Jack's Uncle Henry

Jack never knew his Uncle Henry who died in the Civil War.

Along with Jack's father Arthur de Saulles, another uncle and several aunts, Henry Longer de Saulles was born in New Orleans when the family lived on a prosperous cotton plantation. Their historic mansion still stands at 2618 Coliseum Street in the Garden District of New Orleans – drop by when you're in the neighborhood. 

Henry went to college at Harvard University, class of 1857. When the “boom days” of cotton started to show a decline in the years leading up to the Civil War, the patriarch Louis de Saulles sold his New Orleans home and relocated everybody to New York City. They only stayed there a few years, and then Louis kept going – over the Atlantic ocean to his native France, and settled in a villa in a picturesque town called Pau at the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains near the border of Spain.

Henry did not accompany the family to France but stayed in New York to work as a financier. His father was disappointed, and it looks like the rift between them never had a chance to mend.

When the Civil War broke out, and his home state Louisiana seceded from the Union, Henry abandoned his Harvard education and his career on Wall Street. He enlisted on May 10, 1862 as a Confederate in Company F, Louisiana Volunteers. Under the command of Colonel William R. Miles, Lieutenant Henry de Saulles participated in a series of battles and skirmishes around Port Hudson, Louisiana in late May 1863. At the Battle of Plains Store, his company defended a vulnerable position in a shallow ditch behind a barricade of rails covered loosely with dirt. The men alternated shooting off their rifles with shoveling out the trenches.

On June 3, 1863, Henry took a bullet to the chest and, after languishing through the night, died the next day at the age of twenty-four.

Colonel Miles wrote a condolence letter to Henry's parents to say, "He lingered until the night of the 4th, when he calmly passed away. I was with him most of the night of the 3rd; and at intervals, when sufficiently calm to converse, three subjects alone seemed to occupy his thoughts—his mother, his father, and his country. I cannot refrain from saying of your son that a truer gentleman never lived; a braver soldier never died."

One reference source was Helen P. Trimpi's study of Crimson Confederates, Harvard Men Who Fought for the South. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2010) where I learned that Henry was not alone in returning to his native shores to fight for the Confederacy. Her book makes no judgments on the men – she simply tells their stories. If you have a chance to find it in a library, it's a fascinating collection of hundreds of little biographies.

Trimpi's book includes a photograph of Henry that is available for order from the archives of Harvard University. Below is a scan from the book.

The other reference was from Google Books, a scanned out-of-print copy of J. Wilson and Son's Report of the Class of 1857 in Harvard College, Prepared for the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Its Graduation. Published in 1882, the authors of this book contacted the surviving family members of deceased alumni which in this case was Mr. Louis de Saulles himself writing a letter dated in May 1882 from his villa in France. This book has the precious quote of Henry's father (who is Jack's grandfather), “After leaving Harvard... but six years more of life was granted to him. The first one of those was passed in a friend's counting room, at New York. He elected for commerce rather than for law, which I had wished him to prefer.” And this book has the full version of Colonel Miles's condolence letter that Trimpi's book abbreviates.

Henry's body was buried first in New Orleans and later was moved to the prestigious Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. This is the same cemetery, in the same family plot where – in 1917 – Jack was laid to rest.