Charles Cushing Whitman

In 1860 he was a 21 year old shoe cutter living with his widowed mother and 4 siblings in East Bridgewater, MA. He was at least briefly a Private in Company L, 4th Massachusetts Infantry (3 months' service) in April 1861, then, on 18 May 1861, he enlisted as a Private in Company C, 29th Massachusetts Infantry.

He was in action with his company at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

Although the battle was not renewed on the 18th, yet the two armies lay facing each other during the whole day and a part of the following night. Before light on the morning of the 18th, Company F, under Captain Tripp, which had been on the advanced line in [Piper's] corn-field since noon of the 17th, where they had been terribly exposed, was relieved by Company C, under First Lieutenant N. D. Whitman, and Company K, under Captain Pray. Even in the darkness, the work of relieving the men at the front was attended with great risk. The two lines were less than one hundred yards apart ...

A large number of wounded Confederates were still scattered through the corn-field, some of them only a few yards distant from our pickets. The constant cries of these poor fellows, who were begging our men to remove them and give them water, excited the sympathy of our soldiers, and many brave, and even reckless, efforts were made during the day to relieve their sufferings. One soldier of Company C [Charles C. Whitman] crawled on his hands and knees a distance of several yards toward the Confederate lines, in order to give a wounded enemy a drink of water from his canteen, the bullets of the Confederate sharpshooters striking close about him, and covering him with dust.

He transferred to Company K of the 36th Massachusetts Infantry on 30 January 1864 and mustered out with them on 15 August 1864 in Boston.

By 1870 he was back in East Bridgewater, where he worked in a shoe factory and lived with his brothers Ezekial and Eben.

His service information from Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines1, the History,2, source of the quote above, and George Warren Nason's History and Complete Roster of the Massachusetts Regiments: Minute Men of '61 (1910). Personal details from family genealogists and the US Census of 1860 and 1870. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

There were three other Whitmans from East Bridgewater who enrolled in the 29th Infantry in May 1861: Privates Asa Washburn (22) and Freedom (24), and First Lieutenant Nathan Davis Whitman (30). These were cousins, sons of his uncles Marcena and Willard.

07/04/1839; East Bridgewater, MA

01/21/1906; East Bridgewater, MA; burial in Central Cemetery, East Bridgewater, MA