James Pym

When he was 17, an incident that took place on 14 April 1865, just five days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, resulting in a charge of “attempt to commit an unnatural crime with a mare”, based on the eye-witness account of John Quartermain, a 19 year-old farm labourer, and an initial confession of guilt by the defendant. Pym (under the name Pimm) duly appeared at the Court of Quarter Sessions in Oxford on Monday, 26 June 1865, and despite a plea of “All I wish to say is that I never did it,” was found guilty as charged and sentenced to a term of six months imprisonment. It is highly unlikely therefore that a disgraced Pym ever returned to live permanently in his native village.

Nothing further is heard of this wayward ploughboy until 11 December 1874 when he presented himself at the U.S. Army recruiting office in Boston, Massachusetts, unless, that is, he was the subject of a tantalising story that has been handed down through four generations of another branch of the Pym family. It tells of a James Pym calling at the home of Emanuel and Elizabeth Pym in Oakley, Buckinghamshire, a small farming village not more than 10 miles from Garsington. Apparently he was “dressed in funny clothes and high-heeled boots,” and left behind a reputation in the family as being a “nasty, crude piece of work.” The fact that this incident most likely took place during the late 1860s, the visitor having confessed to being “a deserter from the British Army,” and afterwards “he went away to London never to be heard of again,” all add weight to the possibility that he was the same man who served in the 7th Cavalry?8

On enlistment Pym was described as being age 22, 5 feet 7 inches tall, having blue eyes, light hair, and a fair complexion, previously employed as a labourer.9 His youthful appearance evidently deceived the recruiting officer, Lieutenant William Harper, into accepting that he was indeed five years younger than his actual age. This writer hastens to add that there is absolutely no evidence to prove, or disprove, that he was a fugitive from the British Army but a calculated reduction of five years in age would have been a convenient way of making a fresh start and avoid having to answer any potentially awkward questions about a less than honourable phase of his life. Regrettably, the incorrect year of his birth continues to be widely quoted in printed works,10 the internet, and even on his tombstone!11

From Boston Pym was sent to Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, Missouri, where he completed his basic training on 29 January 1875 and was assigned to Company B, then stationed in Shreveport, Louisiana. He arrived at Shreveport on 10 February 1875 along with 27 other new recruits, among whom no less than ten hailed from the British Isles. Shreveport was in the District of the Red River under the command of Lewis Merrill, the Seventh Cavalry’s second major.

 

 

The 7th Cavalry was engaged in what was known as ‘Reconstruction,’ the name of Government policy to resolve the issues of the Civil War after the Confederacy was defeated and slavery ended. Reconstruction addressed how former secessionist states would return to the Union and the constitutional and legal status of the former slaves. The Union troops were received by the disgruntled white community with thinly disguised hostility and mainly acted in a policing role rounding up members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organisations. However, their time in the South proved to be relatively uneventful.