Samuel Artemas Moffett

In 1860 he was a 23 year old bank clerk in Watertown, NY. He enrolled on 27 September 1861 in Watertown, NY as 2nd Lieutenant of Company A, 94th NY Infantry, his commission dated 3 March 1862. He was promoted to First Lieutenant on 17 March.

He was with his company in Maryland and took command from Lieutenant Colonel Littlefield (probably ill) as the next senior officer present about 20 September 1862.

Moffett wrote the regiment's Antietam after-action report as Commanding Officer 3 days after the battle. In November, Lieutenant John A. Kress, USA, was appointed Lieutenant Colonel, and Captain De Witt C. Tomlinson was made Major. At about this time Moffett was promoted to Captain of Company B (to date from 16 September 1862).

Major Tomlinson resigned on 13 April 1863, and was succeeded as Major by Captain Moffett. Moffett commanded the 94th Infantry on the Chancellorsville campaign and at Gettysburg, and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel on 16 December 1863 when Kress resigned. He was captured in action on the Weldon Railroad near Petersburg, VA on 19 August 1864 and a prisoner at Libby Prison in Richmond, VA, then at Salisbury NC, and Danville, VA to about 1 March 1865. He was mustered out on 18 July 1865 in Washington, DC.

By 1865 he was a bookkeeper living with his parents in his hometown of Rodman, Jefferson County, NY, but by 1870 was a grocer in Evansville, IN. In 1880 he was in real estate in Chicago, and was an undertaker there in 1900.

His service from Phisterer.1. Personal details from family genealogists, his Pension Card, online from fold3, the US Census of 1860, 1880, and 1900, and the New York State Census of 1865; he's not found in the 1910 census, but his wife and son Walter were living on a farm in Madison County, MS that year. His gravesite is on Findagrave, source also of his picture, from a photograph in uniform with major's or lieutenant colonel's straps, contributed by Gettysburg collector Jeff Kowalis. His stone has his birth in 1840.

He married Helen Norcross (1846-1933) in Indiana in about 1869 and they had at least 3 sons, 1 of whom may have been an adopted nephew.

07/04/1836; Rodman, NY

03/24/1917; Ridgeland, MS; burial in Jessamine Cemetery, Ridgeland, MS