Merriam, Francis Jackson

Life Span
to
Full name
Francis Jackson Merriam
Place of Birth
Birth Date Certainty
Exact
Death Date Certainty
Exact
Gender
Male
Race
White
Sectional choice
North
Origins
Free State
No. of Spouses
1
Family
Minerva Caldwell (wife)
Occupation
Military
Relation to Slavery
White non-slaveholder
Other Affiliations
Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
Military
Union Army

Francis Jackson Meriam (Villard, 1910)

Scholarship
Francis Jackson Meriam was born November 17, 1837, at Framingham, Massachusetts, and died suddenly November 28, 1865, in New York City, after having served in the army as a captain in the Third South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he was forever urging wild schemes upon his superiors, and often attempting them. In an engagement under Grant he was severely wounded in the leg. Early in the war he married Minerva Caldwell, of Galena, Illinois. He was in Boston, coming from Canada, on the day of John Brown’s execution, but was finally induced by friends to go back to Canada. Mr. Sanborn has characterized Meriam as of “little judgment and in feeble health,” but “generous, brave, and devoted.”
Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 685.
How to Cite This Page: "Merriam, Francis Jackson," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/index.php/node/6258.