Pte. Andrew Wilson Malcolm

Andrew Wilson Malcolm was born at Dunfermline in Fife, Scotland on 6 May 1819. His parents were John Malcolm and Catherine Malcolm (née Wilson) who had married in Dunfermline on 10 September 1803. John was a lawyer who travelled throughout Scotland settling disputes. On 14 July 1842, at the age of 23, Andrew married Jemima Crawford Souter at Killarrow on the Isle of Islay in the Hebrides, Scotland. Their eldest daughter, Marie, was born at Islay in 1846, but their next daughter, who would become famous New Zealand suffragist Kate Sheppard, was born in Liverpool on 10 March 1848, followed by son Francis born in London in 1849. The family is shown as living at Islington East in Middlesex, England, in the 1851 English Census. The following year, on 17 July 1852, Andrew was in New York enlisting in the US Army, his occupation given as ‘clerk’ [U.S. Army, Register of Enlistments, 1798-1914]. He was with the Union Regular Army, US Rifles, G Company. Jemima and their children must have remained in England, as their son Robert was born there in 1853. Records show Andrew re-enlisting at Mesilla in New Mexico, on 24 July 1857. On 12 April 1861 the American Civil War broke out, fought between northern states loyal to the Union and southern states that had seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. The following year, on 26 January 1862, Private Andrew Wilson Malcolm died at Fort Craig at San Antonio in New Mexico, at the age of 42. His cause of death was given as Delirium tremens (DTs), a severe, life-threatening form of alcohol withdrawal. This may have been one of the reasons why Andrew’s daughters Kate Sheppard and Isabella May would later become heavily involved in the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Women's Christian Temperance Union. Established in 1854, Fort Craig was one of the largest and most important US Army frontier forts in the West and played a crucial role in Indian campaigns and the Civil War. Positioned in the Rio Grande Valley in Socorro County, Fort Craig was one of eight strategically positioned forts on the primary road between New Mexico and Mexico. Fort Craig was self-contained, having everything from officers’ quarters, storehouses and horse stables to a hospital, blacksmith’s shop, carpentry shop and sutler’s store selling provisions to the army. For a short time in early 1862, almost 4,000 troops occupied the sprawling stone-and-adobe complex. Reports suggest that life in the Fort was somewhat uncomfortable, with complaints about leaking roofs, crumbling walls and chimneys, crowded conditions and filth from crumbling dirt roofs and muddy floors. After his death at the end of January 1862, Andrew was buried in the Fort Craig cemetery. A document, dated 23 February 1865, shows Jemima in receipt of a US Civil War Pension for her husband Andrew W Malcolm, who served in the 3rd US Cavalry Regiment [U.S., Civil War Pension Index: General Index to Pension Files, 1861-1934]. Four years later, in 1869, Jemima immigrated to New Zealand with her two daughter and two sons, arriving in Lyttelton on 8 February 1869 on board the Matoaka, and joining daughter Marie Beath who had arrived in New Zealand earlier. Jemima died at Addington in Christchurch on 29 June 1881 and was buried in Addington Cemetery. In 2007, following reports of widespread grave-looting, archaeologists with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Fort Craig cemetery in New Mexico, commissioned a ground-penetrating radar study on the cemetery which found 251 coffins with human remains. Archaeologists confirmed widespread evidence of looting and desecration including empty graves and verified that 20 had been looted. Between August and October 2007 federal archaeologists secretly exhumed 67 bodies, the remains of 39 men (some with uniforms still visible), two women and 26 infants or small children. It has not yet been established whether the remains of Andrew Wilson Malcolm were one of the looted graves, one of those exhumed by archaeologists, or if they remain in the soil at Fort Craig. Source: Biography by Debbie McCauley (19 June 2020).

• Name: Andrew W. Malcolm
• Side: Union
• Regiment State/Origin: Union Regular Army
• Regiment: US Rifles (Regular Army)
• Company: G
• Film Number: M233 roll 25
• Died 26 January 1862
• Cause of death: Delirium tremens (DTs)