Editor’s note: This is the final installment of Richland History Group’s three-part series on Casper Carlisle, the Battle of Gettysburg Medal of Honor winner. Visit TribLive.com for Part 1 and Part 2.
At the conclusion of last month’s Casper Carlisle installment, it was Aug. 4, 1886, and our hero was in jail awaiting what likely was to be an assault with intent to kill charge after his brutal attack on five Pittsburgh police officers.
Historian John Haltigan provided additional newspaper articles from 1886 that advance to Aug. 20 our knowledge about Carlisle’s legal proceedings — hearings that captivated Pittsburgh at the time.
Not that more examples of his Aug. 3 barbarity are necessary (see Part 2 of this series), but I cannot resist revealing two tidbits from the Aug. 20 Pittsburgh Daily Press from his day-earlier preliminary hearing before Alderman Bell in the Mayor’s Office: “Carlisle had caught Lt. Foster’s arm with his teeth and bit out a large piece of flesh” and “much testimony was totally unfit for publication.”
While the attorney representing Carlisle, his wife, daughter and Mrs. Bechtold may appear to be an unimportant detail, Col. William A. Stone was no small-time counsel. He was the district attorney for the Western Pennsylvania U.S. District Court, served seven years in the U.S. Congress and was Pennsylvania’s 22nd governor for four years. We do not yet know for certain what finally transpired beyond Aug. 19 in Carlisle’s litigation, but he certainly was helped by having counsel from Stone, who, like Carlisle, was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic Post 128.
Somehow, the GAR post itself became a defendant.
Stone, well aware that 1) the police did not have a warrant to raid the hosue, 2) one of the officers was in civilian clothes and 3) another was hard of hearing, called two Carlisle character witnesses. Each portrayed him as more peaceful and respectful than Mother Teresa.
After this first hearing, Carlisle, unlike his daughter, was not even jailed, but merely released on bail. I suspect he ultimately was afforded a huge legal break due to some or all of the following: mental illness, technicalities, his Gettysburg heroism and Stone’s legal accumen.
Post-military life
Let’s look back 25 years to our hero’s pre-1886, post-military life. After his and brother Benjamin’s initial Union Army enlistment in 1861, they both reenlisted in February 1864. Following Lee’s April 9, 1865, surrender, they “mustered out” of the service on June 26, 1865.
An 1867 city directory shows Carlisle living on the North Side as a teamster. An 1869 directory has him living at 68 Balkan St., near Lacock Street, in Allegheny City as a wagon driver. From his 1886 legal proceedings, we know he started working as a wagon driver for Pittsburgh’s Reymer Brothers Candy Factory in 1873 and worked there at least until his 1886 attack against the police.
Carlisle’s relationships with women are a mystery.
Related:
• Part 3 of Richland History Group's series on Casper Carlisle, Richland's most-famous unknown
• Part 2 of Richland History Group's 3-part series on Casper Carlisle, Allegheny County's only Battle of Gettysburg Medal of Honor winner
• Casper Carlisle: Richland’s most famous unknown
It is unclear if he ever technically married. He was “married” in 1864 to Margaret W. Rush (1835-1916), who was born at sea after her parents left England and was the mother of Carlisle’s first daughter, Sarah (the troublemaker). He then apparently “married” a “Matha” (1843 New York birth) in 1869. Matha is a female name of Aramaic origin — a variant of Martha, meaning lady or mistress of the house.
Matha probably is the 1870 mother of Carlisle’s daughter, Nancy, and 1877 mother of daughter, Ella. She appears as Carlisle’s wife in the 1880 Allegheny City directory.
Most perplexing are the following pencil writings on the inside cover and both sides of the first blank page of an 1864 Oxford New Testament (not the edition given to Union soldiers): “March 21, 1869”; “Mary Ellen Harlacher” on three page sides with indistinguishable writing; and “Pvt. Casper Carlisle” on one page.
This edition, sold at the Oswald Book, Stationery & Drug store in York, Pa. (as noted by an embossed stamp), was almost certainly Mary Ellen’s. I found a namesake living near York at that time, but she only would have been 12 in 1869. I talked to today’s owner of the Bible but gained no insight.
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We may never know why Carlisle’s name and rank are there. Do I have the wrong Mary Ellen? Though “married” in 1869 to Matha, was he nonetheless friends with Mary Ellen? Was she the young daughter of a soldier Carlisle fought with? Was Mary Ellen in fact Matha?
Jail time possible
I found no mention of Carlisle being at any GAR Post 128 meetings between his August 1886 trouble and his appearance in a Sept. 11, 1889, veterans photo at Battery Park in Gettysburg. This may suggest, contrary to what I wrote above, that he did serve some minimal time, likely at a poor farm.
In November 1980, a pension application for him or a spouse was denied. That application may have been submitted pursuant to Congress’ June 27, 1890, Dependent and Disability Act, under which any veteran serving at least 90 Civil War days would receive a pension if unable to perform manual labor because of a military or nonmilitary disability. Under that act, commission of a felony was a reason for denial, but that is not to say a felony was the reason for denial.
Carlisle moved from Allegheny City to the lower Hill District, 34 Cliff St., possibly as early as 1891. On two occasions in 1892, he received $5 payments from the GAR as he was respectively “in destitute circumstances” and “injured.” Several other Pittsburgh-area addresses appear.
With the lobbying help of his military unit’s Capt. James Thompson, he finally received the Medal of Honor on Dec. 21, 1892, from the Department of War after a 30-year wait.
Might pity have played a role?
Historian Art Fox, who has done past yeoman’s work researching Carlisle, mentioned references to him living in Pittsburgh until 1899, but my informed speculation is that Carlisle became an inmate, possibly as early as 1894 at Homestead’s Pittsburgh Poor Farm, which was for the insane and indigent, and then for sure at South Fayette’s new Marshalsea Poor Farm — a 1900 census lists him as a wagon-driving inmate. He died there at age 66 on April 29, 1908.
A record shows that “wife” Matha died in 1906. Might that have affected his will to live?
Thinking Carlisle had no children, his GAR post contributed $25 toward his burial as a pauper but never mentioned his passing in its 1908 year-end report. His mother, father and brother Benjamin, who outlived Carlisle, are all buried in the Bakerstown Methodist Church cemetery. Did they even know he had died? Might his 1886 trouble estranged him from them?
Joe Pulgini and Wes Slusher replaced Carlisle’s small Mt. Lebanon Cemetery marker in 1991 with a ground-level stone, and William Mulligan arranged for a 4-foot tombstone in December 1998.
Casper Richard Carlisle was an ordinary man, possibly a bit slow or affected by wartime post-traumatic stress disorder, who demonstrated extreme courage at Gettysburg.
There is still much we don’t know about our hero, and perhaps that’s best. All of us fall short.
While he may have been protecting his daughter, it would be hard to say he did not stumble in 1886. But, as Wyatt Earp once said, “We all stumble; it is how we finish life that counts.”
Richland’s most famous and mysterious unknown finished his sad 1886-1908 life the right way — as the wagon driver that he was.