May 8
On this day in 1865, 15-year-old Robert P. Madison, a private in Company F, 35th North Carolina Infantry, died in a Richmond hospital–one month after the Civil War had essentially ended. Born in 1850 in Wolfsville, Union County, Robert was the first-born son of George Marquis Madison, a 31-year-old English miner who had immigrated to North Carolina in the 1840s and found work in the region’s gold, lead, and copper mines. George had enlisted in a heavy artillery unit defending Wilmington in March 1862, but poor health forced him in and out of hospitals until his medical discharge in June 1863. But the family’s commitment to the Confederate cause remained strong. On September 1, 1864, Robert volunteered to fight–though only 14, three years younger than the legal age set by the Conscription Act. Confederate officers were desperate enough for manpower that they accepted him. But young Robert shared his father’s weak constitution. After enduring several cold months in the trenches south of Petersburg, Robert fell gravely ill and was admitted to Jackson Hospital in Richmond on March 13, 1865, with febris intermittens–a fever in which the patient’s temperature spikes for several hours at repeated intervals, a symptom of infectious disease. In Robert’s case, it was tuberculosis, then known as “consumption.” He was too weak to leave the hospital when the Confederate army evacuated Richmond on April 2. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, but Robert remained bedridden, treated by Union and Confederate doctors. There was nothing they could do to halt his advanced respiratory distress. The teenage Robert died on this day in his hospital bed, one of the last and youngest of 14,000 soldiers to die of tuberculosis during the war.
Robert Madison died in a Civil War hospital
Sources:
Louis H. Manarin and Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comps., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 1:537-38 , 9:415; 1860 U.S. Census: Union County; Ken Stover, “Civil War Diseases.”
