Charles C. Davis

Thirty-one years after the guns fell silent at Shelbyville, the United States finally put into ten words what Charles C. Davis had done in battle: “Led one of the most desperate and successful charges of the war.” That brief Medal of Honor citation hides a much larger story. On June 27, 1863, amid the violence and confusion of the American Civil War, Davis led Union cavalry forward at Shelbyville, Tennessee, in an attack so determined that it became the defining moment of his military life.

Born on August 15, 1830, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Charles C. Davis was part of a generation whose lives were transformed by the outbreak of civil war. When Pennsylvania raised volunteer cavalry for Union service, Davis entered the Army from Harrisburg and served with the 7th Pennsylvania Cavalry, also known as the 80th Pennsylvania Volunteers. The regiment became part of the hard-riding Union cavalry forces operating in the Western Theater, where mounted soldiers were expected to scout, screen armies, raid communications, seize crossings and, when necessary, charge directly into enemy positions. Davis eventually attained the rank of Major, the rank under which his Medal of Honor record is officially preserved.

The moment that secured his place in American military history came at Shelbyville on June 27, 1863. Union forces were driving Confederate troops through Middle Tennessee during operations that would weaken their hold on the region. Cavalry fighting demanded speed and nerve, but a mounted charge against organized resistance could turn into disaster within seconds. Davis chose aggression. He led his men forward in an attack remembered not merely as successful, but as extraordinary even by Civil War standards. His official Medal of Honor citation contains no elaborate description and no dramatic embellishment. It simply states: “Led one of the most desperate and successful charges of the war.”

Those words are powerful precisely because of their restraint. Thousands of cavalry charges were made during the Civil War. Very few were later singled out by the United States government in such language. Davis's action at Shelbyville became the event by which his service was ultimately judged, but recognition did not come immediately. Like many Civil War Medal of Honor recipients, he waited decades. On June 14, 1894, more than three decades after the battle, Major Charles C. Davis was formally awarded the Medal of Honor. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society confirms that the award was made during his lifetime and records Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as the place to which his service was accredited.

His Medal of Honor is therefore not a posthumous reconstruction of battlefield legend. Davis lived to see his Civil War service officially recognized by the nation. By the time the medal was presented, the United States had changed enormously from the country that had gone to war in 1861. Former battlefields had become places of remembrance, veterans were aging, and the government was increasingly formalizing the way Civil War service and gallantry were commemorated. Davis stood among those veterans whose battlefield conduct had survived that passage of time.

His service is also represented by the Civil War Campaign Medal, which appears on his reconstructed ribbon rack after the Medal of Honor. Unlike the Medal of Honor, the Civil War Campaign Medal did not carry an individual gallantry citation. It recognized qualifying Army service during the Civil War. The Army's Institute of Heraldry records that the Civil War Campaign Badge was formally authorized in 1907, later becoming known as the Civil War Campaign Medal, and that its ribbon was eventually standardized in the familiar half navy blue and half gray design. That blue and gray ribbon symbolically joined the two sides of the conflict in remembrance.

There is an important historical detail behind that ribbon. Davis died before the modern blue and gray ribbon design was adopted in 1913. His ribbon rack should therefore be understood as a modern standardized representation of his official military entitlement, not necessarily as an exact recreation of a ribbon bar he personally wore in that form. The Medal of Honor and Civil War Campaign Medal together tell two different parts of his story: one recognizes extraordinary individual courage at Shelbyville, while the other represents his broader service during the nation's defining internal conflict.

Charles C. Davis died in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on January 20, 1909, at the age of 78. He was buried in Harrisburg Cemetery, returning in death to the same Pennsylvania community where his life had begun and from which he had entered military service. The Congressional Medal of Honor Society records his burial in Section A-2, Lot 23.

More than a century later, Major Charles C. Davis remains one of Pennsylvania's Civil War Medal of Honor recipients and one of the notable cavalry officers of the 7th Pennsylvania Cavalry. His story does not need exaggeration. The official citation already provides the hook history left behind. In a war filled with desperate attacks and extraordinary personal risks, Davis led a charge that the United States Army remembered as one of the most desperate and successful of them all. That single decision at Shelbyville carried his name from a Tennessee battlefield into the permanent record of American military valor.