William Fisher Plane

He was a teacher in Columbus, GA until 1854 when he passed the bar and began to practice as an attorney. He moved his practice to Baker County in 1858 and in 1860 was a prosperous 32 year old attorney owning 6 slaves at Newton, GA. By 1861 he owned 3 plantations in Baker County. He enrolled on 27 May 1861 in Atlanta and mustered as 2nd Lieutenant of Company H of the 6th Georgia Infantry. He was elected Captain later the same day, vice Captain Alfred H. Colquitt, who was elected Colonel.

On September 5, the day he led his men across the Potomac River into Maryland, he wrote his wife:

We are war worn and foot sore. My feet are blistered top & bottom & my boots nearly entirely gone. One more day's tramp & I shall be in the condition of hundreds in our army - barefoot. The turnpike roads in this part of Virginia have worn them away rapidly.

We have been resting near Frederick for two days. Here I bought for self a pr of shoes & for wife & baby shoes also. I will send back the first opportunity an enameled leather bag with shoes, buttons, needles, thread & pins. I worked hard to get some dresses, but I failed entirely. Col C sends the same things for Sally [Colquitt's wife] ...

He died of wounds in the Stone House Hospital on Samuel Poffenberger's farm near Sharpsburg in 1862. He was originally buried "on eastern side of branch in Samuel Poffenbarger's meadow and along the line fence between Poffenbarger and Miller" near the battlefield at Sharpsburg.

General D H Hill wrote of him:

The lamented Captain Plane, of that [6th Georgia] regiment, deserves a special mention. Of him it could be truly said that he shrank from no danger, no fatigue, and no exposure.

He was probably reinterred at Hagerstown in about 1874.

Burial information from Pruett.1 His service from the Roster 2 and his Compiled Service Records,3 online from fold3. Personal details from family genealogists, the US Census of 1860, and from S. Joseph Lewis, Jr. in his introduction to Plane's Letters to his wife, in The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2, June, 1964; 2 letters quoted above. DH Hill's quote from the General's Report. Captain Plane also has a stone at Rose Hill Cemetery, Macon, GA.

He married Caroline Helen Jemison (1829-1925) in 1854 and they had 2 children; their first, Rebecca, died at 18 months. Caroline was later the first president of the Georgia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

02/1828; Charleston, SC

1862; Sharpsburg, MD; burial in Washington Confederate Cemetery, Hagerstown, MD