate victory at Gettysburg. He immediately reenlisted, joining the 51st Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on the third day of the famous battle that ended with a victory for the Union, albeit a Pyrrhic one, given the tremendous cost in loss of lives. Desperate to replace fallen troops, Congress enacted conscription and drafted men between the ages of twenty and forty-five. Anyone whose name was drawn by lottery could be exempted by paying a commutation fee of $300 or finding a substitute. Sylvanus ended up enlisting again as a substitute for an umbrella merchant in New York on September 11, 1863. Despite his parlous vision, Sylvanus fought valiantly and was promoted to corporal after four months in Company D, 42nd New York Volunteer Infantry. Injured in the leg, he was taken prisoner at Cold Harbor, along with seventeen hundred other Union soldiers. After the war, this twenty-year-old Chinese veteran—vision impaired, leg injured, and health damaged—was denied a pension. Adding insult to injury, when he reapplied for a pension in 1877, the doctor appointed by the Bureau of Pensions attributed his bad vision partially to inflammation caused by manual labor and partially to “the peculiar look characteristic of his race.” Even though he was eventually granted a far smaller pension than he deserved, his common-law Irish wife, Mathilde, could not get the widow’s pension to which she was entitled after his death at the age of forty-six in 1891. She ended up having to send two of their children to an orphanage, thus bringing a tragic end to the Sylvanus story, which itself had begun in an orphanage in Hong Kong.12
Like Thomas Sylvanus, Siam-born George Dupont also was underage when he enlisted. While working at a foundry in Jersey City, Dupont was enticed by the $75 enlistment bonus. On August 12, 1862, though only fifteen, he was accepted into a White unit, Company B, 13th New Jersey Volunteers, even though he had a dark complexion. The recruitment officers, eager to meet the quota imposed by the federal government, entered Dupont’s age as eighteen and doctored the “CONSENT IN CASE OF MINOR” form by crossing out his purported guardian’s name. Together with his regiment, Dupont fought in the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest one-day conflict in American history, and then at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Taking part in General Sherman’s merciless campaign in Atlanta, Dupont was injured at Kolb’s Farm on June 22 and hospitalized until the war’s end. In 1869, like his fellow countrymen Chang and Eng, Dupont vacated his oath to the king of Siam and became a naturalized American citizen.13
And then there was John Williams, a five-foot-tall, brown-eyed, black-haired Japanese samurai, who served as a substitute for a Brooklyn man. A soldier in the legendary 1st New York Cavalry, comprising mostly immigrants of German, Irish, and English extraction, the pixie Japanese enlistee fought hard for three years in various battles, ranging from the Peninsula Campaign to the Shenandoah Valley Campaign. As we saw earlier, the racial category for Asians at this time was still unsettled in the United States, so some of these Asian soldiers were able to enlist in the White units and received the monthly pay of $13, while others had to join the Colored regiments and received the lesser pay of $10. Either way, they caused bewilderment and confusion on both sides of the fighting line. When John Tomney, a Chinese soldier in the Union Army, was captured, a Confederate general wondered whether he was “a mulatto, Indian, or what?”14
The same question could have been put to Christopher Bunker by any of the military men who saw his mixed physical features. They might have been even more curious if he had told them about his origin. At eighteen, Christopher was “a handsome blend of Chinese and European”: five-foot-eight, slender, black-haired, with a neatly-trimmed moustache, a strong nose, a broad forehead, brown eyes, and a tinted skin color. It would have been hard to figure out his race from his appearance. But no one could question his pride as a Southerner and his devotion to the Confederate cause. His most noteworthy war experience was his participation in the raid of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In July 1864, in retaliation for the damage done by General David Hunter’s federal troops in the Shenandoah Valley, Brigadier General John McCausland led twenty-four hundred Confederate cavalrymen as they moved toward Chambersburg. Along the way, they swept aside Union cavalry and captured many of them, as Christopher described in a family letter about similar encounters earlier:
About two weeks ago we all went out on a scout and was gone about five days we travelled three nights and days before we made a halt. The second night got me it rained all night as hard as it could pour and we had to travel over the rockiest and the muddiest road that I ever saw and the next morning we ran up on the Yankee pickets and captured them and went on to a little town called Rogersville and there we saw a little fun catching Yankees, we captured about 150 Yankees and started back about twelve o’clock and travelled all night that night and in the whole scout we did not take our saddles off of our horses but once or twice and did not feed but once or twice a day and when we got back to camp every horse in the battalion had scratches so bad that they could hardly travel.15
On the morning of July 30, the Confederate brigade reached Chambersburg. McCausland issued a proclamation to the townspeople, demanding $100,000 in gold or $500,000 in greenbacks within three hours or the city would be put to the torch and its leading citizens arrested. “When its inhabitants failed to raise the money, McCausland destroyed it, and while the city burned, drunken soldiers plundered freely, even tearing brooches, rings, and earrings off women in the streets.”16 Chambersburg was the only town in the North destroyed by Confederate forces.
Fleeing from pursuing Union troops, McCausland got as far as Moorefield, West Virginia. Mistakenly thinking that he was in the clear, he ordered his men to set up camp in a level field that was militarily indefensible. A special unit of Union troops known as the Jessie Scouts disguised themselves in Confederate gray and pretended to be a relief column. In a surprise predawn attack, they routed the Confederates. In the mayhem, Christopher was shot out of his saddle, becoming one of the more than four hundred Confederates wounded or killed in that battle.
Earlier, prior to the raid on Chambersburg, Christopher had told his family in the same letter we saw earlier, “My horse corked himself and became very lame and I had to leave him with a gentleman who lives five miles this side of Lexington . . . and if I should get killed or captured on this raid you can send and get him.” After his capture, Christopher’s blood-spattered horse was brought back to Mount Airy. Seeing the riderless steed, Chang and Adelaide felt certain their first son had died.
Fortunately, however, Christopher was only wounded. He was taken to Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio. One of the largest military prisons, Camp Chase was infamous for its lax policy of allowing Confederate inmates to be accompanied by their former household slaves. But by the time Christopher arrived, the prison had discontinued such hospitality. On October 12, more than two months after his capture, Christopher was finally able to write home:
Dear Father, Mother, Brothers and Sisters: It is with pleasure I take the present opportunity to drop you a few lines to let you know how I am getting along. I was captured the 7th of last August and brought to this place. I have no news of interest to write to you as there are none allowed to come in prison. You must write to me as soon as you get this and let me know how you are getting along. I would like to hear from you all as it has been a long time since I heard from you. But I hope it will not be very long before I hear from you and see you too although I see no chance for an exchange. I have not seen many well days since I came to this place. I have had the smallpox and now got the diareea [sic] but I hope that I will be well in the course of a week. . . . We are drawing very light rashions [sic] here just enough to keep breath and body together.17
Nothing could have brought more relief and elation to the Bunker household than this plainly worded epistle. From this point on, “packages from home supplemented his meager rations. His father, Chang, also sent him money so he could buy items—such as cigars, underclothes, pocketknives, and smoked beef—from the prison store.”18 Christopher remained a POW until a parole exchange of prisoners was agreed upon between the Federal Government and the Confederate States in March 1865. On April 17, he arrived home, a hero to the family.
Family lore holds that Christopher’s cousin and Eng’s oldest son, Stephen Decatur Bunker, also enlisted in the 37th Battalion of the Virginia Cavalry after he turned eighteen in July 1864. This would mean that the two Bunker cousins had fought side by side for almost a month before Christopher’s capture. But no record has been found to confirm Stephen’s enlistment in the unit; in fact, there was no trace of Stephen at all in the Compiled Service Record, except that a D. C. Bunker was listed in the Confederate Cavalry. As one historian puts it, “It is possible that the clerk got the name confused or maybe misunderstood the accent of the part Chinese cavalryman.”19 To strengthen the family’s claim, a North Carolina pension record does exist for Stephen. According to the later testimony of his sons, Stephen eluded capture at Moorefield but was wounded a month later, on September 3, 1864, near Winchester, Virginia, when Sheridan’s fifty thousand Union troops clashed with the Confederate Army led by Lieutenant General Jubal Early, forcing the latter to retreat. In April 1865, as the Union victory was all but set in stone after Appomattox, Stephen was wounded again and taken prisoner. A Northern doctor plucked from his shoulder a .44 caliber bullet, a bloody souvenir that would become a family heirloom for generations.
While two of their adult sons “saw the elephant” with their naked eyes and proved their gallantry with their battle wounds, Chang and Eng themselves were said to have been almost drafted—ironically, not by the Confederate Army but by the Union. In the last days of the war, as the armies of Sherman and Grant were delivering the death blows to the South, a division of six thousand Union troops, led by General George Stoneman, moved into North Carolina across the mountain ranges from Tennessee. A former West Point roommate of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson and the future governor of California (1883–1887), Stoneman up to this point had held a mixed record in the war. He had earlier launched a failed raid in Georgia, during which he was embarrassingly captured by home guards. And then later he led a successful raid against the saltworks in Virginia, winning back some lost glory and respect from his peers. The move into North Carolina in 1865 would be Stoneman’s last raid. His original instructions were to “penetrate South Carolina well down toward Columbia, destroying the railroad and military resources of the country . . . to return to East Tennessee by way of Salisbury, North Carolina [and] release some of . . . [the Federal] prisoners of war in the rebel hands.”20 But fast-developing events, especially Sherman’s swift capture and punitive burning of Columbia on February 17, changed the course of Stoneman’s movements, unexpectedly bringing the Union blue to the door of the Siamese Twins.
Stoneman’s Raid, as it is known in history, a two-month campaign tearing up rebel havens in western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, commenced on a rainy day in late March. As one of the soldiers in the 15th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry wrote in his diary, “We started from Knoxville in an ordinary rainstorm, which increased in intensity during the day, and at night had developed into a furious hailstorm. We are in the lightest marching order, and our shelter tents are a poor protection at such a time.”21 The dirt roads cutting across the gaps in
the Blue Ridge Mountains were in poor condition, now made worse by the storm. For each company, only two pack mules were allowed—one for carrying ammunition, the other for absolute necessities, such as food and cooking utensils. No baggage was allowed except overcoats.22 On March 28, the advance guard of this force, a detachment of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry under Major Myles Keogh, entered Boone, the county seat of Watauga, taking the citizens by surprise. “We arrived here this a.m.,” read Stoneman’s official mention of his first hit in the state, “captured the place, killing nine, capturing sixty-two home guards and 40 horses.”23 After burning down the Boone jail and destroying all of the county records, Stoneman divided his forces and led a brigade himself eastward, through Deep Gap to Wilkesboro, where Chang and Eng had first settled. Along the Yadkin River, Stoneman’s forces left behind a bloody trail of dead home guards, looted houses, burned factories, and stolen horses and mules.
On Sunday, April 2, Stoneman’s cavalry forded the Yadkin and turned north toward Virginia. At nightfall, more than four thousand blue-uniformed men on horseback rode into Mount Airy, which the troopers described as “very ordinary.” They picked up, or, “liberated,” the mail at the post office and read the letters for amusement. They also hit the homes of prominent citizens, such as Gilmer, Hollingsworth, Prather, and Graves, pilfering additional horses. Cavalryman Frank Frankenberry, tired of camping but too chivalrous to foist himself upon the locals, took a room at the Blue Ridge Hotel. At midnight, word of a seventeen-wagon Confederate train passing through sent some of the troopers scurrying out of town to capture it. When they did, “animals were turned over to the quartermaster’s department and the wagons were burned.” According to Thomas Perry in Civil War Stories from Mount Airy and Surry County, the only injury that Stoneman’s cavalrymen suffered in Mount Airy was at the hands of the Bunkers: Knowing of the presence of the famous Siamese Twins, Stoneman ordered his men to leave the family alone. But one foolish Yankee trooper, out of curiosity, ignored the order and visited one of the Bunker homes, where he grabbed a Bunker daughter. He “received the only wound the cavalry got that day when he received a slap across the face from the same daughter.”24