Wallace A. Beckwith

He Left Cover to Keep the Battery Firing

Wallace A. Beckwith was born on February 28, 1843, in New London, Connecticut. When the American Civil War entered its second year, he enlisted in the Union Army and joined Company F of the 21st Connecticut Infantry. He entered service as a private and, within only a few months, found himself facing one of the most destructive battles of the war.

The 21st Connecticut Infantry was mustered into United States service in September 1862. After leaving Connecticut, the regiment moved through the defenses around Washington before marching toward Falmouth, Virginia. By December, it had joined the Army of the Potomac for Major General Ambrose Burnside’s campaign against Fredericksburg.

Fredericksburg presented the Union Army with a formidable battlefield. Confederate forces occupied strong defensive positions beyond the city, while Union troops had to cross the Rappahannock River and advance across exposed ground. On December 13, 1862, repeated Federal attacks encountered intense artillery and rifle fire.

Beckwith was only nineteen years old when his defining moment came.

The 21st Connecticut had moved into position near the fighting when an artillery battery urgently needed additional men. The battery had suffered heavily, and there were not enough artillerymen available to continue working the guns effectively. A call went out for volunteers who were willing to leave the relative protection of the infantry position and help man the battery.

Beckwith answered the call.

Along with other volunteers, he moved forward to the exposed artillery position. The men took their places with the battery while enemy fire continued around them. Beckwith remained at the guns and helped keep the battery in action through the remainder of the engagement.

His official Medal of Honor citation later captured the essential facts in a few words: he gallantly responded to the call for volunteers to man a battery and served with great heroism until the engagement ended.

The action required Beckwith to step outside his normal role as an infantry private. Artillery pieces depended on trained crews working together to load, aim, fire, and maintain the guns. When casualties reduced those crews, the effectiveness of an entire battery could rapidly collapse. Volunteers who came forward under those conditions were exposing themselves at positions already drawing concentrated enemy fire.

The volunteers continued serving the battery during the final phase of the fighting. Although the Union assaults at Fredericksburg failed to break the Confederate defenses, Beckwith and the other men who had answered the call remained at their temporary artillery posts until their service was no longer required.

The Battle of Fredericksburg ended as one of the Union Army’s most painful defeats. Burnside’s forces had repeatedly attacked powerful Confederate positions and suffered severe losses without achieving the breakthrough they sought. For Beckwith, however, the battle became the moment by which his military service would ultimately be remembered.

He continued serving with the 21st Connecticut after Fredericksburg. The regiment remained in Federal service for the rest of the war, moving through Virginia and North Carolina and taking part in operations that eventually carried it into the campaigns around Richmond and Petersburg. Beckwith remained in the Army until the regiment’s service ended in June 1865.

More than three decades passed before his bravery at Fredericksburg received the nation’s highest military recognition. On February 15, 1897, Wallace A. Beckwith received the Medal of Honor for his actions of December 13, 1862.

The long delay between battlefield action and formal recognition was not unusual among Civil War Medal of Honor recipients. Many acts of courage from the conflict were reviewed and recognized years later as supporting testimony and military documentation were considered. Beckwith’s decoration permanently linked his name to the desperate struggle at Fredericksburg and to the moment when he voluntarily left his infantry position to help keep an artillery battery operating under fire.

The Medal of Honor recognized a very specific act. Beckwith had not been ordered into the battery as part of his normal assignment. He responded voluntarily when men were urgently needed. Once there, he remained in the dangerous position through the conclusion of the engagement.

After the war, Beckwith returned to civilian life in Connecticut. He eventually entered federal employment and in 1890 became an inspector in the United States Customs Service. He served in that work for several years, left the service for a period, and later returned. His Customs career continued until 1923, giving him a long record of federal service decades after his Army career had ended.

His later life unfolded during a period in which the generation that had fought the Civil War gradually passed into national memory. Beckwith lived long enough to see the United States transformed by industrial expansion, overseas conflict, and the First World War. Yet his own place in military history remained rooted in the battlefield experience of his youth.

Wallace A. Beckwith died on November 22, 1929, at the age of eighty-six. He was buried in Jordan Cemetery in Waterford, Connecticut.

His story endures because of a decision made under fire at Fredericksburg. When an artillery battery had lost men and needed volunteers to continue operating its guns, Beckwith stepped forward. He exchanged the shelter available to his infantry regiment for an exposed battery position and remained there until the fighting ended.

Thirty-five years later, the Medal of Honor formally recognized that act of courage. Wallace A. Beckwith entered the Civil War as a young private from Connecticut, but his willingness to answer a desperate call for help on December 13, 1862, secured his place among the Medal of Honor recipients of the American Civil War.