Colonel Edward E. Cross so loved his horse Jack that when he returned home to Lancaster, N.H., to recuperate from his first wound of the Civil War, he had Jack shipped home, too. The visit was not all leisure for Jack.
By Cross’s count, seven rebel balls had touched his person as he led the Fifth New Hampshire Volunteers on June 1, 1862, at the battle of Fair Oaks in Virginia. Only one did damage, striking his left thigh and passing right through. A man who saw him hit said Cross stood cheering his men for a few moments and then “fell like a pine tree.” He was treated in the field, on two hospital ships, and in a Philadelphia hospital before coming home.
In July, Cross assembled a party of family and friends for an excursion to the summit of Mount Washington. According to the local paper, Jack pulled Cross and his friends up the mountain in a wagon. The auto road was being constructed that summer and would officially open in August. The Cross party’s ascent came earlier, but perhaps the road was far enough along for Jack and his wagon.
It’s too bad the party found no place for Jack in the group photograph taken to mark the occasion. The stereographer Franklin White of Lancaster took the picture. Stereography, a technique that involved side-by-side images that had a luminous three-dimensional clarity when seen through a special viewer, had been around for just a few years.
Although there are many candidates, Cross is widely regarded as New Hampshire’s greatest Civil War hero. There are several small cabinet portraits of him, but this picture is the most vivid.
White posed the Cross party before the Tip-Top House, then a hotel and still standing today. Cross is seated right of center wearing his kepi and holding a cane. The couple beside him are almost certainly his father, Ephraim, and his mother, Abigail. Behind the colonel, hat in hand, is Henry O. Kent, his boyhood friend. I can’t identify the others.
Kent had worked with Cross as a printer in Lancaster before the war and later, as a politician, helped him get his commission as colonel of the Fifth New Hampshire. Two days after the battle at Fair Oaks, Cross wrote him from a steamer on the Pamunkey River that his regiment “did nobly, more than nobly, gloriously. We beat back the enemy, but at fearful cost.”
Cross returned to his regiment in August 1862. He commanded it in the Bloody Lane at Antietam the next month, was severely wounded at Fredericksburg in December, and directed his regiment’s bold stand at Chancellorsville in May 1863. He was acting as a brigadier general at Gettysburg two months later when he was shot and killed near the Wheatfield.
(Thanks to David Morin for calling my attention to the White stereograph. “The Yankee Volunteer,” Morin’s superb virtual archive of New England Civil War soldier photos, is at https://dmorinsite.wordpress.com/.)
(Mike Pride is editor emeritus of the Monitor and retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.)