A Civil War Oval Albumen Photograph of Michigan Cavalry Officer Horace S. Green

Circa 1861

equestrian portrait shows sergeant of cavalry Horace S. Green (1818-1862) wearing a single-breasted frock coat, indicating company grade officer, with a Hardee hat having crossed sabers.
stamped three times H.S. Green / 3rd. Michi.gan'y / Co. B, one upper and both lower corners.
7 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches.

According to the genealogical record, Horace Green was born in 1818 to New Yorkers James and Hopestill Eunice Green. The family relocated to Clinton County, Michigan, where Green worked as a farmer as a young man. He enlisted at St. Johns on August 27, 1861, as a sergeant and mustered into Co. B, 3rd Michigan Cavalry, leaving behind his second wife, Lydia, and ten children.

The regiment left Grand Rapids on November 28, 1861, for St. Louis, Missouri, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. G. Minty. Green and his cohort settled in New Madrid along the Mississippi River, where the water quality was notoriously poor. Consequently, more illness was recorded among the regiment here than at any other point during the Civil War, with a correspondingly high mortality rate. New Madrid was ultimately evacuated given these conditions, and the regiment was dispatched up the Tennessee River to the battlefield of Shiloh, where the men took part in the siege of Corinth in the spring of 1862. Unfortunately, Green had already succumbed to a water-borne illness on March 2, 1862.