{"id":163,"date":"2010-07-30T09:38:17","date_gmt":"2010-07-30T13:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cwblog\/?p=163"},"modified":"2010-09-23T12:20:40","modified_gmt":"2010-09-23T12:20:40","slug":"the-colwell-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/the-colwell-family\/","title":{"rendered":"The Colwell Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

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James Smith Colwell<\/a>, a 48-year-old who worked as a lawyer in Carlisle<\/a>, Pennsylvania, was one of the oldest men in the region who answered President Abraham Lincoln\u2019s<\/a> call for 75,000 volunteers after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter<\/a> on April 12, 1861. Colwell joined the Carlisle Fencibles, a local volunteer company under the command of Robert Henderson<\/a>, as a first lieutenant. Six weeks later the Fencibles left Carlisle for Camp Wayne in West Chester<\/a>, Pennsylvania, where they received training and were designated Company A of the 7th Regiment, Pennsylvania Reserve Corps. His wife, Ann<\/a>, had not been happy with that decision. \u201cYou left me without talking about it,\u201d as Ann reminded him. While James admitted that \u201c[he] err[ed] frequently,\u201d he observed that \u201cit [was] nearly always an error of the judgment & not of the heart.\u201d Yet in this case he\u00a0argued\u00a0that it was impossible to get out of the army. \u201cI do not see how I could get out of the service without bring[ing] disgrace and dishonour on myself & my little family,\u201d as Colwell explained. Colwell had in mind his four children \u2013 two sons and two daughters. Colwell’s oldest daughter, Nannie, was about six years old in December 1861 when she announced<\/a> in her \u201cfirst letter\u201d that she \u201c[could] read\u201d and \u201c[sent him] a big kiss.\u201d Colwell was able to return to Carlisle on furlough, but on September 17, 1862 he died during the Battle of Antietam. Local newspapers published obituaries<\/a>, including the Carlisle (PA) American<\/em>, which noted that \u201c[Colwell\u2019s] high moral character and exemplary life had made him a bright example in our midst.\u201dWhen Civil War veterans in Carlisle established a local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic in February 1881, they decided to call it the Captain Colwell Post.<\/p>\n

The Colwells are important to Carlisle<\/a>\u2019s Civil War history but their story was largely forgotten until recently.\u00a0\u00a0 The couple\u2019s great-grandson David Colwell compiled nearly two hundred of their letters from the war in the 1990s and published them in a wonderful book entitled The Bitter Fruits<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Colwell family’s house was located at 145 South Pitt Street in Carlisle, PA.<\/p>\n

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James Smith Colwell, a 48-year-old who worked as a lawyer in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was one of the oldest men in the region who answered President Abraham Lincoln\u2019s call for 75,000 volunteers after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter on April …<\/p>\n

The Colwell Family<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[186],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-war-1861-1865","tag-carlisle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/cumberland150\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}