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Samuel Ranger Goes to War

Letters home from an East Hampton native offer insights into the hardships endured by a Civil War soldier.

When Samuel Miller Ranger answered the call to fight for the Union in 1862, he was 45 years old, the maximum permissible age for recruits. He left a wife, three children and a 14-acre farm on Three Mile Harbor Road that his family seemed as unprepared to manage without him as he seemed unprepared for soldiering.

As described by his descendant, Charles E. Squires, Ranger “was a simple, hard-working, rural American family man, caught up in the turmoil of the most turbulent time in our national history.” Squires, who previously put together an account of his family heritage in The Rangers of Northwest, used a remarkable series of letters Samuel Ranger wrote during his Civil War service to his wife Sarah Ann (nee Lester) as the basis for a second volume, Sam’s War copyrighted in 1998.

As he marched off with several of his East End neighbors to join the 127th New York Volunteer Infantry, Ranger was undoubtedly inspired by the cause (preservation of the Union) and family tradition (his father and grandfather had been soldiers). Squires speculates that he may have found the financial incentives attractive as well. East Hampton Town was offering $100 to volunteers at the time, plus $3 a month to wives and $1 per child.  Monthly pay for a private was $13.

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Initially, Ranger’s Company D was assigned to reinforce the defenses of the capital from a position in northern Virginia, which suffered one of its most severe winters in 1862-63 when frequent snowfalls alternated with cold, driving rains.

“I would like soldiering very well if it wasn’t for being out nights in the rain,” Ranger wrote to his wife on November 26, 1862, striking a stoic tone that does not entirely mask the misery of long marches in foul weather, short rations, vermin and the constant threat of disease.

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Because he was illiterate, Ranger turned to Johnny Bennett, the young son of an East Hampton neighbor, as his scribe and the two became close. While Ranger devoted much space in his letters to instructions for his wife on matters relating to the farm—when to lay in wood, whether to replace a dead horse, how to handle the corn—he never failed to send his love and to plead for more letters. Frequently Johnny Bennett added his own greetings to Ranger’s 15-year-old daughter Annie— greetings that sound increasingly like tentative love letters.

After enduring the frigid Virginia winter, Company D was sent to the coastal islands of South Carolina where the soldiers suffered the miseries of torrid, mosquito-infested summers during the seemingly endless campaign to capture Fort Sumter and then Charleston. 

Ranger’s matter-of-fact litany of the company’s sick and dead lengthens and on October 2, 1863, he wrote: “A good many of our regiment boys is sick and some of them dead, poor Johnny for one has gone and left us and I miss him very much.”

For this man of such emotional restraint, it is an expression of heartbreak.

The stalemate over Charleston goes on and on. There are bloody battles and scores of skirmishes, but before it is over, opposing troops had ample opportunity to discover their common humanity. From Cole’s Island, Ranger wrote on January 12, 1864: “We are still in the same place. We are right in sight of the rebs. They seem to be a very nice lot of fellows—some of the boys exchanges papers with them occasionally.”

Towards the end, Ranger was wounded and hospitalized. He survived the war but his health was broken. He returned to East Hampton in July 1865 and resumed his former life, though he was, understandably, much changed. He died in 1881 at the age of 64 and was buried in Round Swamp cemetery beneath a small military stone bearing this inscription: “Sam’l Ranger, Co. D, 127th N.Y. Inf.”

Sources from the Archives: “Sam’s War: A Narrative Based on the Civil War Letters of Samuel Miller Ranger, Co. D, 127th New York Volunteers” and “The Rangers of Northwest: A Historical Overview & Genealogy” both by Charles E. Squires.

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