Portrait of a soldier
William Wilbur Edgerton
'What storyes I shall have to tell when I get
home,' announced Private William Wilbur
Edgerton to his mother. Born and reared in
Central New York, the third of four children
to Dorothy Doud and John Leffingwell
Edgerton, Wilbur had enlisted in the
107th New York Volunteer Infantry illegally
in July 1862, just one month shy of his
seventeenth birthday.
From a tender young age, Wilbur had
been on his own. His father was a ne'er do
well who wandered about, searching for
success and happiness, never to find it.
Wilbur's two older sisters married, and his
mother, financially abandoned, took the
youngest boy to Sparta, Wisconsin, where
she had friends. Wilbur bonded well with his
mother, recalling, 'When I was a little boy, I
tought nothing was so nice as to sit on
mothers lap and I have not exatly [gotten]
over that.'
The best thing that ever happened to him,he believed, was being thrown out to his
own devices at such an early age. Wilbur
started kicking around at various jobs at
twelve - fiddle playing, a cooper, a farm
hand, a factory worker, and then a
blacksmith. Neither fiddling nor work as a
cooper paid much, so he took on
employment with a farmer. When the man
ripped him off of nearly half his pay, he
stormed off and entered factory labor.
Wilbur left that to apprentice with a
blacksmith, which at the time offered a
much better career track. 'Blacksmithing is
black work,' he conveyed to his mother in
racially charged language common in that
day, 'but it brings white money so I dont
care.' Unfortunately, the blacksmith's
explosive temper and vulgar ways convinced
him to quit. He then linked up with another
blacksmith; this time a good, decent man.
Edgerton enlisted for the simple reasonthat everyone kept asking him why he did
not soldier. He was a young man, without
family, in good health, and because he had
been on his own so long, everyone assumed
he was older than he really was. 'I made up
my mind that it was my duty to fight for my
country and I did so,' Edgerton justified.
Just two and a half months after the
regiment was formed, the 107th New York
'saw the elephant' in the single bloodiest day
of the war, at Antietam in Maryland. Lee had
raided into Maryland, but his plans fell into
Federal hands. When Union forces moved
more aggressively against him than he
anticipated, Lee retreated to the north bank
of the Potomac River, near a town called
Sharpsburg and a creek named Antietam. On
the morning of 17 September 1862, the
107th advanced through the North Woods
and into the timber, where they came under
fire for the first time. As they rushed into the
East Woods, a Rebel volley struck down men
on either side of Edgerton. You 'have no idea
what it is to be a souldier off in a strang
country whare your comrades are a dieing
off fast and no noing how soon before your
time will come,' he explained to his younger
brother. In the course of passing through the
woods, 'I run over a good maney ded and
wounded Rebels.'
A couple of hours later, the 107th
advanced to protect an artillery battery. 'The
balls flew around my head like hail stones
and sounded like a swarm of bees,' he
described to his brother. 'O Johney I tell you
that you can have no conception of the
thouths [thoughts] that run through a mans
head about thouse times it made a man
think of the good and the bad things that he
ever did in his life. I know my head was full
of thoughts.' People who had been in
combat had tried to prepare him for it, but
the experience was nothing like anything he