Moses Higgins: A Face from Home
Moses Higgins: A Face from Home
In the middle of the Civil War, far from Illinois, my great-grandfather John Newton Prentice recorded a small but meaningful moment in his 1862 diary. On July 19, while camped in Mississippi with the 57th Illinois Infantry, he wrote: “Discovered Moses Higgins to be in our Regiment for the first time.”
Moses G. Higgins was a private in Company C, from Elmwood, Illinois. John was in Company A. They had not crossed paths earlier in their service. Finding a man from home, standing among the ranks of strangers, brought a quiet kind of joy. In a place where the war felt endless and home felt very far away, that recognition mattered.
The camps around Corinth were hard. Good water was scarce. John noted in August that it was nearly impossible to get plenty of clean water. Sickness moved through the regiment steadily. Disease took more men from the 57th than battle wounds. In December, John began recording Moses’s decline:
- December 13: “Moses Higgins is quite unwell.”
- December 14: “Moses Higgins is very sick and gone to the hospital.”
- December 16: “Moses Higgins is better this morning.”
The improvement did not last. Moses died on January 14, 1863, at Corinth, Mississippi, of dropsy brought on by heart disease. He was buried in Corinth National Cemetery. John had watched a man from home grow ill and die in the same hard conditions that affected so many others.
These brief diary lines are the only personal record that remains of Moses Higgins. They show the simple human weight of the war: the unexpected comfort of finding someone from home, and then the quiet loss of that same man. No grand heroics, just two Illinois soldiers who crossed paths for a short time in a difficult place.
I wrote a song from John’s perspective about that meeting and the goodbye that followed. It is called “Moses Higgins.” You can listen to it here:
The song is meant to carry that small story forward — the joy of recognition, the hardness of the camps, and the farewell to a man who was, for a little while, a piece of home in a foreign land.