William M. Small

Mother wrote to James: “Miss Berks had a friend on the Nassau at the time of the wreck. His name is Wm. Small. He is from Wisconsin, a Baptist minister’s son. He was kicked by a horse while throwing them overboard. If you remember him, send word” (Mother to James, December 27, 1863).

The Nassau was an army steamer with General Banks’s expedition to the Texas coast. “We lost one excellent steamer, the Nassau, on the bar at Brazos,” Banks reported to General Halleck, because larger ships could not escape the “northers” by entering the bays (Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. XXVI, Pt. 1, p. 410). A correspondent at Brazos Santiago wrote on November 8, 1863, that “the Nassau grounded, and was obliged to throw her quota of horses into the roaring breakers. It is a singular fact that they all put out to sea, instead of attempting to gain the shore”, and that she was “a total wreck” (Philadelphia Inquirer, November 23, 1863, p. 3). The same report says the 20th Wisconsin landed at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Two weeks later another transport passed “within one hundred yards of the wreck of the Nassau” crossing the Brazos bar (Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 1863, p. 2). James’s regiment came to Brazos Santiago in the same expedition (James, November 20, 1863).

The Wisconsin roster lists a William M. Small of Burke, Wisconsin, who enlisted on August 5, 1862, in Company B of the 20th Wisconsin Infantry and was discharged for disability on June 12, 1865 (Roster of Wisconsin Volunteers, vol. 2, p. 145). He is the only William Small in any Wisconsin regiment that served in Texas, and the 20th was in the landing at Brazos, so the letter’s Wm. Small is probably him. That he was a Baptist minister’s son has not been confirmed.

Mentioned in 1

1863 Dec 27