Jacob Douty

Details on Jacob’s growing years are lost to history except he must have had to grow wise quickly to provide for himself. The earliest record is the 1850 census showing he was born in Pennsylvania and living in a boarding house in Pottsville, Schuylkill County, where he was a laborer. He was the only teenager among the five other adult boarders.

Two years later he married Eva Elizabeth “Lizzie” Spotts and he found his lifelong occupation as a boilermaker. The most notable part of his story is found in the next decade, specifically in the role he played during what Pennsylvanians called the War of the Rebellion.

At the outset, the state recruited men for a three-month term, assuming the insurrection would be put down in short order. Jacob served as a sergeant in the 6th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment from late April of 1861 to late July. Since the war wasn’t over by then, re-recruitment was necessary, so Jacob returned to serving his state and country in September. He was made 2nd Lieutenant in Company K of the 48th Volunteer Infantry, nicknamed the “Schuylkill Regiment” since most of the men were from that county.

Jacob saw action at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and throughout the Overland Campaign in 1864. By then his rank was 1st Lieutenant. What happened next, according to some historians, was an event that should have earned Jacob the Medal of Honor.

The Avoidable Siege

That June, after failing to take the city of Petersburg, Virginia by assault, the opposing forces resorted to trench warfare and remained “dug in” for the next nine months. But the commander of the 48th, Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants, had an idea to really do some digging. He was a former mining engineer and proposed that his men, who were mostly miners, could dig a long mine shaft and set off an explosion directly beneath the Confederate line. 

The plan was a success and the lengthy siege might have been avoided if the battle that followed had not been such a miserable failure. The idea was approved by Major General Ambrose Burnside of the IX Corps, Major General George Meade of the Army of the Potomac, and even the commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant.

It took them a month using crude implements, covertly digging a tunnel 511 feet long and about three feet in height, just enough to crawl through. They stopped when they knew they were about 20 feet beneath the rebel fortifications, then branched about 38 feet left and right in a T-design. The two branches were filled with 8000 pounds of gunpowder and tamped down.

At 3:15 in the morning on July 30 the fuse, about 98 feet in length, was lit but nothing happened. An hour later, Lt. Douty and Sgt Henry Reece volunteered to risk certain death and crawl back in to investigate. They found the fire had shorted out where the fuse lines had been spliced together. With his sergeant holding the lantern, Lt. Douty used his pocket knife to repair the line and re-light the fuse. They crawled out as fast as their hands and knees would take them. 

The wait, this time, was worth it. After about 15 minutes, the explosion proved the miners had done their job. It left a crater (still visible today) nearly 200 feet long, 70 feet wide, and 30 feet deep, killed some 200 Confederate soldiers, and created a state of confusion. 

Unfortunately, there was confusion on the Union side as well because the battle plan was poorly communicated and poorly followed. The troops entered the crater instead of attacking the enemy on the rim, while two of their generals sat it out in a bunker drinking liquor. Union casualties were double that of the Confederates. Grant confessed later that the disaster was “the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.”

Had everyone done their jobs as well as the 48th Regiment did, the war might have ended much sooner. Lt. Douty certainly would have been in line for recognition, but his three-year term expired in September. He returned home to his wife in Pottsville and to a steady job making boilers.

An Unavoidable Separation

His marriage, apparently, wouldn’t be as steady. The couple lived in a boarding house in nearby Luzerne County in 1870. Because of wounds received in the war, Jacob received an invalid’s pension starting in 1879. Then the 1880 census showed he was back in Pottsville as a boilermaker and listed as a widower, although he really wasn’t.

Elizabeth and Jacob were separated and she was living with a family about a half-mile away, but she still listed her status as married. That became a true statement five years later when she married someone else, a local stone mason. Jacob had apparently left by this time for a new life in Philadelphia. He found work in the maintenance shops at the city’s water department. He also found some old friends, veterans of the 48th, through a local post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the popular veterans society of the day.

On April 13, 1895 Jacob died in his home at 1346 South 13th Street. The funeral was attended by his co-workers and conducted by his GAR family, including the chaplain and pall bearers. His burial was provided by another veterans group, the Pennsylvania Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. They maintained part of Section 133, also known as the MOLLUS plot or the Soldiers’ Home Burial Lot, where a military stone marks his grave.

Post Script: The lot was originally owned by a group known as The Soldiers’ Home In the City of Philadelphia. From 1864 until 1873 it sheltered and cared for over 3500 sick and wounded soldiers and sailors. In 1869 the home purchased burial space in Section 133 for indigent veterans who died in their care. Funds were raised over the years to place a bronze statue of a soldier as a “silent sentry” over the lot. Dedicated in 1884,  the figure stood 7’ 2” tall on a nine-foot granite base. Ownership of the lot was eventually transferred to MOLLUS in 1889.

For about 90 years the sentry stood watch over the 96 graves. Sometime in the early 1970s it was stolen (although it weighed 700 pounds) and almost sold for scrap. A Camden, New Jersey scrap dealer called authorities and the local MOLLUS commandery paid for repairs. Since Mount Moriah was in a state of disrepair and was finally abandoned in 2011, the organization had it erected in 2014 at Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery.