Tales from the road: The little Irish chaplain 'worth ten men'

John McNamara (upper right) served as 1st Wisconsin chaplain.

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In Lake Geneva, they say Ulysses Grant, William Sherman, “Little Phil” Sheridan and Mary Todd Lincoln once visited their quaint Wisconsin burg. But I’m more interested in Civil War commoners, so I make my way to the town’s Pioneer Cemetery — it’s two blocks from the lake and across Maxwell Street from a vintage Rolls Royce parked next to a shiny, red Corvette in a driveway.

Nothing else calms jumpy nerves quite like a walk through a well-manicured graveyard, even one with grass coated thickly with dew, as Pioneer Cemetery is this morning. Here, in the town’s oldest cemetery, more than two dozen Civil War veterans rest.

You’ll find Ora Kimball, a “useful and upright citizen” who served in the 9th Vermont. He died in 1882. I wonder if he was among the United States soldiers Stonewall Jackson bagged in Harpers Ferry in mid-September 1862.

The broken tombstone of
Private Martin Ross of
the 22nd Wisconsin.

Nearby, under a low-hanging limb of a craggy oak, stands the pearl-white gravestone for William Stoodley of the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry. As an early 50ish private, he fought in battles at Newtonia, Byram’s Ford, Little Blue River and other unheralded fights in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. 

Thirty yards or so from Stoodley, embedded in soggy turf, sits the broken tombstone for Martin Ross. In 1863, the 22nd Wisconsin private died in a regimental hospital in Danville, Kentucky.

And then there’s the grave of John McNamara, the diminutive, Irish-born Episcopalian minister who served as a chaplain with the 1st Wisconsin. Newspapers hailed him during the war as the “fighting chaplain” and “little chaplain.” Oh my, what a legacy he left. 

“Faithful and earnest,” a Wisconsin newspaper called McNamara.

“Worthy and respected,” wrote another.

By the end of 1862, McNamara — who, at 36, left a thriving ministry for the U.S. Army in October 1861 — had already endured major battles at Perryville in Kentucky and Stones River in Tennessee. Then, in September 1863, he witnessed the horrors of Chickamauga.

To soldiers, McNamara provided advice, comfort, and in 1862, mittens from home. The Irishman buried some of his soldier flock, too, including Lt. Collins C. McVean, the victim of an enemy “missile” in Georgia in the summer of ‘64.

“There are few regiments in the field that are blessed with so stirring and active a Chaplain,” a Wisconsin newspaper wrote. “We have heard wounded soldiers of the 1st say that on the field of battle, their Chaplain was worth ten men. Cool and collected when the bullets and balls fly thickest, not a soldier falls but receives his immediate and personal attention.”

In 1864, in appreciation for his service, the 1st Wisconsin gave McNamara an inscribed, silver meerschaum pipe with a mouthpiece made of amber. The Irishman, meanwhile, found time to give the army hell.

Before the war, McNamara — an ardent abolitionist — railed against the evils of slavery. In the 1850s, he lived in Missouri and Kansas Territory. Later, he published a book, Three Years on the Kansas Border, in which he wrote about the struggles of pioneers to bring that territory into the union as a free state. In 1856, his anti-slavery speech in New York drew praise from the New York Herald, but his courageous stand earned him scorn by some within his church.

The gravestone of Chaplain John McNamara caught my eye in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

In Tennessee in 1862, Chaplain McNamara complained about army rules allowing “negro catchers” into camps to search for escaped slaves.

"The chief business of our officers at this post is to issue passes to slave hunters, in obedience to higher authority,” he fumed in a letter. “The new article of war forbidding officers to aid in returning fugitives is carried out thus far that we need not show the claimants where they are, nor take hold of them and help to get them away. But, on the other hand, passes are given to search our camps, and if the negroes are found in them, a word of sympathy must not be expressed by us, nor a finger lifted to save! I will be candid and say that without our direct aid it is a matter to catch a man fleeing for his life.

“But this is because the men want freedom, and will run in hopes of securing it. Now, sir, we the officers and privates of this regiment, do not like this work. We came here to fight the common enemies of our country, and we want to do it. Field officers have ridden twenty-four hours in a drenching rain, in the night, too, to protest against their regiment being used in this way. Negro catchers say that Starkweather's brigade do not cheerfully obey orders. This unwillingness on our part to do the dirtiest of all work, is regarded by the negro claimants as ‘bad usage’ and in consequence reprimands have come down to us!"

After the war, McNamara served as president of a college in Nebraska, traveled to Europe and toiled in a home for the aged in New York. In October 1885, following a trip to the post office in North Platte, Nebraska, where he ministered, McNamara was stricken by paralysis. He died hours later, age 60.

“A good man closed his earthly work loved and is mourned by our whole people,” a Nebraska newspaper wrote.

In Wisconsin, a newspaper obituary noted McNamara's “energetic spirit.”

“[H]e has acquitted himself with entire fidelity and much zeal and ability," the publication wrote, "and it may truly be said of Dr. John McNamara: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou in the joys of thy Lord.’"

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SOURCES

• E.B. Quiner Scrapbooks: "Correspondence of the Wisconsin Volunteers, 1861-1865," Volume 2, page 160, Wisconsin Historical Society Collection
• Lincoln County (Neb.) Tribune, Oct 31, 1885 
• The Lake Geneva (Wis.) Herald, June 30, 1882
• The Telegraph-Courier, Kenosha, Wis., Apr 9, 1863, Nov. 26, 1863, July 7, 1864 
• Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, Wis, Jan 20, 1864