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/node/6258.