A private went out under fire to save the enemy who had been trying to kill him

This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.

William Wallace Cranston needs to be remembered.

* * *

He was born near Woodstock, in Champaign County, Ohio, on November 20, 1838. Farm country. Flat fields and hard winters.

The Cranstons were a large family with a Scottish name and not much else, and William Wallace grew up knowing work before he knew anything.

Woodstock was the kind of place a man left and carried with him. It taught the things farm towns teach — that weather does not negotiate, that a job half done is a job not done, that you stand by the people in the next field because next season the trouble may be yours. None of that is written in a citation. All of it is in the man who earned one.

He was twenty-four when the war found him. A private in Company A of the 66th Ohio Infantry. Not an officer. Not a man marked for history. He carried a rifle and did what privates do, which is wait, and march, and wait again. The photograph that survives was taken later, after he had earned a captain’s bars. The eyes in it are steady. They do not look away from the camera, and you get the sense they did not look away from much.

He is my great, great Uncle Bill.

Chancellorsville

May 2, 1863. The Virginia Wilderness — second-growth scrub oak and pine so thick a man could lose a regiment in it. Joseph Hooker had brought the Army of the Potomac across the Rappahannock with more men than Robert E. Lee, and he had Lee nearly surrounded. Then he stopped. He dug in around a crossroads and a brick mansion called the Chancellor House and waited for Lee to come to him.

Lee did not do the expected thing. He split his army in the face of a larger one and sent Stonewall Jackson on a long march around the Union right. That march would unhinge Hooker’s army before the day was out. The XI Corps, on the far right, would be rolled up at dusk and sent running through the woods.

The 66th Ohio was not there. It belonged to the XII Corps, dug in nearer the center under John Geary. But the same day that broke the Union right was breaking everywhere, in pieces, and the woods between the lines filled with men who could not walk and could not be reached. Out in front of the Ohio works, on the road, a wounded Confederate lay where he had fallen. He was inside the enemy’s field of fire. Which is to say, he was a dead man who had not finished dying.

Four Men and Two Blankets

You leave him. That is the arithmetic of war. He wore the other uniform, and the ground he lay on was swept by rifle fire, and no order in the world required a man to go out and get him.
Cranston went out and got him.

He was one of four. Sergeant Henry Heller. Private Elisha Seaman. Sergeant Thomas Thompson. Company A men, all of them. By the account Cranston gave later, they laid down their rifles and their cartridge boxes — a man going to save an enemy does not go armed — and they took two army blankets for a stretcher and they walked into the fire.

What they were betting on was a thin thing. They were betting that the men shooting at them would understand what they were doing, and would hold their fire for it. It was not a sure bet. The fire was constant. The citations of the men who went with him say so, in the flat language the government uses for these things: they brought in the wounded man under a constant fire. Cranston’s own citation says only that he was one of a party of four who voluntarily brought in a wounded Confederate officer from within the enemy’s line. It does not say what it cost to do it.

Citations rarely do.

They carried him back across the open ground to the Chancellor House, which the army was using as a hospital, and they set him down among the Union wounded, and the man lived long enough to talk.

What Mercy Bought

Here the story does a thing that stories about mercy do not usually do. It paid.
The rescued Confederate, safe inside Union lines and grateful, told what he knew — the strength and the placement of the columns moving against Hooker’s flank. On a day when the Union command could see almost nothing through the smoke and the trees, that was worth more than a battery of guns. An act of pure conscience turned out to have a hard military edge. The men had not gone out for intelligence. They had gone out because a man was crying in the dark. The intelligence came anyway, the way grace sometimes does, unasked.

Cranston lived. He fought through the rest of the war and rose to captain on his own merit. When the guns stopped he took his family west, the way so many of them did, looking for room. He landed in Parsons, Kansas, and the town did with him what his army had done — it saw the steadiness in him and put him to use. They sent him to the Kansas House of Representatives. He served the 28th District from 1889 to 1891.

The medal came late. It almost always did for these men. On December 15, 1892 — nearly thirty years after the Wilderness — the government awarded William Wallace Cranston the Congressional Medal of Honor. His three companions received theirs the same year, in separate ceremonies through the summer. The government understood what it was honoring: not one man’s legend, but four men and two blankets and a single decision made together under fire.

He died at home in Parsons on December 7, 1907, after a long illness. A wife, a daughter, two sons. They buried him in Oakwood Cemetery, far from the Ohio fields and farther still from the Virginia woods where, for the length of one walk into the fire, he had decided that a wounded enemy was a man first and an enemy second.

The Geometry of Mercy

Most medals are given for what a man does to the enemy. This one was given for what a man did for the enemy.

That is a different shape of courage, and a rarer one.

The soldier who holds a line under fire acts on training and the press of the moment. The man who climbs out of his own works to carry off a wounded enemy has time to know exactly what he is doing and exactly what it may cost. He has the whole logic of the war telling him to stay put. He goes anyway. There is no order behind it and no advantage in front of it — only a sound from the dark and a decision about what a human being is owed.

Cranston could not have known the man would live, or talk, or matter. He could not have known he would survive the walk himself. He knew only that leaving him was the easy and the sanctioned thing, and that he would not do it.

The medal took thirty years.

The story took longer than that to surface, and it surfaced mostly because a family kept it.

The deed was always worth more than the recognition, which is the way of nearly every life in this series.

William Wallace Cranston deserves to be remembered.

* * *

Sources: U.S. Army Medal of Honor citation and the Congressional Medal of Honor Society record for William Wallace Cranston (Company A, 66th Ohio Infantry); the citations of Henry Heller, Elisha B. Seaman, and Thomas W. Thompson of the same company; National Archives Congressional Medals of Honor Index (file 1591-VS-1878); National Park Service Chancellorsville battle material and order of battle; the postwar recollection reproduced in W.F. Beyer and O.F. Keydel, eds., Deeds of Valor (1901); and the Parsons Daily Eclipse obituary, December 10, 1907.
Next in this series: Clement Vallandigham — the congressman who was exiled from his own country for what he said.

Charles C. Jett is a civic educator and author. He writes the Courage and Consequence series at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com. William Wallace Cranston was the author’s great-great-uncle; this profile is built on official military records, contemporary documents, and family papers.