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C.S. Wainwright
(1826 - 1907)
Home State: New York
Command Billet: Corps Chief of Artillery
Branch of Service: Artillery
Unit: First Army Corps
Before Antietam
A wealthy farmer from Rhinebeck, he had traveled in Europe to study artillery and was a State militia officer in command of a battery. He was appointed Major of the First Regiment, New York Light Artillery on 17 October 1861, promoted to Lieutenant Colonel on 30 April 1862, and Colonel on 1 June. He was with Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker on the Peninsula Campaign that summer, then in the defences of Washington. Hooker appointed him Corps Chief of Artillery snd he received orders on 15 September to report to his command then at Frederick, MD.
On the Campaign
He arrived in Frederick on the 16th, Middletown on the 17th, and joined the army at Sharpsburg on 18 September.
The rest of the War
He continued as artillery chief of the Corps to Chancellorsville, and commanded the Artillery Brigade at Gettysburg. After the army reorganization of 1864 he was Chief of Artillery of the Fifth Corps, Army of the Potomac. He was honored by brevet to Brigadier General of Volunteers on 1 August 1864 and mustered out with his regiment on 21 June 1865.
After the War
He had a "large farm and country place" in the Hudson Valley of New York. He moved to Washington, DC in about 1884 and died at the George Washington University Hospital there, by then completely blind, at age 80 in September 1907.
References & notes
His service basics from Heitman1 and the Adjutant General.2 His gravesite is on Findagrave. His picture from a photograph [pdf] in the Roger D Hunt Collection at the US Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC), Carlisle, PA.
His wartime journals were published in A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, Dr. Alan Nevins, editor (1962), online from Hathi Trust, source also of details above.
His brother William, Colonel of the 76th New York Infantry, was also on the Campaign - briefly in command of a brigade in the First Corps and wounded on South Mountain on 14 September.
More on the Web
His original diaries are now in the Huntington Library [finding aid] in Los Angeles. There's a fine c. 1861 photograph (pdf) of the original field officers of the First New York Light, including Wainwright, at USAHEC.
Birth
12/31/1826; New York City, NY
Death
09/13/1907; Washington, DC; burial in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn,NY
1 Heitman, Francis Bernard, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army 1789-1903, 2 volumes, Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1903, Vol. 1, p. 993 [AotW citation 31342]
2 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 1896, Vol. 2, p. 438 [AotW citation 31343]