My Civil War Ancestors: Charles Wesley Hines

In the Eastern Orthodox Churches, a married man can become a priest, but a priest who is single or widowed is not allowed to marry.  The joke is, then, that any woman who desperately wants to find a husband should just hang around an Orthodox seminary in the days leading up to ordination, as the reality of "now or never" hits the seminarians.  Something of the same urgency is no doubt felt on the eve of any war by the men who will do the fighting; they may not lower their standards, but they are likely to be more prompt with their proposals.  Be that as it may, Charles Wesley Hines married Martha Ann Parrott (1842-1914) on 17 January 1861 -- just one day after the opening of the Georgia Secession Convention.  Their one child, my great-great grandmother Martha Wesley Hines, was born on 26 October 1861 -- just over nine months from the wedding.

Charles Wesley Hines was born on 3 November 1834 to Samuel and Susannah Hines.  His mother's maiden name was Miller, but her father's full name seems to have been lost; she was from Savannah, Georgia, and Mason Covington Miller's family had come from South Carolina, so they may or may not have been somehow related.  Regardless, they eventually became related, as her granddaughter Martha Wesley Hines married Levi Henderson Miller, Mason C. Miller's son.

The father of Charles Wesley Hines was one of a long line of men from Milford, Connecticut, named Samuel Hine, the final "s" being added after he moved to Georgia.  (I will write about the Hine family later, since they were involved in the Revolutionary War.)  As a result, although I have found no actual "brother vs brother" in my family tree (the desertion of Peter Pelt came close), it is practically certain that C. W. Hines had first cousins on the other side when he enlisted as a 3rd corporal in Company H of the 29th Georgia Infantry on 1 October 1861.

As is so often the case, all the really interesting stories appear to have been lost to time.  C. W. Hines worked his way up to full sergeant, but on 19 September 1863 he, like Daniel Thomas Richards, was wounded at Chickamauga.  Unlike Daniel Richards, he did not survive, succumbing to his injuries in a field hospital on 25 September 1863.  He is buried in the Marietta Confederate Cemetery.

One interesting thing is that although his widow Martha was eligible to apply for a pension from the state of Georgia, there is no record of her ever having applied for it.  This seems to have been the typical case; in fact, Mason Covington Miller is the only ancestor I know of who applied for a pension based on service to the Confederacy.  UPDATE:  Benjamin Franklin McDaniel applied for a pension from the state of Florida.