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Captain Patrick H. White Camp Ford Prison Banks' blunder at the Battle of Mansfield led to the loss of 21 cannons, which included all guns from the renowned Chicago Mercantile and Nim's 2nd Massachusetts Batteries. Captain White and his fellow captured soldiers were led on foot by the Rebels from western Louisiana to the eastern part of Texas where Camp Ford had been built as the largest Confederate prison in the Trans-Mississippi area. By the time White, Pinckney S. Cone (his Senior 1st Lieutenant), and 19 other men from the Chicago Mercantile Battery reached the prison, it was overcrowded with Yankee prisoners from the Red River Campaign. The Union soldiers at Camp Ford were barely subsisting under the squalid living conditions there. White and his men remained imprisoned for fourteen months and were not released until May 29, 1865 when they rejoined their artillery comrades in New Orleans. After the Civil War At the end of the war, Captain Alex McDow of Walker's 16th Texas Infantry signed his Parole of Honor to be released as a POW at Houston, Texas. He returned home to Victoria in southern Texas and lived there with his daughter. Prior to his death in 1891, Captain McDow had prominently displayed White's sword above the mantle in his living room and wanted his daughter, Mrs. Kate Browning, to return it someday to its rightful owner. Thus, Mrs. Browning ran an advertisement in The National Tribune, a Union veterans' weekly newspaper, at the beginning of 1896 and offered to return the captured sword to Captain White. In the meantime, Patrick H. White had moved from Chicago immediately after the Civil War to get married and settle in Albany, New York. Surprisingly, White saw the tiny, obscure advertisement placed by McDow's daughter and was able to retrieve his lost sword. He was ecstatic to be reunited with his presentation sword after 35 years. For the rest of his life, Patrick White kept his beloved sword in the hallway of his home along with his other Civil War memorabilia. Upon his death on November 25, 1915, White's daughter gave her father’s belongings to one of his friends, John Boos. Boos gathered much of Captain White’s documents, including his diary, POW parole document, correspondence, wartime and postwar photos, etc. and bound them into a leather book. Additionally, White’s friend John Boos persistently worked with the Illinois State Historical Society to publish some of the artillery commander’s memoir in 1922. Most of artillery captain's reminiscences, however, have never been published. Today, Patrick H. White's sword, Medals of Honor, revolver, and canteen are still on display at the New York State Museum in Albany, NY. |
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