Hometown Hero – Civil War heroics merited Medal of Honor

Today Magazine Online
5 hours ago
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• Canton Native Risked His Life in Brutal Battle of Irish Bend

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By David K. Leff

Special to Today Magazine

Rising stiff and chilled on the morning of April 14, 1863, 20-year-old Canton native William Edgar Simonds awakened to a gray morning in Louisiana, where he was camped with several units of Union troops during the Civil War. Simonds served in the 25th Regiment of the Connecticut Volunteer Infantry.

After a hasty breakfast, the men set out on a winding road following Bayou Teche. Eventually they entered an immense sugar cane field in a place called Irish Bend. It was crowded with desiccated, breast-high stalks from the previous year.

On orders of the commanding officer, colonel George P. Bissell, they marched down the field, right wing deployed ahead as skirmishers. Suddenly there was gunfire from a dense wood of magnolia, cottonwood, briars, vines and palmettos growing nearby. Lead raked the dry, brown canes with a sound like hail on a window.

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With the skirmishers helplessly pinned down ahead, the colonel shouted for the men to hit the dirt, load and rise up and fire at an enemy who was all but invisible among the trees.

Simonds thought of the ambushed skirmishers cringing on the ground up front under threat of certain death. They’d been through a lot together since leaving Connecticut. Without warning or even knowing why, Simonds got up.

Bullets whizzing overhead, he kept low and painstakingly worked his way up from the rear through a hazardous no-man’s land of muddy furrows and brittle cane stalks to where his compatriots were trapped under a withering enfilade.

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The air was thick with acrid smoke when Simonds found the trapped men. Breathing heavily, blood pounding in his ears, his face and uniform were spattered with muck. Startled by his appearance, the troops stared as if at a ghost.

Finally finding his wind, Simonds mustered an authoritative voice that commanded obedience and ordered the skirmishers to move. Urging them to keep low, he hurried the isolated patrol through the canes and safely back to the regiment under unrelenting enemy fire.

Although outnumbered and outgunned as exploding artillery shells rained down, Simonds and the other troops were eventually saved by reinforcements just as the end was drawing near. With fresh men on the field, the Union turned the tide of battle.

For his gallantry in uniting the unit under fire, Bissell promoted Simonds from sergeant-major to lieutenant. Following a congressional investigation 36 years later, Simonds was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military award for bravery bestowed by the United States. +

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David K. Leff served as the Canton Town Historian and Poet Laureate — an award-winning author, he wrote more than 10 books, including his tribute to the Collinsville section of Canton titled "The Last Undiscovered Place" — he died in May 2022 at age 67

• This feature was first published in the April 2019 edition of Canton Today Magazine, a forerunner of Today Magazine

Hometown Hero – Civil War heroics merited Medal of Honor

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