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Home Town Groveland, Massachusetts
Last Address Boston, Massachusetts
Date of Passing Oct 19, 1900
Location of Interment Pine Grove Cemetery - Lynn, Massachusetts
Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient. He served during the Civil War in the 19th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, rising from Corporal to Captain and commander of Company I. He was awarded the CMOH for his bravery while a 2nd Lieutenant at the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia on December 13, 1862. His citation reads "Seized the 2 colors from the hands of a corporal and a lieutenant as they fell mortally wounded, and with a color in each hand advanced across the field to a point where the regiment was reformed on those colors". His Medal was issued on December 16, 1896. He fought in the Peninsular Campaign, and in the Battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (where he was severely wounded during Pickett's Charge), The Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor. In the last battle he was captured, and spent time in the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia before being moved to prisoner camps in Macon, Georgia and in Charleston, South Carolina. In Charleston he was among a number of captured Union officers who were placed by the Confederates on Morris Island (which was being shelled by the Union Navy) in an attempt to have the enemy warships stop their bombardment. He made a successful escape from Confederate prison, but was recaptured. In 1893 he served as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic Union army veterans organization, and in 1899 he published his war-time memoirs as "Reminiscences of the Nineteenth Massachusetts Regiment". Captain Adams was one of seven 19th Massachusetts Infantry soldiers who were awarded the Medal of Honor during the Civil War (the others were Major Edmund Rice, Color Sergeant Benjamin F. Falls, Sergeant Benjamin H. Jellison, Sergeant Daniel J. Murphy, Corporal Joseph H. DeCastro, and Private John H. Robinson.
Description The American Civil War was an internal conflict fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865. The Union faced secessionists in eleven Southern states grouped together as the Confederate States of America. The Union won the war, which remains the bloodiest in U.S. history.
Among the 34 U.S. states in February 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the U.S. to form the Confederate States of America. War broke out in April 1861 when Confederates attacked the U.S. fortress of Fort Sumter. The Confederacy grew to include eleven states; it claimed two more states, the Indian Territory, and the southern portions of the western territories of Arizona and New Mexico (called Confederate Arizona). The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by the United States government nor by any foreign country. The states that remained loyal, including border states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North. The war ended with the surrender of all the Confederate armies and the dissolution of the Confederate government in the spring of 1865.
The war had its origin in the factious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories. Four years of intense combat left 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers dead, a higher number than the number of American military deaths in World War I and World War II combined, and much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed. The Confederacy collapsed and 4 million slaves were freed (most of them by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation). The Reconstruction Era (1863–1877) overlapped and followed the war, with the process of restoring national unity, strengthening the national government, and granting civil rights to freed slaves throughout the country.