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CIVIL WAR SMOKING CAP OF JOHN F. CROSSMAN, 36th MASSACHUSETTS
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$3,950.00
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Item Code: 1179-342
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Formerly in the collections of the Texas Civil War Museum, this is a great piece for a display focused on Civil War army camp life- an identified Massachusetts soldier’s “smoking cap.” These show up in several different forms, but were quite fashionable, perhaps largely because of their suggestion of the exotic east, with images of imaginatively clothed Turkish pashas luxuriating on cushions amid clouds of tobacco smoke. Of course, the reality of army camp life in the Civil War was considerably less picturesque, or luxurious.
This one is in the form of a conical cap, about 8 inches tall, with a cloth covered flat metal button on the top that likely held a cord and tassel in the fashion of a fez. The cap made of four triangular panels, two blue and two of a coarser, brownish gray cloth, with a 2-inch tall red and black checkered band around the base that is turned under for ½-inch inside, with the cap lined six panels of the same brownish gray cloth, showing slightly darker, as less subject to exposure and oxidation. The flat metal button on the top is 5/8-inch in diameter, covered in a thin blue and red fabric. The condition is excellent overall, with good color and virtually no tears or holes to the body of the cap and just two small wear spots on the top edge of the button on the top of the cap, whose fabric covering also shows some fading.
John Francis Crossman was working on the family farm at Berlin, Massachusetts, when he enlisted at age 19 on 7/26/62. He mustered in as a private in Capt. Hasting’s company, later designated Company I of the 36th Massachusetts, at Worcester on 8/27/62, remaining on the muster rolls of that company until the November-December 1864 roll, when he is carried thereafter on the roll of Company G. The regiment reached the Army of the Potomac just after Antietam and joined the 9th Corps. It went west with the corps under Burnside in March 1863, serving in Kentucky, Mississippi, and east Tennessee, until returning east with the corps in April 1864 to take part in Grant’s Overland Campaign against Petersburg and Richmond, seeing action at Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Bethesda Church and other battles with considerable loss.
Crossman is listed as absent sick in the General Hospital on the October 1862 company roll through their April 1863 roll, present for May-June 1863, which puts him with regiment when they moved from Kentucky into Mississippi as part of the Vicksburg Campaign, then absent sick from the July-August roll (including being at the convalescent camp at Crab Orchard, KY, on the Sept-Oct 1863 roll) until March-April 1864, when he is marked present, (when the unit has is moving back to the eastern theatre) and then absent sick again from May 9, 1864, just after the Battle of the Wilderness, where the regiment lost 85 men, including 23 killed or mortally wounded on May 6. He was diagnosed as suffering from Typhoid and hospitalized in Philadelphia and then Armory Square General Hospital in Washington, where he was discharged on May 25, 1865.
Crossman was born in 1843. The 1860 census picks him up as a farmer on the family farm in Berlin. He married in 1868, and in 1870 is listed as a working in a shoe shop, his occupation also in 1880. The couple had five children, four of whom survived to adulthood. In 1901 Crossman and his wife moved to Vermont, where he died in September 1902 at age 59 and was interred at Jamaica, Windham County, VT. He wife outlived him by several decades, passing away in 1941.
With the cap is an old, thin paper bag in which it had been stored and a modern copy photograph of a circa 1900 bust view of a man in civilian clothes, labeled in the modern copy as “John Francis Crossman.” Displayed with it was a real-photo postcard of aged Civil War veterans, civilians, a cornet band, and others drawn up on a green with a large frame house in the background, labeled in the photo: “Memorial Day May 30th 1907.” The scene has a decidedly New England look and may be something retained by the family, though taken at a Memorial Day ceremony in Massachusetts or Vermont several years after Crossman’s death. He had been a member of G.A.R. Post 54 in Berlin, Mass, before moving to Vermont, and may thus be among those memorialized in the ceremony.
This is an interesting piece that displays nicely and would be great among a display of a soldier’s personal effects or the pastimes of camp life. [sr][ph:L]
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