Biographical Profile of Pvt. Abram Garvin, 108th U.S. Colored Infantry

During the winter of 1864–1865, frigid temperatures and snowstorms made life miserable for thousands of Confederates huddled in the prisoner of war camp at Rock Island, Illinois. To make matters worse, smallpox and other diseases sickened the men, filling the camp hospital and cemetery. Union soldiers on the other side of the stockade also suffered in the harsh climate. “Many of our men froze their feet while on guard and had to be taken to the Hospital,” noted an officer.⁵⁶⁵ Others fell ill with colds, including Sgt. Abram Garvin of Kentucky.⁵⁶⁶

Prior to his enlistment, Abram toiled in bondage as a farmhand and blacksmith in Hart County, one of about nineteen people enslaved by Sinclair Garvin,⁵⁶⁷ a Virginia native in his sixties who had settled in the village of Woodsonville early in the century. In June 1864, Abram traveled about seventy-five miles north to Louisville and joined the Union army with his enslaver’s consent. He took his place in the ranks of the 108th U.S. Colored Infantry, a new regiment composed mostly of formerly enslaved men from the north and west central regions of Kentucky. He soon received his sergeant’s stripes and assumed a leadership role in Company F.⁵⁶⁸

In the fall of 1864, Garvin reported with the rest of the 108th to Rock Island for duty as prison guards. On September 26, a Mississippi Confederate captured ten months earlier after the Battle of Lookout Mountain in Tennessee wrote in his diary, “8,000 Southern men to day are guarded by their slaves who have been armed by the Tyrant,” a reference to Abraham Lincoln and his administration.⁵⁶⁹

One captain in the 108th wrote of the “butternut colored cusses” in a letter to his family in Connecticut: “The Rebel prisoners here swear that they will not submit to be guarded by d—d [n*****s].… I don’t know how they can help themselves, unless they can get away, and they will have a good time in trying to get away.” He bragged about Garvin and his comrades, “These men are the best guards I ever saw. If an order is given them to guard anything, so be it to the man who attempts to interfere with them.”⁵⁷⁰

Garvin did his duty despite the cold that settled in his lungs in January 1865. It left him with a dry, hacking cough that grew worse, even after he and the regiment were relieved from duty at Rock Island and deployed to Mississippi. A friend in another company estimated that Garvin was excused from his responsibilities about one-third of the time due to the cough. His compromised health may have caused his reduction to the ranks in the autumn of 1865.⁵⁷¹

Garvin mustered out with the regiment in March 1866 and returned to Kentucky, where he died of “consumption” in 1879 at about age thirty-seven. He left behind a wife, Fanny, who was pregnant, and six children under age eleven. Family, friends, and his army buddies attributed his death to his army service.⁵⁷²