The Remarkable Story of the McClure Brothers (Civil War/Gibson County History)

You can read part of the story in the news article, below, published on page 4 of the 1 Sep 1911 Evansville Journal newspaper. It tells of the annual reunion of the 17th Indiana Infantry Regiment, Company H, assembled in Gibson County, Indiana, during the Civil War.

Not mentioned was a fifth McClure brother, Alex, who died four years earlier. He also served in this company of Gibson County men. David, mentioned above, was their brother who served in a different Indiana company and regiment during the war.

Now, the McClure brothers were sons of Catherine Devin-McClure (1812-1888), who was Rev. Alexander Devin's daughter. The Devin family pioneered Gibson County and Princeton, Indiana. Catherine's brothers ran a mercantile business on the square in Princeton and the building on the Northwest Corner of the Public Square is the Devin Block, built by them in the 1800's. They were well known for selling loads of pork and produce at the Port of New Orleans, floating their merchandise by flatboat down the rivers. In fact, the name Joseph Devin was popular among the residents of that town, I have a second cousin named after him, Joseph Devin Hussey (1859-1951).

So FIVE of Catherine's sons went off to war in 1861 as part of the Union Army...and ALL OF THEM came home in one piece! That is quite remarkable! And their regiment (Indiana's 17th) was active in famous battles at Chickamauga and the Siege of Atlanta. You can easily fact check me on that.

Here are the brothers names and dates, in order, all but one of them died in Indiana:

ALEXANDER DEVIN MCCLURE, 22 Dec 1837 - 6 Mar 1907
JAMES M. MCCLURE, MD, 20 Jan 1841 - 14 Mar 1913 (He attended medical college in Chicago after the war, then set up his practice in St. Louis, practicing general medicine)
JOSEPH DAVID MCCLURE, 9 Jul 1844 - 6 Jan 1919
ROBERT MOFFIT MCCLURE, 16 Sep 1846 - 26 Dec 1926 (Died in Kansas)
WILLIAM GRADY MCCLURE, 29 Mar 1848 - 29 Feb 1920

Interesting to note, that the three youngest brothers were only teenagers when the war broke out, William, the youngest was but 13 years of age.

Dr. James M. McClure, got sick and took the train home from St. Louis, to his youngest brother's house South of Princeton. He died in 1913 at Prentice McClure's residence, a year and one half after the reunion described in the article, above. Here's an excerpt from the medical journal where news of his passing was relayed to his colleagues at the time (note, the date 16 Mar 1913 is the day his obituary ran in the Evansville newspaper).

Slavery, the flag and the war

Is this flag offensive to you? It is to me. And with all the debate surrounding it's use of late, I thought it a good time to put my views on slavery, the flag and the Civil War out there.

Sadly, it took our country more than 100 years to recognize African-Americans as fully-ordained citizens. From being viewed lower than livestock during the first half of the 1800's to finally receiving equal rights in the 1960's, our treatment of our black brethren was shameful, at best. And slavery remains a stain on the fabric of our nascent history. It took a young kid from Indiana only one viewing of the "Roots" miniseries on NBC in the 1970's to realize the wrong that had been done to them. I was sickened by images of young female slaves being dragged off and raped by their white overseers. The miniseries made me angry, sad and sick to my stomach.


Likewise, the flying of the Confederate flag stirs up those same feelings, for when I see it, I imagine it's user being the most vile of southern racists, stuck in a pre-1960's mindset of intolerance and hate. That is what the "stars and bars" represents for many Americans. For that reason, alone, it is offensive and should be taken down from statehouses and halls of justice. And just what "heritage" does it represent, exactly? A southern heritage of intolerance, injustice, inequality and white privilege? Quite a heritage, I must say. And if, to you, it's nothing more than a battle flag of the failed experiment called the Confederate States of America (CSA), then why fly the loser flag at all? In most battles, the tattered flag of the losing army, in this case the CSA, is lowered and the victor's flag raised. The Confederate flag represents all the wrong things--losing, at best, and hate, at worst.

Finally, I've grown very tired of the Southern revisionists who would have us believe that the Civil War was not about slavery. It was only fought over issues like autonomy, states' rights and independence.

So was the issue of slavery really a catalyst for war? I think it was. So does this article from Salon.com. So does Christopher Dickey, who wrote of the radical southerners and successionists, "Their cause was slavery: holding slaves, working slaves, buying and selling slaves—black chattel considered less than human beings by custom, by the courts, and even by the Constitution, whose authors never mentioned slavery but weasel-worded it into the founding document of the Union." And I agree with him. Slavery was the economy of the South. Successionists wanted to preserve their way of life, a life made entirely possible by slave labor and the crops they harvested for market. Dickey purports, "The hunger for that fresh territory and the slaves to work it was insatiable...More land, more slaves, meant more money and more power to dominate the federal government and make it support people who wanted more land, more slaves and more money." In Dickey's view the South was a "slavocracy" because, as I've always argued, their economy was built on the backs of slaves. Thus, the preservation of that economy and the war they fought for that aim was, in fact, a conflict to preserve slave ownership, plain and simple. Yet, as the article in Salon.com points out, revisionists have always tried to paint it as something else. All of their vain attempts to veil the true intent of the Civil War, using terms like "state's rights" and "preserving our heritage," is just wordsmithing to remove slavery from the vocabulary of war historians. Some of us are smart enough to see through that flimsy veil, even when modern-day racists raise it in defense of things, like the use of the Confederate flag.

That's my .02 on the issue. And please, quit telling me to revisit the history books. I'm quite well read, thank you.

James Hussey Letter dated 12 Sep 1862

I've been building my family tree online for the better part of 8 years, but only recently purchased access to the vault of records on Ancestry.com. Today, I made one of the coolest finds to date. First, let me give you a bit of family history...

Back when Indiana Territory was a vast wilderness of tall timber, unspoiled watersheds and every kind of wild beast, my pioneer ancestors came from all points south and east to settle this veritable, backwoods paradise. Of the New England-born pioneers, was the family of Richard and Aphia (Mills) Hussey.

According to Gibson County newspaper man and historian Gil R. Stormont, the couple and their 4 children left Maine and travelled overland through the Genessee Valley (NY) to Washington
County, Ohio. Richard Louis Hussey (1789-1851) was a cabinet maker there for four years. Aphia bore him two more children before they left in late 1821 for Gibson County, Indiana, locating 5 miles east of Princeton, near Francisco. There, Richard cleared a farm and opened a blacksmith shop. He is my 5th great-uncle on Mom's side.

The last of the four children to be born in New England was James Madison Hussey (1817-1862). He would have made the long overland trip as an infant, knowing only thick woodlands of southwestern Indiana as home. After many years service to his father, clearing and cultivating a farm, James owned and operated a flour and a saw mill on the Patoka River in nearby Kirksville (now Wheeling), Indiana. That was before he heard the call of duty to put down the rebellion. James enlisted in the Union Army on August 2, 1862, and served as First Lieutenant in Company B, 65th Regiment, Indiana Volunteers.

It wasn't long before 1st Lt. Hussey contracted a serious illness and found himself bedridden at Camp Comeback in Henderson, Kentucky, southward across the Ohio River from Evansville. It is at this juncture we come to the present moment and my great find. Thanks to another Ancestry member, some of J. M. Hussey's correspondence has been saved in digital format for antiquity. Below is a scanned image of the opening of one of his last letters to his wife, Sarah, dated (on my birthday, no less) September 12, 1862. (Click on the image for a more readable, full-size version.)


By early November of that same year, James Madison Hussey was dead. He never recovered from his illness, as historian James T. Tartt recalls, James died of pneumonia in a Henderson, Kentucky, hospital. He received a military burial on the family farm back in Indiana. Now owned by the McConnell family, Lawrence Cemetery sits at the corner of a field just off Fairview Road near Francisco.