23rd Infantry

Private Robert Jones

Company I (the “Granville Stars”), 23rd Regiment N.C. Troops (13th Regiment N.C. Volunteers)

Robert Jones of Granville County was conscripted into service and enlisted at Oxford on July 8, 1862, in Company I (the “Granville Stars”), 23rd Regiment N.C. Troops. On the following September 6 he entered a hospital at Danville, Virginia, suffering from “debilitas,” and was granted a sixty-day furlough on October 11. No muster rolls for Company I are extant from the date of Jones’s enlistment through 1863, but he returned to duty and was captured at the Battle of Gettysburg.

The 23rd North Carolina suffered near annihilation on July 1 at Gettysburg, sustaining nearly 300 casualties. Sixty-six men were killed or mortally wounded in action, and more than 175 were captured. By March 1864 another twenty-five members of the 23rd North Carolina had died in Federal prisons of war. One of them was Robert Jones, who died in the smallpox hospital at Fort Delaware, Delaware, on October 20, 1863.

Image: Copy print in author’s possession.

Source Note:
Manarin et. al., North Carolina Troops 7:231; Mast, “North Carolina Casualties”; Mast, State Troops and Volunteers, 1:261, 281-282; service record files of Robert Jones, 23rd Regiment N.C. Troops, Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers from the State of North Carolina (M270), RG109, NA.