Maris Alexander

  General Notes:

Maris Alexander enlisted as a Corporal in Company K, 77th Infantry Regiment Pennsylvania on December 8, 1861. He died in the service of his country on January 16, 1862 at Camp Wood, KY.

The 77th was at Camp Wood from Dec 1861 to February 1862. Maris most likely died of dysentary while in camp ...
Notes on the 77th from http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/HIUS403/77pa/mission.html:
"And the war came." So spoke Abraham Lincoln of the Civil War. But the actual fighting did not come onto the soil of the Union until the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. When the war did come to Pennsylvania, all but one Pennsylvania regiment met Lee's army that July--the 77th Pennsylvania Volunteers. For most Union soldiers from Pennsylvania, their military experience climaxed with their defense of their home state late in the war; however, the men of the 77th Pa. had a fundamentally different experience. They were the only Pennsylvania regiment to have fought in the western campaigns, and received much local attention for emerging victorious (and unscathed by loss of men) at Shiloh in April of 1862.

While many Pennsylvania soldiers traveled many miles away from their homes for longer periods of time than they had hitherto been away, the men of the 77th Pa had an unusually arduous journey. They went so far from home as to be finally discharged in Victoria, Texas, after the war--sent there because of the supposed threat of French troops in Mexican villages. Historians have found that much of the sense of honor and duty which motivated men to enlist and stay in the army stemmed from a desire to protect home ground. The regiment's transfer to Texas would have seemed an unglorious end to their service. As reflected in the Franklin County newspapers, the interest in and excitement attached to the regiment also declined in the later war years. Many members of the regiment were also captured and imprisoned after the battle of Chickamauga or died of disease in the second half of the war. Despite these and other hardships, most men in Company A saw fit to re-enlist as volunteer veterans in early 1864 for another round of duty. Although in the memoirs of John Obreiter and Samuel Daihl the story of the 77th Pa. reaches its pinnacle at Shiloh, it clearly did not end there. Looking at what happened after Shiloh may clarify the importance of that narrative to the regiment's own historians.

Traditional military history tends to focus on battles and fighting as the shaping experience of a soldier's life in the army. But like most Union regiments, the 77th Pa. actually spent the majority of their time not fighting.
Figures compiled from even the standard regimental history demonstrate the discrepancy between days spent fighting and days spent otherwise.
In addition to participating in some of the most important military campaigns in the West, men of the 77th Pa. also marched through usually difficult terrain, encountered "rebels" and slaves for the first time, got sick with dysentery, were detailed to supply trains, and missed home. The physical landscape of the war in the West which the 77th Pa. traversed had an affect on the way they saw themselves in relationship to their homes, their comrades, and the people they met along the way. In letters home and to the war department asking for sick leave, members of the regiment expressed their longing to return to their homes in Pennsylvania. The different social landscape of the South brought unexpected encounters with un-hostile rebels and ex-slaves aiding in their escape from Richmond's Libby prison. The war also played itself out in the public landscape of the newspapers when the soldiers of the 77th Pa. became pawns used by political parties during the gubonatorial race in Chambersburg.