Jefferson Ayers

A member of the Catawba Tribe in the York District, he enlisted as Private, Company K, 17th South Carolina Infantry on 9 December 1861 at Camp Hampton, Charleston, SC.

He was wounded in action on South Mountain on 14 September 1862.

He was wounded again, mortally, in the head over his left eye by a gunshot at Hatcher's Run near Petersburg, VA in February 1865. He was treated in hospitals in Petersburg, then Richmond, but was captured there on 3 April. He was taken to the Hammond General Hospital at Point Lookout, MD but died there in July 1865.

His service from the Rolls,1 as Jeff Ayers (Indian). His Sharpsburg wound and other details from Laurence M. Hauptman's Between Two Fires (1995), citing his Compiled Service Records at the National Archives, and Timothy Fenlon's master's thesis A Struggle for Survival and Recognition: the Catawba Nation, 1840-1860 (2007, pdf). His gravesite is on Findagrave.

His name is among those of 17 (of the 19 known) Catawbas who fought in the Confederate Army on a memorial erected in a small park in Fort Mill, SC in 1900 [online from the HMDB].

The population of the Catawba tribe in South Carolina in 1860 was 55 persons; there were 60 at the 1890 US Census.

Three other Catawbas also wounded on the Campaign were brothers James and John Harris, 12th South Carolina Infantry, and his messmate Bill Canty of the 17th.

12/21/1840; York County, SC

07/1865; Point Lookout, MD; burial in Point Lookout Confederate Cemetery, Scotland, MD