Unique among my forebears — including, for all intents and purposes, my own parents — William O. Robison (1844 – 1917) made a concerted effort to get some details of his life into writing, beginning in December 1886. He did this for a very specific reason: he had long been suffering from a number of debilitating, chronic health problems stemming directly from his service in the Union Army during the Civil War, and he finally sought to convince a skeptical Federal Pension Office to acknowledge the origin of his distress and compensate him for it. The Federal government was unmoved. “You haven’t shown that your health problems are a result of your military service,” he was told. So William O. Robison wrote letters, hired attorneys in Washington, DC, gathered testimony from old army buddies, and was interviewed by Federal agents who took depositions from him and people he knew and who had known him before, during, and immediately after the war. Many of the witnesses he sought or would have liked to have had were by this point — more than 21 years after William O. had been discharged from the service — already dead or had scattered to unknown locations. Moreover, the events they were asked to comment on were fairly narrow in scope — mostly what happened on a certain day during the Battle of Atlanta in July of 1864. The testimony collected, however, inevitably covered other, more general aspects of his life. Many of these stray details shed more light on the life of William O. than we have for any of his contemporaries in the family — and more than we have even for his children. This great trove of material was eventually turned over the National Archives in Washington, DC, where members of the public can request to see it. I did exactly that many years ago, and made copies of the most interesting bits.
§
The starting place for any biography is the household into which the person in question arrived and was raised. William O. Robison was born in DeKalb County, Indiana, the third child in a household whose history, such as we know it, is summarized here.
(There is this curious naming convention in the family: there is always a William in each generation, but he is never the first-born son of a William.)
William O.’s middle name is never more than abbreviated with an “O” in any document I know of. It is usually thought to stand for “Orlando,” although I have seen “Oliver” or even “Oscar” mentioned as well. None of these names — Orlando, Oliver or Oscar — have any family significance as far as I know, which is not always the case for middle and even first names in our family. So which is right, Orlando, Oliver, or Oscar?
In the 1860 Federal Census there is no William O. enumerated with his parents William R. and Asenetha and all their other children. But there is a certain “Philander” of the right sex and age: a 16-year-old male. Unlike the other candidates for a middle name, “Orlando” has both the same number of syllables and the same stress pattern as “Philander.” This could mean that the Philander on the Census is actually William O., and it argues for Orlando being the correct middle name. In distinguishing the son from the father with the same first name it appears that someone probably said aloud, “That’s William Orlando” and the enumerator heard “Philander” — a not uncommon male name in the nineteenth century. The enumerators were working and writing quickly to get on with the task. Robisons of that generation and household were also notoriously lax about correcting the written, official record to read “Robison” and not “Robinson” — although they always signed “Robison” themselves. They may have not reviewed the “Philander” notation at all.
What do we know about him, this third child, William O. Robison ?
He worked from a young age at the farm of a neighbor, William McGuire. McGuire remained a friend and seems to have been a sort of second father to William O. (McGuire immigrated also into Story County from Indiana, and may have known the Robisons there. McGuire and his family later followed William O. to Carthage, Missouri.)
When asked (under oath) by a Pension Office agent in 1900 whether there was anyone alive who could corroborate his version of certain facts under scrutiny, William O. replied, “I don’t know anyone except McGuire. I worked for him from the time I was eight years of age.” McGuire himself, when questioned by Pension Office agents that same year used affectionate, playfull language, that suggests a certain intimacy:
I knew William O. Robison ever since he was an impudent little boy. He worked for me on a farm up by Nevada, Iowa. Before the war I had him under observation to the time he enlisted and after he came back from the war, and ever since, except from 1870 to 1874. I saw him right along every few days, something like that. I know he was [a] tough, wiry young fellow when he went into the service.
In an earlier testimony (in 1896), McGuire had said that
I first got acquainted with him in 1855. He worked for me and I frequently saw him. He lived about 1-1/2 miles from me for [obscure] years. I have been acquainted with him ever since, only [i.e. except for] when he was in the army about two [sic] years. I have seen him once a week.
It is clear from this statement that William O. didn’t actually live at the McGuire farm, notwithstanding his young age. He must have walked (or ridden) over to the place roughly every week. McGuire said in a different deposition that William O. worked for him on the farm “when he grew up” and right up to his enlistment in the Army.
Although I don’t know the exact location of the McGuire farm, he and his family show up on the 1860 Census in New Albany Township, Story County. The Robison farm was located on the very eastern edge of Nevada Township, neighboring New Albany.
The 1860 Federal Census also confirms that William McGuire must have arrived in Story County after 1853, since he had had a child born in Indiana in that year, and the next one born in Iowa in 1857. So William O. could have only starting working on McGuire’s farm when he was ten years old (1854) at the earliest, not eight years old. On the other hand, McGuire himself (not just William O.) stated in another deposition in that he had known William O. “since he was eight years old.” This either means that this had become by then the common story they told (William O. and William McGuire were by the time of these statements living in the same small town in Missouri, and were still friendly and in the same local veterans’ organization), or it could suggest that the Robison and McGuire families knew each other in Indiana, before immigrating (at different times) to Story County, Iowa.
Patterns of immigration in the American West — i.e., related or friendly, unrelated families moving together or eventually to the same places, and Army veterans settling together — is clearly an important phenomenon and one that I understand poorly at this point. It seems to be very different from our experience in the twentieth (and twenty-first) century, where a new job or the desire to be near the grandchildren is enough motivation to justify a move across the country.
William R. Robison had two older boys (William O.’s brothers Nelson and Julius) to help him with his newly established farm; McGuire’s first two children were girls. He therefore probably needed and appreciated help from his neighbor. The older of McGuire’s girls, Mary, recollected in 1895 (when she was 44 years old) that
I was acquainted with [William O.] from my childhood [and] attended the same school he did. I know that at the time he enlisted he was to all appearance a sound, healthy young man free of any disability.
Another childhood friend, Reuben Perrigo, recollected in a sworn statement in 1895 that:
I knew [William O. Robison] from our boyhood up. Grew up boys and were together until he enlisted. As a boy and man there was not a more healthy, strong, robust man in our County. I have worked with him and had every opportunity to notice of any disabilities he might have prior to his enlistment.
So we know from this that William O. did go to school, at least for a few years. What else can we conclude? That he was healthy, sociable, spirited (“impudent”), helpful, and hard-working.
He was also apparently swept up in the excitement and drama of the coming war with the Successionists. We are pretty sure that the family was solidly pro-Union, anti-slavery, and in favor of putting down the rebellion. William O.’s oldest brother Nelson had enlisted in the Company E of the 19th Illinois Infantry as soon as it was formed in the spring of 1861. (I think recruiters for this unit had been working in Iowa among recent immigrants from other states and elsewhere.) Nelson was 20 years old when he went into the Army. In the summer of that year, William O.’s immediately older brother, Julius, who had turned 18 in that summer of 1861, volunteered for military service as soon as he was able to, and enlisted in Company B of the Second Iowa Cavalry, on July 21, 1861.
Here is where we come to the first “stretch” in William O.’s narrative. He, and a couple of probably equally-underage friends, Bill Baker and Dave Warmack — he still remembered their names after almost 40 years — apparently accompanied Julius to the recruitment site and also tried to enroll in Company B of the Second Iowa Cavalry on that same day. They succeed, but within a month William O. and his friends were thrown out — and the memory of it still seemed to smart decades later. Here’s what William O. reported to a Pension Bureau investigator in January 1900:
I first enlisted in Co. B 2nd Iowa Vol. Cavalry on the 21st day of August 1861 and was discharged inside of a month upon a Surgeon’s certificate of disability. Cpts. Hepburn and O’Neal had promised to take in somebody else but the Company was full and so they had to make room for their friends and their excuse to us was that we were too light – there were three of us discharged then: Wm. Baker who afterwards went into the 40th Iowa, and David Warmack who went home and myself. As a matter of fact there was nothing the matter with us and there was no certificate of disability. Hepburn worked it up and we were discharged by order of Col. Hatch and Major Barnes (?) Adjt. General.
The actual fact is more likely that it was discovered that William O. had lied about his age. His erroneously reported year of birth of 1843 (instead of the correct 1844) persisted in the Federal paperwork for years. Was it his brother Julius — just barely of age himself — who let it slip that his kid brother and his friends were underage? Did William O. come to resent this? I don’t know. William O. never mentions his brother Julius in anything that has come down to us. Maybe that says something.
William O. got an “honorable discharge” for medical disability from the Second Calvary in September 1862. He was sent home. For the next five months he was back in Nevada. Fuming? Dreaming? There is no record. Twenty-five years later he stated (under oath) that “all the sickness I had in that service [i.e., the cavalry] was ‘the chills'” and that the unit commanders had considered him “too light for cavalry service.” Within days of his 18th birthday in January of 1862, William O. enlisted in the 16th Iowa Volunteer Infantry in Nevada, three miles down the road to the west from the farm where he lived with his family. He was told to report to Davenport to be mustered in.