Placed as skirmishers, theirs was among the first units to advance past the Richmond Stage Road the following day, engaging the Confederates on the Slaughter Pen Farm. In preparation for the Battle of Fredericksburg, the 13th Massachusetts crossed the Rappahannock River at the lower crossing early on the morning of December 12, 1863. At Antietam, the 13th suffered nearly 140 casualties in less than two hours of fighting in the Cornfield. The unit fought at Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas, where it lost 193 men, including 19 killed. On July 20, 1861, he enlisted as a private in Company D of the 13th Massachusetts Infantry, which was posted on patrol of the Upper Potomac until March 1862. After attending public schools in that Boston suburb, he became apprenticed to a jeweler and watchmaker at age 15. Maynard was born in Waltham, Mass., in February 1836.
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Painting of Medal of Honor recipient George H. William Carney died in December 1908 following an elevator accident in the Massachusetts State House, where he worked as a messenger on behalf of the Department of State. He married and raised a daughter in a home on Mill Street that now resides on the National Register of Historic Places. He went, briefly, to California, but returned to the maritime city permanently in 1869 and began a 32-year career as a letter carrier. In the intervening years, he had returned to his home in New Bedford and taken a position caring for the city’s streetlights. Like many Civil War veterans, Carney waited several decades to receive his Medal of Honor, which was issued on May 23, 1900. The severity of his wounds meant Carney was discharged from the army in 1864. Despite this, he refused offers from men of other units to take the flag so he could receive medical aid, replying "No one but a member of the 54th should carry the colors!” In the process he was shot in the head, chest, legs and one arm. He briefly planted it atop the parapets and brought it safely back to Union lines in retreat. When he watched the color bearer fall, fatally wounded, Carney took up the flag and carried it for the rest of the battle.
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Carney himself is not directly portrayed in the film, although his own experience in the engagement was suitably dramatic. The experience of Carney’s regiment was fictionalized and depicted in the 1989 film Glory, familiarizing many Americans with this dramatic engagement. He left his studies for the ministry to enlist in the first African American regiment raised by the state as a sergeant, and marched off to war down Beacon Street on May 28, 1863, an event immortalized in the bronze Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s memorial on Boston Common. William Harvey Carney, one of the heroes of the 54th Massachusetts’s attack on Battery Wagner was born into slavery in Norfolk, Va., escaping via the Underground and building a life in the Bay State. But for all that has been written about the battle exploits of those brave men, their broader lives are often shrouded in obscurity. A great deal is known about some of the events for which those men - and, in only one case, a woman - were recognized. Nearly half of the Medals of Honor that have been distributed since the award’s inception in 1862 were bestowed for actions during the Civil War.
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