Goodrich – Jim Pless will be among Michigan residents honoring Civil War ancestors this Memorial Day.
Unlike many northerners, the Goodrich resident and businessman will remember a Civil War soldier who fought for the South: his great-grandfather, James Monroe Pless.
To the Pless family, fighting in the Confederate Army wasn’t an issue of slavery, nor of secession. The family didn’t own slaves. Nor did they benefit from the use or trade of slaves.
In those days, says Jim, it was a matter of conscription. Either sign up and earn a bonus and vacation time, or be forced to fight.
But it was mostly a matter of defending one’s homeland, which was being invaded.
Jim heard stories from his father about J.M. Pless, who came up missing during the Civil War.
The discovery that his great-grandfather was among those buried at the Confederate Tomb in Chicago sparked the search.
‘In 1961 my father found James Monroe Pless was buried with the Alabama 34th in Chicago,? said Jim. ‘I thought, I have to find out where that unit went.?
Born in Georgia in 1830, J.M. Pless moved to Alabama after marrying Jim’s great-grandmother, Lucinda Jane Boone in 1853.
He joined the Confederate Army in 1862 after his brother’also a Confederate soldier’was home on leave.
Coming from a family of cotton share-croppers, J.M. Pless is believed to never have learned to read or write, and left no letters explaining his whereabouts.
Leaving five children behind’including his youngest daughter whom his wife became pregnant with after he was home on leave’J.M. Pless joined the Alabama 34th Infantry Regiment.
According to enlistment documentation, J.M. left by train for Tupelo, Miss., before heading to Nashville, Tenn.for military training.
J.M. Pless served in two major Kentucky battles in Harrisburg and Perrysville, in which an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 men died on each side.
Union forces followed the troops to Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tenn., where they reorganized before fighting what the Confederates called the Battle of Stone’s River, also known as the Battle of Murfreesboro, in Tennessee.
J.M. Pless is believed to have been captured on the Chickamauga battlefield before being taken to Rossville, Ga., and along the Tennessee River to the military holding area of the Nashville penitentiary.
He was then taken to a military prison in Louisville, Ky. to be part of a prisoner-exchange program.
The prejudice of Confederate President Jefferson Davis led to the untimely death of some of his own men, says Jim, when Davis refused to allow white prisoners to be exchanged for black prisoners.
Already sick, J.M. Pless was sent to Chicago’s Camp Douglas, where he died of chronic dysentery in 1863 and buried in Potter’s Field among ‘derelicts?, says his great-grandson.
Never knowing why he didn’t return, his wife sometimes despaired at raising five children on her own.
Her great-grandson Jim, now 76, moved to Michigan to find work after serving in the U.S. Air Force in the 1940s.
Learning of his great-grandfather’s burial site, he wanted to visit the Confederate Tomb with his parents, who decided against the trip because of his mother’s health.
‘I regret it tremendously,? said Jim, whose documentation began in earnest when Confederate Tomb employees in Chicago wouldn’t help locate a list.
‘I went into a slow boil and said, OK, there will be a database.?
By the time he was finished, Jim had checked and double-checked the information of 4,275 Confederate soldiers known to be buried at the site.
His research’some of which is so unique it’s copyrighted’is compiled in two books, ‘James Monroe Pless Traced? and ‘The Roster: Confederate Comrades of Private James Monroe Pless.?
He was ‘lost? for a year while typing, finding genealogy a full-time job.
Along the way, he’s found evidence of the maternal Henderson family line. It may lead to research for another book.
War, says Jim, is mean and brutal. Soldiers, both Union and Confederate, were sometimes kept enlisted at gunpoint; shot for desertion. It was a time when both sides did what had to be done. Sometimes, it meant the loss of fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers, all trying to do the right thing.
To him, the Confederate flag isn’t a symbol of rebellion. It’s all in the attitude, he says.
Jim relishes the stories he’s found of soldiers from both sides swimming to the middle of the Tennessee River to trade tobacco, getting along so well their commanding officers put a stop to the camaraderie.
Although J.M. Pless was buried without any semblance of respect, his life’and death’are considered honorable by his family.
Jim gathered the Pless family in a special memorial ceremony in honor of his great-grandfather in Dadeville, Ala. on Nov. 4, 2000, 137 years after his burial.
The City of Dadeville also passed a proclamation in 2002 declaring Aug. 3 a day to honor the memory of J.M. and Lucinda Pless.