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T.B. Kaufman

T.B. Kaufman

Federal (USV)

Captain

Tobias B. Kaufman

(1837 - 1912)

Home State: Pennsylvania

Branch of Service: Infantry

Unit: 1st Pennsylvania Reserves

Before Antietam

In 1860 he was a 22 year old teacher living with his parents on their substantial farm near Carlisle in Cumberland County, PA. He enrolled at Camp Wayne and mustered into service as a Corporal in Company I, 1st Pennsylvania Reserves on 10 June 1861 in Baltimore, MD. He was promoted to 2nd Lieutenant on 27 June and to Captain on 14 November 1861.

On the Campaign

He was wounded by a gunshot to his right forearm at Antietam on 17 September 1862. He later described his experience there:

At daylight of the 17th a brisk fire was opened upon both sides, the skirmish line being established after night was irregular and crooked, our right not quite so far advanced as our immediate front. Our right was slowly falling back under heavy fire of the enemy, and they [were] getting a flank fire on us. Not seeing any officer with the skirmishers on our right ["the Bucktails"/13th Pennsylvania Reserves] I requested the commanding officer to send an officer to take charge of the line. The officer he ordered to go refused, saying that no man could pass through that fire without being killed. I volunteered to go and did go and there received my wound. The men with me were strangers to me not being of my reg't. I remained after being wounded long enough to establish the line.

The rest of the War

He was back with his Company in January 1863 and promoted again, to Major on 1 March 1863. He mustered out with the regiment on 13 June 1864. He was commissioned Colonel of the 209th Pennsylvania Infantry on 16 September 1864 and was captured at Bermuda Hundred, VA on 17 November. He was briefly held at Libby Prison in Richmond, VA then at Danville, VA until paroled on 22 February 1865. He mustered out of service on 31 May 1865.

After the War

He was a store clerk in Churchtown, PA, then a partner in his own store in Boiling Spring, PA. He went to Belmont in Wright County, Iowa in 1873, and was a farmer there to at least 1900, when he was listed as a "capitalist." In 1910 he was retired and lived with his daughter Maud and her husband in Tulsa, OK.

References & notes

His service from Bates,1 as Tobias B. Kauffman, the Card File,2 and Hunt,3 source also of his picture, from a photograph in the Doug Kaufmann Collection, US Army Heritage & Education Center. Personal details from family genealogists, at least one of whom has his death in Tulsa, and the US Census of 1860, 1880-1910. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

He married Clara K Strock (1850-1891) in 1870 and they had 3 children. He married again, Emma J. Whited (1860-1905) in December 1892.

His great-grandson Doug Kauffman published Tobias's Story: The Life and Civil War Career of Tobias B. Kaufman in 2012. He's the source some personal details and the quote above, from Tobias's 1885 pension application (I cleaned up the punctuation for readability).

Birth

08/19/1837; Boiling Springs, PA

Death

10/19/1912; Belmond, IA; burial in Belmond Cemetery, Belmond, IA

Notes

1   Bates, Samuel Penniman, History of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-65, Harrisburg: State of Pennsylvania, 1868-1871  [AotW citation 29082]

2   Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Adjutant-General, Pennsylvania Civil War Veterans' Card File, 1861-1866, Published <2005, first accessed 01 July 2005, <http://www.digitalarchives.state.pa.us/archive.asp?view=ArchiveIndexes&ArchiveID=17>  [AotW citation 29083]

3   Hunt, Roger D., Colonels in Blue: Union Army Colonels of the Civil War - Mid Atlantic States, Mechanicsburg (PA): Stackpole Books, 2007, pg. 93  [AotW citation 29084]