William Bennett Phipps

On 7 April 1865, five days after he was captured in the trenches outside Petersburg, a Confederate private in the prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland, wrote to the general in charge of prisoners:

“I wish to avail myself of the opportunity of taking the oath of allegiance to the United States Government. If it is required of me to do it again, I was conscripted three years ago by the Confederate Government. I have never violated the oath I then took only under compulsion. I am an Englishman by birth and took the oath of Allegiance to the United States on the 8th day of October 1856 in the county court of Kings, Brooklyn, L.I., and was captured near Petersburg on the 2nd day of April 1865 from Co. C, 44th North Carolina Troops.” — W. B. Phipps, 44th Regt. Co. C

Two days later Lee surrendered at Appomattox, which he had no way of knowing. He was held another ten weeks and released on 16 June 1865 on the oath he had asked for, the second time in his life he swore it.

William Bennett Phipps is Frederic Roger Curtis’s great-grandfather. The line runs from William and his wife Emily to their daughter Emily Josephine, who married Hubert Orestes Curtis; to their son Frederic Arthur Curtis; and to Roger. William died in Chicago in 1898 and Roger was born there in 1928, so the two ends of the chain missed each other by thirty years.

Stratford-upon-Avon

He was baptised at Stratford-upon-Avon on 28 May 1827, “William Bennett, son of John Phipps, upholsterer, and Elizabeth”. His middle name was his mother’s surname, a common English custom: John Phipps had married Elizabeth Bennett at Stratford on 28 February 1826. She was buried on 29 May 1837, aged 32, when William was ten. His father remarried eighteen months later, and that marriage entry names John’s own father, another William Phipps.

Brooklyn and Greenville

His letter from Point Lookout supplies the next part of his life. He became an American citizen in the county court at Brooklyn on 8 October 1856. Five years’ residence was then required for naturalisation, so he had crossed the Atlantic by about 1851, in his early twenties.

By 1860 he was at Greenville, Pitt County, North Carolina, working as an upholsterer like his father, with his wife Emily written in beneath him in the census. Greenville that year held a coach maker, a coach trimmer, an upholsterer and a stage driver, all English and all recently arrived, and a coach-building business is very probably what drew them there.

The war

In 1862 he entered Company C of the 44th North Carolina, signed up in Pitt County “for the War”. He was a private throughout: six roll calls, the cover of his file and his release card all say so, and he answered at every one of those roll calls over two and a half years, never sick, absent or on leave. He was issued clothing in August and November 1864. On 2 April 1865, as the Confederate lines at Petersburg broke, he was taken prisoner.

How he came to serve depends on which paper you read. A card in his file from 1862 records him as a substitute, a man paid to go in the place of someone who had been called up. His letter of 1865 says he was conscripted. The letter was written to the man holding him prisoner, while asking him for a favour, so he had every reason to say he had been forced, which is also no proof that he was not. “Three years ago” is very nearly right: June 1862 to April 1865 is two years and ten months.

The clerk who processed his release wrote down what he looked like: light complexion, greyish hair, dark eyes, five feet eight and three-quarters. No photograph of anyone in this branch from his generation is known.

Chicago

Within five years of the surrender he had left the South. By 1870 he was in Chicago, and he stayed there for the rest of his life, registering to vote in Cook County in 1892. He died in Chicago on 9 March 1898, about seventy, leaving three daughters: Lilian, Emily Josephine and Elizabeth.

His wife appears in every record of her lifetime as Emily Phipps. The fuller name “Emily Eliza Morgan” comes from her daughters’ death certificates, decades after her own death. One was reported by a son-in-law who married into the family four years after she died, and Elizabeth’s, of 1941, gives her mother as “Emily C. Morgan”, born in England, with a middle initial that matches nothing else. The daughters agreed on the surname, but nobody who knew Emily before her marriage wrote it down.

Updated 2026-09-29