Chapter 21: Heroic Wounds
Supplement to Endnotes
Endnote 4) There are several injuries in George Cole's compiled service records (CSR). For the injury from Bull Run, see CSR (Company C , 2nd US Colored Cavalry, Microfilm #M1817). In a summary of his service, it briefly mentions that he was “wounded in action at Blackburn Ford, July 1861.” For what seems to relate to his injury from his horse, see: “From New Berne NC, July 23rd 1862.” Cole’s doctor reported the wound and requested a furlough a day before Cole’s company participated in a minor skirmish in North Carolina. It is unclear if Cole participated in this skirmish, though one comrade seventeen years later remembered him being there. Cole was likely in a bed, or possibly on a train for New York to recover for a couple of weeks. All we know is that he was “on leave,” or as found in another service report, “July 1862 Absent on fifteen days furlough from July 25/62.” Later, in the same report we find, “Sept 1862 absent in New Berne sick.” See: George W. Cole’s CSR, 12th NY Infantry, and 3rd New York Cavalry. Field reports show a minor skirmish happened a day after the injury — suggesting, perhaps, that Cole’s horse did not fall on him during any significant engagement with the enemy. Instead the company reports make it more plausible that Cole was on picket duty with his men, and he stumbled into a ditch when engaging the enemy in some way. See: Frederick Phisterer, New York in the War of the Rebellion, to 1865 (Albany, Weed, Parsons, 1890), p. 165; OR, part II, Vol. 41, pp. 232-3, 307.
Endnote 6) As recorded in the war’s medical reports, intense expulsive efforts — the hallmark of acute dysentery or diarrhea — resulted in several hundred reported prolapsed anuses. Prewar medical experts, too, recorded occurrences after deadly bouts of dysentery of men’s colons descending nearly two feet from the rectum before sloughing off. Cole didn’t need his accident to explain his woes. To the chagrin of the prosecution, this same doctor also testified that bloody piles could possibly lead to depression and perhaps insanity. Cole’s insomnia was a well-recognized symptom of acute bowel trouble. His partially paralyzed lower extremities, melancholia, delirium, and intussusception (the collapsing, or telescoping of one set of bowels into another), all of these could just as easily be explained by the inglorious scourge of dysentery. See: J.W. Sherby in Syracuse Journal, April 29,1868; Joseph K. Barnes and United States. Surgeon-General's Office, The Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War (Wilmington, N.C: Broadfoot Pub. Co, 1990), Volume III.
Endnote 11) About comrade, John Moschel: I have not been able to locate Moschell’s advertisement though there is evidence from the trial that he campaigned to recruit a new company after he resigned his commission in Cole’s Third New York Cavalry. He also opened up a recruiting station in Syracuse.
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Endnote 12) Mary Barto Cole’s pension application, ex-corporal Lodowick Wooden—one of the few people who stated the correct time and place of Cole’s accident—claimed that Cole remained in confinement at the hospital for most of the winter of 1862 and some of 1863, “spending but very little of his time with the company.” Wooden also claimed that Cole complained to him that the injuries “troubled him to ride and to breathe and that it had caused a fistula in ano which was troubling him very much.” It appears that Cole admitted the extent of his injuries to some of his junior officers but kept them from most or all of his superiors. See deposition of Lodowick M. Wooden, December 1879, in, Pension Record of George W. Cole, Widow: 265.854, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
Endnote 15) The most compelling proof of George Cole's bowel injury comes from a letter he wrote his brother, after the war, in which he said that because of an accident during a cavalry charge in 1862, he was afraid that his bowels were going to be strangulated. He wrote this in 1867, before the murder. This suggests that he hadn’t even confided to his brother how badly he had been suffering. See: Cole Family Papers, George W. Cole to Cornelius Cole, January 28, [1867], UCLA.
Endnote 16) In the fears of men in the city: The jurymen lived in a mobile nation with liberalizing divorce laws in various states—in a society where wives seemed to be gaining autonomy in cities filled with abortionists, confidence men, and erotic literature. In such a society, husbands, who spent much of their time working outside of home, would need every safeguard available to keep wives from falling prey to men like Luther Hiscock.
Olive had seen this clearly too. George was a symbol of the waning powers of modern husbands to guard their homes against lechers and seducers. Letting the prisoner walk would send a chilling message to the growing number of bad men with sexual designs. There were “too many [seducers] who can sympathize with Hiscock and fear a like fate if the Gen[era]l is acquitted.” Male libertines in growing towns could not be monitored by the watchful eyes of small communities; the power of village churches to sternly punish their own had long since faded. The killing of Hiscock served these lechers notice.
Perhaps Olive inspired George’s attorneys to argue that if the laws of man had lagged behind the evils of the day, only the democratic voice of male jurors could save the embattled family. George’s counsel ended up arguing that husbands needed expanded rights to keep pace with women’s expansion of rights. The laws were rightly being reformed to advance women’s liberties; now laws had to be reformed again so that husbands and fathers could protect women from liberty’s excesses. See: Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 233–34; Olive Cole to Cornelius Cole, 11/10/1867, in Cole Family Papers, UCLA.
Endnote 22) About the hung jury: there were two irreconcilable camps among them, though it was not clear how the jury had been divided. It appears that the men were split between acquittal and manslaughter. The Syracuse Journal reported that with only a few exceptions jurors from the country wanted to acquit Cole, while those from the city voted to convict. If so, this runs counter to the notion that men in large cities and towns would have wanted to secure more powers to protect their wives and sisters from urban temptations. But this report is highly suspect as it claimed that the jury foreman, David Friedlander (from the city), voted for conviction (which he certainly did not). Unless Friedlander pretended to be sympathetic to the prosecution (knowing the jury would be hung) this report is patently false. Friedlander deeply revered Cole, visited the prisoner in his cell, and provided the prisoner information that George then mailed to Cornelius. See: Syracuse Journal, August 10, 1868; Syracuse Journal, May 8, 1868; George W. Cole to Cornelius Cole, May 25, 1868, Cole Family Papers, UCLA; in same folder also see envelope from Friedlander to Cornelius which was filled with newspaper clipping and letter. Letter appears to be missing.
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