William H. Schroyer
Lieutenant William H. Schroyer died at Aquia Landing, Virginia, from either injuries or sickness sustained during the final moments of the Battle of Chancellorsville. The 33-year-old was a tinsmith before volunteering for military service along with his brothers Lewis and Michael. They were in Company G of the 147th Pennsylvania infantry, the unit most associated with Snyder County. Schroyer died on 15 May 1863.
At this point in the war—two years in—the Army of the Potomac was stalled to the northeast of Fredericksburg. A demoralizing winter encampment was broken by the Union offensive against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which still commanded Fredericksburg. Union general Joseph Hooker devised a sweeping flank assault that culminated in the fighting at Chancellorsville. A multi-day affair, the battle was a thorough disaster for the Union, with the Army of the Potomac outflanked and pushed steadily back toward the Rappahannock River. It was during the waning hours of the Chancellorsville campaign when Schroyer fell victim.
Schroyer injured his leg shortly before Chancellorsville. During the rush and push of the battle, he became so impaired by the injury that he had to be removed to a Union hospital. According to Snyder County newspapers, what happened next was plain bad luck. On the way to the hospital at Aquia Creek, a stray Confederate shell landed nearby, killing a horse and hurling it on top of Schroyer. He was crushed under the weight, and it was from these additional injuries that Schroyer eventually passed away. This is the story told in the local press several generations later, when the First World War inspired local interest in the fate of area veterans.
But sources closer to the incident tell a different tale. Captain Charles S. Davis wrote the following in a letter to his wife, two days before Schroyer died:
Lieut. Shroyer was with us until the 3d day of the fight, Sunday afternoon, when his leg gave out and he was Sent to the rear, he is now in the Hospital where G, B, Townsend & the rest are, but I have not Seen him Since. The boys have been down to See him and they Say he has now the Typhoid fever.
If accurate, Davis’s note places the day of Schroyer’s move to the hospital as May 3—the heaviest day of fighting and the costliest for the Union. Perhaps a shell did burst near Schroyer and he contracted typhoid fever. Military hospitals were well known as breeding grounds for such bacterial diseases, and the winter and spring of 1863 were particularly bad times to be in a Union hospital in northern Virginia. The disease was often called “camp fever” and was considered an inevitable part of life in cold, wet, crowded quarters. Mary Jane Everts notes that William’s brother Michael wrote the following in his diary:
May 7th, broke camp, crossed Potomac Creek, passed Stafford Court House, and got back into our old camp at Aqua [sic] Creek landing about 2 p. m., traveling 12 miles. May 8th, I first learned, thru Lot Ulrich, of the sickness of brother William, in the division hospital, which was located four miles from our camp. I asked for a pass to visit the Lieutenant … From that time until May 15th, whenever I was off duty I stayed with brother and attended to his wants as best I could … My brother-in-law, John Crossgrove, then sheriff of Union county … came to Washington, got a pass and came to Aqua [sic] Creek and arrived there on the morning of May 15th, only a little while before brother died. Arrangements were made for having the body embalmed and sent home to Selinsgrove for burial.
Here, too, Schroyer’s demise was attributed to “sickness” instead of injuries. Finally, the official Army Register, published in August 1865, listed Schroyer’s cause of death as “disease.” The U.S. Sanitary Commission was blunt about the runaway nature of typhoid: “active warfare involves the repeated and almost constant occurrence of contingencies that necessitate a choice of evils.” The evil that the Army of the Potomac had to chose in early 1863 was to stay huddled in winter encampments that sapped men of their health. Doctors might chase and chase after a complete eradication of diseases like typhoid, but they could never quite catch up to it. James Fulton, a Union surgeon out of Chester County, described his experience at Aquia Creek in the days after Chancellorsville: “After getting into to camp we immediately set to work to fix up our hospital as there were many Sick [with] Typh[oid]. Those attacked with the Fever were taken down…with delerium and great prostration.” If William Schroyer succumbed to typhoid fever, he was one of the 37% of Civil War soldiers with the disease who died from it.