Open main menu
Open main menu
![[no picture yet]](images/none.gif)
[no picture yet]
(1845 - 1903)
Home State: New York
Branch of Service: Infantry
Unit: 103rd New York Infantry
Before Antietam
Barely 16 years old, giving his age as 19, he enlisted in New York City for three years and mustered as a Fifer in Company F, 103rd New York Infantry on 16 December 1861.
On the Campaign
He was wounded by gunshot to the left leg in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862.
The rest of the War
He was probably treated at a field hospital near the battlefield and was admitted to a US Army hospital in Frederick, MD on 24 October. He was discharged on 15 December 1862.
After the War
He began receiving a Federal pension for his wounded leg in August 1870. In 1883 he was receiving $14 per month and lived in Lincoln, NE. In September 1893, by then living in Washington, DC:
Herman Perls, a veteran of the late war, one of the owners and publishers of the Deutsche Presse, the leading German newspaper at the Capital, fell and broke his leg on Wednesday, Sept. 6. What makes this accident especially severe to Comrade Perls is the fact that when a soldier in a Now York regiment he was wounded so severely in his other leg at Antietam that he could hardly navigate. This accident, therefore, is especially unfortunate, because the good leg is the one that was hurt this time.By 1896 he was a skilled artisan at the Weather Bureau, US Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC.
References & notes
His service from the NY Adjutant General1, who says he was discharged for disability in July 1862 in Fredericksburg, VA, and the Company Muster Roll (pdf). Wound and hospital details from the Patient List 2 as Pvt. Harman Pearls. The quote above from the National Tribune of 14 September 1893, online from the Library of Congress. His occupation from the Official Register of the United States (1899, 1901) and an 1896 City Directory for Washington, DC. Personal details from family genealogists, at least one of whom has him as Hermann L. Perls.
He was the 11th and youngest child of Loebel (Leopold) Perls (c.1796-c.1849) and Maria Silberman (1789-1877).
More on the Web
His birth record, from a c.1847 Census of the Jewish population of Pless, is online from the Centralna Bibliotka Judaistyczna. Thanks to an unnamed genealogist for the pointer.
Birth
11/12/1845; Pless, Brandenburg (now Pszczyna, Poland), PRUSSIA
Death
04/14/1903; Washington, DC
1 State of New York, Adjutant-General, Annual Report of the Adjutant General of the State of New York [year]: Registers of the [units], 43 Volumes, Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1893-1905, For the Year 1902, Ser. No. 33, pg. 815 [AotW citation 21765]
2 National Museum of Civil War Medicine, and Terry Reimer, Frederick Patient List, Published 2018, first accessed 17 September 2018, <http://www.civilwarmed.org/explore/primary-sources/databases/frederickpatient/>, Source page: patient #87 [AotW citation 21766]