Rufus Pettit: American Civil War Union Prison Inspector

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Guilty was the verdict, dismissal from the army the sentence. The two weeks of hearings and deliberations had ended with Pettit in shame. He returned to New York State, decided to give up farming, bought a house in Baldwinsville, and began practicing law.

Pettit’s postwar years remain mostly a mystery, but an incident with his son during that period suggests that the harsh behavior that turned up in the Alexandria prisons did not disappear. His son, Rufus H. Pettit, graduated from Cornell with a degree in entomology, taught at Michigan Agricultural College, and went on to invent a device called the flit gun, a bug-spray device that would be known to every American who lived between that time and the propagation of aerosol sprayers after World War II. The former prison commandant reacted by denouncing his son as a ‘butterfly chaser’ and eventually disowning him.

As Pettit entered his 60s, he applied for a military pension for his service in the Mexican War. Listing his occupation as ‘gentleman,’ he was awarded $8 a month. The next year, 1881, he applied for a Civil War pension, based upon a doctor’s affidavit that he suffered from ‘chronic diarrhea, spinal paralysis and cystitis.’ The application was denied, probably because of the court-martial ruling.

A few months later, Rufus D. Pettit, former gallant battlefield commander and brutal prison-keeper, was dead at age 67. Perhaps many of the men of the 1st New York Light Artillery’s Company missed the firm but fair captain who had led them into battle on the Virginia Peninsula in 1862. But no doubt few of the Union prisoners stuck in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1864 felt the same way.

This article was written by Thomas P. Lowry and originally published in the October 2001 issue of Civil War Times Magazine.

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Tags: 19th Century, American Civil War, Civil War Times, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures

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