Jacob Gellert Frick

He Seized the Colors and Charged Through Fire

Jacob Gellert Frick was born on January 23, 1825, in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. By the time the United States entered the Civil War, he had developed the military experience and leadership that would eventually place him in command of Pennsylvania infantrymen during two of the Army of the Potomac’s most punishing battles. His wartime service became permanently associated with the regimental colors—symbols soldiers were expected to protect even amid the confusion and violence of battle.

In August 1862, the 129th Pennsylvania Infantry was organized at Harrisburg for nine months of service, with Frick serving as its colonel. The regiment joined the Army of the Potomac and became part of the Third Division of the Fifth Corps. Within months of its organization, the 129th Pennsylvania would be committed to the Battle of Fredericksburg, where Frick performed the first of the two actions later recognized with the Medal of Honor.

On December 13, 1862, Union forces launched repeated attacks against the strongly defended Confederate position at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Frick’s regiment served in Brigadier General Erastus B. Tyler’s brigade of Major General Andrew A. Humphreys’s division. Late in the day, Humphreys’s Pennsylvanians were ordered forward toward the Confederate defenses below Marye’s Heights. The advance carried them across exposed ground under intense artillery and musket fire.

During that assault, Frick seized the colors of his regiment and led his command forward. The official account for which he was later honored describes him taking the colors and leading his men through a terrible fire of cannon and musketry. In an era when regimental flags served both as rallying points and as visible symbols of a unit’s identity, taking the colors personally placed a commanding officer at an exceptionally conspicuous and dangerous point in the advance.

The Union attacks at Fredericksburg failed to break the Confederate line, and Humphreys’s division suffered severely during its attempt to reach the defenses. Frick and the 129th Pennsylvania survived the ordeal and remained with the Army of the Potomac through the winter, when the campaign settled temporarily after the disastrous battle.

Their next major test came during the Chancellorsville Campaign in the spring of 1863. The 129th Pennsylvania remained in Humphreys’s Third Division, Fifth Corps, with Frick still commanding the regiment as colonel. Fighting around Chancellorsville intensified dramatically on May 3 as Confederate forces pressed the Union army and Federal formations fought to maintain their positions.

It was during this battle that Frick performed the second act of courage later incorporated into his Medal of Honor citation. In the confusion of close combat, the colors of the 129th Pennsylvania were lost to the enemy. Frick entered the struggle and, in a hand-to-hand fight, recaptured his regiment’s colors. The surviving official citation does not embellish the encounter with unsupported details; its significance rests in the stark fact that the regimental commander personally recovered the colors during close combat.

Taken together, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville defined Frick’s most celebrated military legacy. At Fredericksburg he had taken the colors himself to lead his command under concentrated fire. At Chancellorsville, less than five months later, he fought to recover those same essential symbols of regimental identity after they had fallen into enemy hands. Both actions occurred while he held the rank of colonel and commanded the 129th Pennsylvania Infantry.

The regiment’s period of Federal service ended shortly after Chancellorsville. The 129th Pennsylvania was mustered out on May 18, 1863, completing the nine-month term for which it had been organized. Its brief existence had nevertheless carried its officers and enlisted men through some of the Army of the Potomac’s most demanding operations, including Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.

Recognition for Frick’s actions came many years after the battles themselves. On June 7, 1892, nearly three decades after the Civil War actions for which he was cited, Jacob Gellert Frick received the Medal of Honor. The decoration recognized his leadership at Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, when he seized the colors and led his command through heavy cannon and musket fire, and his conduct at Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863, when he recaptured his regiment’s colors in hand-to-hand fighting.

The Medal of Honor had become the United States’ highest military decoration, and Frick’s award preserved in official form the two battlefield moments for which his name would be remembered. The citation was concise, but it revealed an unusual consistency in his actions: on two different battlefields, when the colors and the cohesion of his regiment were at stake, its colonel placed himself directly in the fight.

Frick lived for almost forty years after Chancellorsville and for nearly a decade after receiving the Medal of Honor. He died on March 5, 1902, at the age of seventy-seven. He was buried in the Presbyterian Church Cemetery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the community with which his Civil War service had been officially associated.

His enduring place in American military history rests on leadership displayed at the point of greatest danger. At Fredericksburg, he carried the colors forward through concentrated enemy fire. At Chancellorsville, he fought to recover them. Decades later, the Medal of Honor formally recognized those acts, preserving the story of a colonel whose courage became inseparable from the flag of the regiment he commanded.