Benjamin Frank Vickers

He had previous military service in Mexico and in Nicaragua. He enlisted in Company D (renamed E), 6th Alabama Infantry on 7 May 1861 at Montgomery, AL.

He was killed in action on 17 September 1862 in the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg:

There was another class of soldiers who had a sort of blind faith in their own invulnerability ... In one case, this blind faith, as I term it, was the result of long army experience of the man whose remarkable escape from wounds in several wars had left upon his mind its natural effect ...

The first illustration was that of a soldier under my command-- Vickers of the Sixth Alabama Regiment. There was no better soldier in either army than Vickers. He had passed unscathed through two previous wars, in Mexico, I believe, and in Nicaragua. He was in every battle with his regiment in our Civil War until his death, and always at the front. The greater the danger, the higher his spirits seemed to soar. The time came, however, when his luck, or fate, in whose fickle favor he so implicitly trusted, deserted him.

At Antietam--Sharpsburg--I called for some one who was willing to take the desperate chances of carrying a message from me to the commander on my right. Vickers promptly volunteered, with some characteristic remark which indicated his conviction that he was not born to be killed in battle. There was a cross-fire from two directions through which he had to pass and of which he had been advised; but he bounded away with the message almost joyously. He had not gone many steps from my side when a ball through his head, the first and last that ever struck him, had placed this brave soldier beyond the possibility of realizing, in this world at least, the treachery of that fate on which he depended.

Basic information from State of Alabama1, and from roster data as compiled by James D. Allen on his Regimental site. The quote above from John B. Gordon's Reminiscences of the Civil War (1904). His middle name may be Franklin.

09/17/1862; Sharpsburg, MD