b. 12/05/1836 Draperstown, Ireland. d. 08/08/1905 Washington DC
DATE OF MOH ACTION: 12/05/1864 Spotsylvania, Virginia.
Charles McAnally MOH
Charles McAnally was born in Ireland in 1836. He emigrated to the United States in 1852. Charles McAnally became one of the early responders to the call by United States President Abraham Lincoln for volunteers to help defend Washington, D.C., following the mid-April 1861 fall of Fort Sumter to troops from the Confederate States Army. After enrolling for military service in Philadelphia during the summer of 1861, he then officially mustered in there as a captain with Company D of the 69th Pennsylvania Infantry on August 1, 1861.
In 1864, while fighting as a first lieutenant with the 69th Pennsylvania and other Union Army troops in the Battle of Spottsylvania Court House, he performed the acts of valor which would ultimately result in his being awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor. On May 12, he was “[c]ut in head, shot [in the] left shoulder; also through right leg, knee and head” while capturing the enemy flag from Confederate States Army soldiers during hand-to-hand combat.
In late October of that same year, McAnally led members of his regiment and others from the 106th Pennsylvania Infantry in an assault upon Confederate troops in order to silence a CSA artillery battery during the Battle of Boydton Plank Road.
After the war, McAnally married on August 24, 1871, in Burleson County, Texas, to widow Frances ‘Fanny’ Veach, and purchased farmland in Lee County, Texas. He married a second time on December 18, 1882, in Travis County, Texas, to widow Julia Hofheintz and lived for some time in the city of Austin, Texas. He had one known child, a daughter, born in February 1880 in Texas.
During the 1890s, McAnally was admitted to the network of National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Admitted on March 5, 1896, to the Southern Branch home in Elizabeth City, Virginia, he was enumerated by a federal census taker in 1900 as a resident of that home who had been confined as an inmate at Fort Monroe.
Hospital records for this period noted that, on March 13, 1905, he was “Dropped/demanding discharges while under sentence”. Those military hospital records also noted that he was a 60-year-old farmer and widower who was 5′ 7-1/2″ tall with grey hair, blue eyes and a light complexion, and that his residence subject to discharge was Philadelphia, and confirmed that he had sustained a gunshot wound of the left shoulder during the fighting at Spotsylvania in 1864. Hospitalized in late July 1905 due to heart disease, McAnally died in the asylum hospital in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1905.
MOH CITATION:
In a hand-to-hand encounter with the enemy captured flag, was wounded in the act, but continued on duty until he received a second wound.
BURIAL LOCATION: UNKNOWN.
LOCATION OF MEDAL: UNKNOWN.