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S.B. Parkman

S.B. Parkman

Confederate (CSA)

Lieutenant

Samuel Breck Parkman

(1836 - 1862)

Home State: Georgia

Education: Harvard College, Class of 1857

Branch of Service: Artillery

Unit: Pulaski (GA) Artillery

Before Sharpsburg

His father - a cotton merchant and bank president in Savannah - and four of his siblings were killed in an explosion aboard the SS Pulaski off the coast of North Carolina in June 1838. He was raised by an aunt, largely in Sing Sing, New York, until attending Harvard beginning in 1853. He read the law and was a practicing attorney in Savannah from 1858 to the War.

He enrolled on 18 May 1861 in Savannah as Junior First Lieutenant in Captain Read's Company, attached as "L" to the 1st Regiment Virginia Artillery. He was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, Company K, 10th Georgia Infantry when the battery transferred to that regiment on 1 November 1861. They became an independent Georgia Battery under Captain Read in March 1862.

On the Campaign

In his after-action Report, General Kershaw noted:

Read's battery performed the most important service in a position of great danger. Second Lieutenant Samuel B. Parkman was killed on the field, gallantly discharging his duty.

References & notes

His service from his Compiled Service Records,1 online from fold3. Bio details from Report of the Class of 1857 in Harvard College (1882). His gravesite is on Findagrave. The photo of him (c. 1857) is in the Harvard University Archives Photograph Collection, and was published by Helen P. Trimpi in Crimson Confederates: Harvard Men Who Fought for the South (Knoxville: UT Press, 2010).

Birth

11/01/1836; near Augusta, GA

Death

09/17/1862; Sharpsburg, MD; burial in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, VA

Notes

1   US War Department, Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers, Record Group No. 109 (War Department Collection of Confederate Records), Washington DC: US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), 1903-1927  [AotW citation 29561]