Civil War detective solves grave mix-up

Piper, a rebel, is really Pfeiffer, a Yank

RALEIGH -- Jacob Pfeiffer caught a rebel's bullet on the hip at Gettysburg in 1863, a wound that took a month to kill him.

That was bad enough. But then the luckless New Yorker was mistaken for a Confederate prisoner of war, boxed up and shipped to Raleigh, where he has spent 145 years resting among his foes.

His discovery last month makes him the second Yankee found reposing in the Gettysburg section of Oakwood Cemetery, a sanctuary for fallen Dixie fighters. It also notches a second mistake corrected by Charles Purser, self-appointed Civil War detective.

"This poor fellow," said Purser, a retired airman and letter carrier in Garner. "He did not go with his boys."

Purser's sympathy spreads to 137 others buried under a hill at Oakwood. In the early 1980s, he and a handful of others helped identify the Gettysburg dead who were transported south and buried there.

At the time, they had no markers other than numbered stones hidden by knee-deep weeds. Purser pored over muster rolls, troop rosters, cemetery records -- learning each man's rank, hometown and death date.

He soon found that 19th-century recordkeeping was shoddy at best, especially after a battle that left 51,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead or wounded, and in post-battle hospitals where the amputated limbs lay in piles.

Last year, Purser learned that one of the men he had identified, John Dobson of North Carolina, was actually John Dolson of Minnesota -- a Yankee interloper sent south because of a clerical error.

Then last month, a fellow buff in New York called with a new Gettysburg burial list unearthed from deep in government archives. The list showed a Jacob Pheiffer of New York had also been shipped south to Raleigh -- his name spelled at least four ways, depending on the document.

"Who's this Pheiffer?" Purser asked himself.

Mingling between Northern and Southern dead isn't so rare, said A. James Fuller, history professor at the University of Indianapolis.

Sometimes, he said, Union soldiers died on their way to prison camp and were buried in the nearest cemetery, alongside the enemy.

Cemeteries exclusively for Confederates were a product of post-war bitterness, he said, and they were set up as monuments to Southern culture. Raleigh's Gettysburg section was created by the Ladies Memorial Association. In 1871, it arranged for 137 bodies -- all of them supposedly from North Carolina -- to be reinterred.

But poor record-keeping was bound to create mistakes. For example, there is no complete roster of Union dead to this day, said Harry Watson, director of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South.

The soldier now known to be Pfeiffer was originally listed as J. Tiffee, Company I of the 40th North Carolina Infantry.

But when Purser checked records of the 40th Infantry, he found no Tiffee.

He did, however, find a George Piper with nearly the same unit who died in the same spot on roughly the same day.

And on many of Piper's rosters, he is listed as Fifer, which looks curiously like Tiffee in the elaborate 19th-century script.

J. Tiffee became George Piper, the name still chiseled on the stone.

It wasn't until a call from Glen Hayes, a frequent partner in New York, that Purser heard about a soldier named Pheiffer from New York being shipped to Raleigh from Gettysburg.

Raleigh's cemetery has no Pheiffer, let alone a Pheiffer from New York.

Purser dug into census records, church records, hospital records and cemetery records and discovered that the only possible man was Jacob Pfeiffer, a German immigrant from the Big Apple.

The date he was shot, the day he died, the company he fought for all matched the man originally thought to be Tiffee.

His name is spelled three ways on three consecutive census reports -- Pfeiffer, Pheiffer and Pfeifer -- but Purser chose the one that occurs most often.

Tiffee became Fifer became Piper became Pfeiffer.

All that remains is to change the stone, which Purser has already ordered and the federal government will provide for free.

You can imagine the sullen New Yorker, dead more than a century, shooting an underground wink to the fellow Yankee further down the row.