A Rebel to the End
by Bob Brail

            On September 28, 1921, William Harvey Matson, a veteran of the Civil War, died at his home in Matson.  A few days later he was buried next to his wife and son in the Hickory Grove Township Cemetery in eastern Warren County.  Before his body was placed in its coffin, family members clothed him in his sixty year old Confederate uniform.  Matson was truly a Rebel to the end.

            
             Born in Missouri on September 21, 1840, to slave-owning parents from the South, William H. Matson attended school in St. Charles County, except for a brief time at a German school in Franklin County.  When the war broke out, Matson was helping his father run their family farm near what is now the small town of Matson in southern St. Charles County. 

            William Matson’s involvement in the Civil War began with a brief stint in a cavalry company, but after a few weeks he enlisted as a private in H. M. Bledsoe’s Company of the Missouri Light Artillery in June of 1861.  Matson would serve with this unit for the duration of the war.  This artillery unit was part of the First Missouri Brigade, whose combat record, according to Civil War historian Ed Bearrs, “is more distinguished than that exhibited by the better publicized Stonewall and Iron Brigades.”  Matson fought in all the major battles of the war’s western theater, including Wilson Creek, Lexington, Pea Ridge, Iuka, Corinth, Port Gibson, and Vicksburg.  Bledsoe’s Company was part of General John Hood’s army in Tennessee in 1864 and fought at Franklin.  In the retreat from Franklin, Matson and his comrades fought a delaying action at Hollow Tree Gap on December 17.  Bledsoe unlimbered his guns on the Franklin Pike and repulsed a charge of Union cavalry.  Later Matson saw combat across Georgia, from Chickamauga to Atlanta.  Finally Bledsoe’s Company was surrendered as part of General Joseph Johnston’s armies at Greensboro, North Carolina, on May 4, 1865.  William H. Matson had served nearly four years.  It is remarkable that he was not seriously wounded, but he must have suffered hearing loss from such prolonged exposure to artillery explosions.

            After the war, William H. Matson returned to rural St. Charles County and farmed.  He married nineteen year old Leveria A. Webb on April 5, 1866, less than a year after returning from the war.  In 1869, Matson’s father, Abraham S. Matson, deeded the family’s farm to William and his brother, in an attempt to avoid losing the farm to his creditors.  Abraham Matson had lost money in several business ventures and the railroad had stopped using his stockyard to deliver cattle.  In the late 1870’s, Abraham Matson’s creditors tried to take the farm from William, but they were not successful. 

            Matson and his wife had only one child, William Shobe, who was born in 1868.  This boy, who years later would be remembered as “bright and promising,” barely reached his thirteenth birthday before dying in 1881.  For reasons that are not known, the Matsons buried their only child in neighboring Warren County, near Foristell, in what is now called Hickory Grove Cemetery, where both William H. and Leveria would later be buried, even though the Matson Burying Ground was available.  The parents expressed their deeply felt grief with these words on William Shobe’s headstone: “He was our only boy priceless, more precious than the gush of joy.”

         

            According to an article written in 1975, Matson “was a stingy sort of man” who produced “only what he and the people on his farm needed.”  However, his involvement in local civic affairs indicates a desire to serve his community.  For example, Matson, a Democrat, worked as an election judge at the August Wine Hall in both 1890 and 1892.  In 1894, he lost the election for justice of the peace in Femme Osage Township, but in a later election won the post.  He also served as a petit (trial) juror in 1884 and as a grand juror for Femme Osage Township of St. Charles County Court in 1895.  A description of William and Leveria Matson, written around 1900 while both were still living is very complimentary: “Mr. and Mrs. Matson have a host of sincere friends, whom they have won by their upright and conscientious lives, and by their genial and open-hearted hospitality.”

            By 1900, William H. Matson had purchased additional acreage and owned nearly six hundred acres north, west, and south of the town of Matson.  Every federal census from 1870 through 1910 lists the Matsons living in Femme Osage Township.  By 1920 William H. was widowed, his wife having died the previous year, but not alone, for both his sister-in-law, Sally Painter, and an African American servant girl, Golda Mosley, lived with him.  Matson was still farming at the age of eighty. 

            William H. Matson remained loyal to the Confederacy throughout his life.  He attended at least three reunions of Confederate veterans, one in Sedalia in 1882, one in Jefferson City in 1883, and another in Lexington in 1911.  In 1920, near the end of his life, Matson wrote a letter to the Confederate Veteran, a national magazine for the former soldiers of the South which was published until 1942.  In a previous issue, a Union veteran had submitted a letter which maintained that Bledsoe’s Battery, Matson’s old outfit, had been captured in May, 1863.  One can almost hear the anger in Matson’s response to this letter: “I was a member of Bledsoe’s famous battery from start to finish. . . . We were never captured during the war. . . . We were in all of the engagements around Corinth, Holly Springs, Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, from Dalton to Atlanta; then we were at Franklin, which was the hardest-fought battle of which we have any history since the world began.  I was exceedingly lucky.  I was never captured . . . and never wounded.  Mr. Catron, Watt Anderson, and Rice Wood were lieutenants in our battery, and if alive they will back me up in all I say.  Your Yankee contributor is mistaken all the way through. . . . I am almost eighty years old and will continue taking the VETERAN as long as I live, but I won’t read a Yankee history.”  It should not be surprising that such a man would choose to be buried in his Confederate uniform a year later.

            Missouri was a divided state during the Civil War, and the service records of the soldiers of southern St. Charles County reflect that fact.  Although many of his neighbors fought for the Union, William Harvey Matson, a lifelong resident of the area, volunteered his services to the Confederacy at the start of the war and faithfully served to the end.   

Sources: “1911 Lexington Missouri Confederate Reunion” (oocities.org/mosouthron/partisans /lex1911.html).  AncestryLibrary.com; Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (itd.nps.gov/cwss/soldiers); The Confederate Veteran (August, 1920); “The Early Years of Matson,” St. Charles Journal, 1975 (Mark Knoblauch); “Conclusion of the American Civil War” (wikipedia.org); United States Census (1860-1920); Genealogical Records (Mary Johnson McElhiney);  A History of Augusta, Missouri, and Its Area As Reported in the St. Charles Demokrat (Anita Mallinckrodt); Memoirs: Historical and Personal; Including the Campaigns of the First Missouri Brigade (Ephraim M. Anderson); Memoirs, etc., Foreword (Edwin Bearrs); Missouri Death Certificates (sos.mo.gov/archives);  Portrait and Biographical Record of St. Charles, Lincoln, and Warren Counties, Missouri;  St. Charles County Atlas – 1905;  Western Reporter . . . (http://books.google.com/books).