P.B. Stanard’s Path to Third Corps Ordnance Officer

TOCWOC Editor’s Note: This one grew out of a research project I’ve been working through for The Siege of Petersburg Online, cataloging the ordnance officers of the Army of Northern Virginia one Compiled Military Service Record at a time. Philip Beverley Stanard was the Third Corps’ Chief Ordnance Officer under A.P. Hill from 1863 to Appomattox. What his own service record adds is an earlier chapter that doesn’t show up in the standard references. It is a good one, so I wanted to find a way to tell the tale.

Philip Beverley Stanard was born February 2, 1835, in Spotsylvania County. When Virginia left the Union in the spring of 1861, he didn’t go straight into ordnance work. Instead, he went to Richmond and organized an artillery battery. The Thomas Light Artillery was raised there in early May 1861 for one year’s service. An index card in Stanard’s own service record suggests the specific date was May 2, and the company initially armed itself with four 6-pounder smoothbore field guns. Stanard stepped in as captain, with Charles H. Thornton as first lieutenant, and Edgar Macon as second lieutenant¹. It numbered around seventy men by the following June, but got into the fight early². A quartermaster’s receipt from July 2, 1861, the earliest document in his file, already has him signing as “Philip B. Stanard, Capt., Thos. Artillery,” the battery’s shorthand name from almost its first week³.

Stanard’s Richmond Thomas Light Artillery used 4 6-lb guns similar to this model located at Antietam National Battlefield. The guns were obsolete by the Civil War.

In July 1861, the battery moved by rail to Strasburg and marched on to Winchester, where it was assigned to Brig. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith’s Fifth Brigade, Army of the Shenandoah, and posted along Red Bud Run. On July 21, the Thomas Artillery supported Jackson’s men at First Manassas. The intense tactical reality of that initial engagement is documented in the Official Records, where the friction of combat cost the battery its second lieutenant. Edgar Macon was killed in action that day, marking one of the battery’s first permanent losses of the war⁴. Eight days later, the paperwork of army life resumed regardless. On July 29–August 1, 1861, Stanard requisitioned forage for forty horses at Manassas, a mundane errand carried out in the immediate aftermath of the battle⁵. By that October, a separate requisition shows the battery drawing 120 blank cartridges for a “James” 12-pounder rifle gun. This was an attempt to modify the obsolete 6 lb smoothbores to fire rifled 12 lb James shells.  It is unclear if one or more of the 4 6-lb guns were converted in this way in an attempt to upgrade the battery’s capabilities.⁶.

Stanard’s wartime service is summarized on page 143 of his CSR file.

Stanard’s own Compiled Military Service Record (CMSR) fills in what came next, and it isn’t the stuff of battle reports. Through the spring of 1862, a run of provision returns (Form 14 in the Confederate organizational structure) shows him signing for rations for his company at entrenchment lines identified only as “Breast Works,” and, separately, for the sick of his command at Lebanon Church. This involved seventy-some men for three to six days at a time, reflecting the ordinary bookkeeping of an army in camp. One return, dated April 21–23, 1862, carries a note from an assistant surgeon insisting that a molasses ration was necessary to the health of the men, which is as close as these administrative documents get to a complaint⁷. A separate slip shows Stanard applying for two weeks’ leave that spring; it was withdrawn May 23, 1862, and apparently never taken⁸.

The battery was in the thick of the Seven Days Battles that followed, engaged at Gaines’s Mill on June 26 and at Frayser’s Farm on June 30, assigned by that point to Wilcox’s Brigade, Wilcox’s Division, in Longstreet’s command⁹. And then, abruptly, Stanard’s own war changed direction. On July 29, 1862, he was appointed captain and ordnance officer to Maj. Gen. A.P. Hill, who was then commanding the “Light Division”¹⁰. The very next day, July 30, his own first lieutenant, Edwin J. Anderson, was promoted to captain and took over the battery. Stanard stepped out of line command, and the man who had been serving under him stepped up to fill the vacancy. His pay voucher for October 31-November 30, 1862, is the first in his file to carry the annotation “On ordnance duty”¹¹.

The Thomas Light Artillery carried on under Anderson for a short time, but the structural realities of the army soon caught up with it. By October 1862, as documented in Lee A. Wallace’s Guide to Virginia Military Organizations, the unit was officially disbanded¹². Its men and remaining materiel were folded into the Hampden Light Artillery, another Richmond battery, a process further detailed in Robert H. Moore II’s extensive regimental history of several Richmond artillery units¹³. That kind of consolidation was a tactical necessity as the army reorganized its artillery in the war’s second year; small, understrength batteries got absorbed into others rather than kept on the rolls at half capacity or with poor quality and obsolete weapons.

Stanard, meanwhile, built the rest of his career in ordnance. His correspondence still carries the “Light Division” designation as late as June 2, 1863, when he sold two pairs of spurs out of his own ordnance stores at Camp Gregg for eight dollars, still signing as “Capt. & Ord. Officer, Light Division.” This helps date exactly when the army’s shorthand caught up with its new Third Corps organization following Chancellorsville¹⁴. The clearest marker comes just two weeks later, in a June 17, 1863, letter Col. Josiah Gorgas wrote to Secretary of War James Seddon, recommending a slate of ordnance officers for promotion. Gorgas named him directly: “Captain P.B. Stanard, Chief of Ord. of the 3rd Army Corps, to be Major”¹⁵.

From there, the record shows him running the relentless business of a corps ordnance office straight through the grinding logistics of the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign. He was tasked with chasing lost paperwork, pricing swords, and moving thousands of cartridge boxes and cap pouches at a time through the Richmond Arsenal to supply the trench lines. He was granted fifteen days’ leave in December 1864, before returning to manage the final, crumbling supply chains of the Third Corps. When the end came in April 1865, Stanard was present at the surrender, signing his Appomattox parole formally as “P. B. Stanard, Maj. and Ch’f Ord. Officer, 3d Corps, A. N. V.”¹⁶.

Stanard is probably more “well-known” for being the Chief of Ordnance, Third Corps than for his earlier work as commander of a relatively short-lived battery.  But it’s a reminder that a CMSR built around one man’s later staff assignment can still carry an earlier unit’s operational story inside it. In this case, that story belongs to a battery that existed for a year and a half, fought at First Manassas and the Seven Days, and then quietly folded into another command the same week its captain moved on to a different kind of war.

After the surrender at Appomattox, Stanard’s civilian life was relatively brief. He died on March 6, 1878, at the age of forty-three, and is buried in the Goshen Baptist Church Cemetery in Rockbridge County, Virginia¹⁷. While modern genealogical databases and cemetery transcriptions frequently misspell his middle name as “Beverly,” the wartime administrative paper trail remains consistent with the “ey” spelling. For researchers tracking the veterans of the Third Corps, his gravesite serves as the final physical marker for an officer who transitioned from the tactical front lines of 1861 to the vital, grinding logistical machinery that struggled to keep the Army of Northern Virginia in the field through to the very end.

Philip B. Stanard’s Full Service History

Compiled from Robert E. L. Krick, Staff Officers in Gray (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003) and Stanard’s own CMSR at Fold3.com

Unfortunately I could find no image of P. B. Stanard.  Some online have mistaken his son’s photo from the 1890s for the elder Stanard.  If you know of an image, please comment here.

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