Washington Clark wrote this letter to his wife Oct. 26, 1862, after he was told he was to be hanged that day. In the letter, which was donated to the Allen County Museum in 1938, Clark implores his wife Sarah to “Take care of yourself and my babies and raise them in the way they should go.” Clark, who was accused of being a Union spy, was hanged by Confederates in Huntsville, Arkansas.
In the final hours of the final day of his life, Washington Clark wrote a last letter to his wife in Ohio.
“Dear Companion,” Clark wrote in the letter from Huntsville, Arkansas, dated Oct. 26, 1862, “I am a prisoner by the Confederacy as a spy and I am to be hung until I am dead today at 4 o’clock. I want you to try to meet me in heaven if I should be so fortunate as to get there. Take care of yourself and my babies and raise them in the way they should go. Do the best you can and remember me. My time is short on this earth. I was only notified of my death two or three hours before sunup. O, if I was only prepared to die but I hope the Lord will have mercy on me. So goodby, Washington Clark.”
Several months later, Sarah Clark received the farewell letter that had been written a few hours before her husband met his death at the hands of the Confederates.
“It was carried under a flag of truce to Cossville, Mo., where it was mailed Dec. 27, 1862,” The Lima News wrote July 18, 1938.
Bernini Keeler Clark, the son of Washington and Sarah J. Clark, who had settled in Lima, donated the letter to the Allen County Museum in June 1938. He also donated another, earlier letter from Clark to his wife as well as a government document from 1866 granting Clark’s widow a pension of $8 per month for herself and $2 per month for each of her children, Bernini Keeler and Anna Dakota, until they reached the age of 16.
Washington Clark was born in 1833 to Burrett Keeler and Mary W. Peterson Clark and grew up in the town of Caledonia, northeast of Marion. Clark “was a healthy youngster and adventurous. As a man he was quick in his judgment, keen, athletic and wholly alive in an emergency,” the Marion Star wrote in a Nov. 25, 1905, story.
“Some four years before the rebellion (Civil War) opened (in April 1861), young Clark, who had barely reached his majority found the West attractive and glittering with inducements for one of his disposition and spirit. He went to Iowa and was quickly the owner of a neat piece of land. Soon after he married and as time passed two children, a son and a daughter, came to brighten the little western home. Prosperity was assured when the first dark clouds of civil war appeared and the republic was threatened,” the Star wrote.
“Clark was patriotic, bone and sinew. He knew his capabilities and scarcely had the smoke cleared from the first battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861) when he sought service as a secret agent, a spy if you please,” the newspaper wrote, adding that “North and South were wild with the first rumblings of the impending struggle and the application from the western cottage was long in receiving its response.”
A roster of Iowa soldiers in “the War of the Rebellion,” published in 1910, showed that Washington Clark enlisted July 7, 1862, nearly a year after the smoke had cleared from Bull Run, as Third Corporal in Company G of the 18th Regiment of Iowa Volunteer Infantry, which was mustered into service in August 1862 in Clinton, Iowa.
By Sept. 13, 1862, Clark’s regiment was encamped at Sock Creek near Springfield in the border state of Missouri. From there Clark wrote his wife, who had returned to the home of her parents in Caledonia with the couple’s children to wait out the war.
“We are having very easy times at present,” Clark wrote. “We have plenty to eat and nothing to do, but this may not last long. I like the tented field very well with one exception, and that is we do not know one minute what we are going to do the next. But it is best for us that it is not otherwise.”
Like the letter written the day he was hanged, Clark’s letter from Sock Creek was donated to the Allen County Museum.
“Not long after this message was written,” The Lima News wrote in 1938, “Clark was given an assignment covering spy duty. At this early date in the war, the government offered practically no training or no protection to those spies, and it was afterwards learned that a rebel spy, working within Union lines, had followed Clark out of camp and immediately exposed him.”
Huntsville, where the Confederates held Clark, is in northwest Arkansas, about 100 miles south of Springfield. During the Civil War, it was a hotbed of partisan activity. In January 1863, nine Huntsville men, including three Confederate soldiers, were executed by Union soldiers even though no formal charges had been filed against them. A few months earlier, Confederate guerrillas had attacked a force of 25 Union soldiers in the area, killing 18 of them.
Sarah Clark received news of her husband’s death in March 1863.
According to the Star, “Mrs. Clark lived in Caledonia (in Marion County) for a time and died some 25 years later in Indianapolis, steadfast in her love and devotion to her young husband who met such an untimely death. She never remarried.”
For “such a loss,” The Lima News wrote in 1938, “she was granted a pension of $8.00 per month and $2.00 additional for each of her two children until they reached the age of 16.” She died about 1885.
In a sequel to the story of the hanging, The Lima News wrote that one of Clark’s brothers had become a Confederate soldier. Long after the war, according to The Lima News, Clark’s brother was reminiscing with another Confederate veteran when he happened to show the man a picture of his brother.
According to the newspaper, the man exclaimed, “Why that is the man I stood guard over,” going on to explain how truly sorry he felt for him and “how his last hours were filled with the frantic concern for his wife and babies which to him meant all life.”
Both of Washington Clark’s children eventually settled in Lima. Bernini Keeler Clark, who donated the documents to the museum, worked as a teamster and operated a saloon on Wayne Street. He died Jan. 3, 1947, of injuries received several days earlier when he was struck by a car at the intersection of Elm and Elizabeth streets. He was 85.
SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
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See more letters from Civil War soldiers
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
