Edward Wild

Featured Character – 1863


Edward Wild

Edward Wild

Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress


Born on November 25, 1865 to a homeopathic doctor, Edward Augustus Wild graduated from Harvard in 1844.  Two years later, he received his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College.  During the Crimean War, Wild, under the name Kholorissy Bey, served as a surgeon in the Ottoman Army.  At the start of the Civil War, Wild raised a company of volunteers.  Commissioned as a captain, Wild served in the 1st Massachusetts Infantry.  He received a severe wound in the hand at Fair Oaks, Virginia, and then lost his left arm at the Battle of South Mountain, Maryland.  A devout abolitionist, Wild returned to Massachusetts to help recruit two new black regiments, the famed 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry.  Promoted to brigadier-general, he assumed command of “Wild’s African Brigade,” which consisted of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, the 2nd North Carolina Colored Volunteers, and the 3rd North Carolina Colored Volunteers. 

After forays into southeastern Virginia, Wild launched a major raid of northeastern North Carolina during the winter of 1863.  Designed to root out Confederate guerrillas and deprive southern sympathizers of their slave labor, Wild brought the “heavy hand of war” to coastal North Carolina.  He freed over two-thousand five-hundred slaves, destroyed rebel camps, and executed Confederate guerrilla Daniel Bright.  Although Confederate newspapers and officials labeled Wild as a “terror,” the Union rewarded him with overall command of the Department of Norfolk on January 18, 1864.  In that capacity, Wild directed troops during the Battle of Wilson’s Wharf, Virginia and the Petersburg Campaign.  Although relieved from duty for refusing to dismiss his brigade quartermaster, a court-martial found Wild not guilty.  Resuming command, Wild’s black troops triumphantly marched into Richmond after the Confederate evacuation.  He later oversaw the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia.  Mustered out of service on January 16, 1866, Wild became a mining engineer, working in Nevada and California.  While surveying the route of a new railroad, Edward Augustus Wild died on August 28, 1891 in Medellin, Columbia.