A Man of Faith and Service: Chaplain William Earnshaw

During a brief moment of respite during the Army of the Potomac’s march through Virginia, Chaplain William Earnshaw composed a letter to Richard Gallagher, a distraught soldier’s father. Earnshaw detailed the last moments of Gallagher’s son, William, who had suddenly fallen ill on the march and died shortly thereafter. Earnshaw wrote of William’s calmness as he sensed death was near, and how he was a “heroic, generous, and brave” defender of the Union. Earnshaw urged Gallagher’s family to take solace in the belief that their son was now in a better place, and to “try by the blessing of God to meet him in heaven.”^[1]

Earnshaw undoubtedly wrote many of these kinds of letters to the families of fallen Union soldiers during the Civil War. Earnshaw’s grace under fire and his passionate zeal for ministering to Union soldiers endeared him to every command in which he served. Present at many of the Civil War’s major battles, Earnshaw would go on to serve as superintendent of several national cemeteries and, later, serve as the chaplain for the Dayton National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers.

Earnshaw trained as a Methodist minister and became an itinerant preacher in 1853, beginning his career in Baltimore, Maryland. He spent the next eight years living and preaching in four different cities before enlisting in the Union Army on April 16, 1861. Assigned to the 49th Pennsylvania Infantry, Earnshaw served in the home guard but was soon commissioned as a chaplain and assigned to the Army of the Potomac. Earnshaw was present at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, and then was transferred to the Army of the Cumberland after Confederate forces were driven out of Pennsylvania.

After the war, Earnshaw took on the important task of establishing national cemeteries for fallen Union soldiers in Tennessee. Appointed by General George Thomas, Earnshaw supervised the creation of national cemeteries at Stone River, Nashville, and Memphis, Tennessee, as well as several other smaller cemeteries in the state. He had the arduous task of reinterring Union soldiers buried on the battlefield into the new national cemeteries. Earnshaw also arranged to send soldiers’ remains home to their families.^[2] As superintendent of the Stone River National Cemetery, Earnshaw relied on the 111th United States Colored Infantry as his primary labor force. Earnshaw also established a Freedman Bureau’s school in Stone River, Tennessee, and the site became an important community spot for formerly enslaved residents.^[3]

Soon after supervising the creation of national cemeteries in Tennessee, Earnshaw was elected as chaplain of the Dayton, Ohio, branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers on the sole recommendation of General Thomas. Referred to by the Tennessean as the “great National Cemetery man,” Earnshaw began his duties on September 9, 1867, and immediately began working to establish a cemetery at the Central Branch.^[4] Noted to have “judgment and taste” in these sorts of endeavors, Earnshaw designed a grid-based Central Branch cemetery reminiscent to the bivouac and camp arrangements he experienced in the Union Army.^[5] 

As commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, a prominent Civil War Veterans organization, Earnshaw used his extensive connections to raise funds for the construction of the Soldiers’ Monument at the Central Branch’s cemetery.^[6] Earnshaw wanted the Soldiers’ Monument to convey the courage of the “American Soldier” and perpetuate the “memory and deeds of the disabled Veterans of the National Home.”^[7] President Rutherford B. Hayes, a former General in the Union Army, was present to unveil the monument on September 12, 1877.

Besides designing the Central Branch’s cemetery, Earnshaw also supervised the resident Veterans in quarrying stone from the eastern edge of the grounds to build the chapel. Construction took two years and the chapel was dedicated on October 26, 1870.^[8] He presided over religious services in the chapel on Sunday mornings and evenings and held weekly prayer meetings at various locations on the Central Branch’s campus.^[9] Near the end of Earnshaw’s chaplaincy, he presided over 100 funerals per month and continuously visited with ill and infirm Veterans of the Home.^[10]

In addition to the chapel, Chaplain Earnshaw also established the Central Branch’s library, serving as its chief librarian. To build the library, Earnshaw solicited books from Dayton’s prominent families and former Union officers and named the Central Branch’s library after General George Thomas, his commanding officer during the Civil War. Earnshaw wrote to every officer who served under General Thomas, requesting just a single book. Books poured in from these requests, resulting in over 6,000 books for the Thomas Library.^[11] In 1868, Earnshaw received a letter from Mary Lowell Putnam, of Massachusetts, in which she offered a rather large donation of books. This led to the creation of a second library and the construction of a dedicated building in 1880 called the Putnam Library. Mary donated books, art, and other materials for years, a legacy that her daughter, Georgiana, took up after her death in 1898.

Earnshaw’s untimely death at 54 years old on July 17, 1885, after nearly 20 years of service, shocked the Veterans at the Dayton Soldiers’ Home. Earnshaw had met over 3,000 Veterans during his tenure at the Central Branch and “grizzled old soldiers and youthful employees wept alike” at his passing. Flags at the Soldiers’ Home were displayed at half-mast and offices and businesses were closed throughout Dayton. Central Branch officers wore a black mourning badge on their left arm for 30 days after his death.

Earnshaw shared in “pleasure and sorrow” with the Veterans and was a warm comrade with the men, becoming a friend in every way to those who met him.^[12] His role in providing for Veterans’ spiritual, mental, and physical health earned him the love and respect of everyone at the Home. His last message to the Home’s residents was to “tell the Veterans I love them all.” Earnshaw’s funeral service was conducted at the Home’s chapel and he was buried in Woodland Cemetery, six miles west of the Central Branch.^[13]

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^[1] Letter from William Earnshaw to Richard Gallagher, Lewistown Gazette, April 16, 1862.

^[2] “The Bodies of Our Dead Heroes,”Philadelphia Inquirer, August 23, 1865.

^[3] Stones River National Battlefield, Chaplain William Earnshaw, https://www.nps.gov/people/earnshaw.htm.

^[4] Centennial Portrait and Biographical Record of the City of Dayton and of Montgomery County, Ohio, Dayton History Books Online, 227-242, https://www.daytonhistorybooks.com/page/page/1606401.htm.             

^[5] A Nation Repays Its Debt: The National Soldiers’ Home and Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio (Teaching with Historic Places), https://www.nps.gov/articles/a-nation-repays-its-debt-the-national-soldiers-home-and-cemetery-in-dayton-ohio-teaching-with-historic-places.htm.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Miami Helmet, September 20, 1877.

^[8] Darlene Richardson, “The History of VA’s Oldest Chapel,” Veterans Health Administration, December 2015.

^[9] J.C. Gobrecht, History of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers: With A Complete Guidebook to the Central Home at Dayton, Ohio (1875), 72.

^[10] “The Late Chaplain Earnshaw,” Summit County Beacon, August 5, 1885.

^[11] “The Late Chaplain Earnshaw.”

^[12] Dayton Herald, July 18, 1885.

^[13] Centennial Portrait and Biographical Record of the City of Dayton and of Montgomery County, Ohio.