Charles Henry Smith (1827–1902)

Charles Henry Smith was a Maine war hero who served as the longest-tenured of the three assistant commissioners of the Freedmen’s Bureau assigned to Arkansas.

Charles Henry Smith was born in Hollis, Maine, on November 1, 1827, to Aaron and Sally Smith. He attended Limerick Academy in Maine and then Waterville College, graduating from the latter in 1856. Smith taught high school at Eastpoint, Maine, and was studying law when the Civil War began in 1861.

Smith became a captain in the First Maine Cavalry and was in most of the major battles of the Army of the Potomac, fighting in sixty-three battles and engagements. He was promoted to major on February 16, 1863, and was then rapidly promoted to lieutenant colonel and finally colonel of the regiment. On August 1, 1864, he was brevetted as brigadier general of volunteers “for distinguished conduct in the engagement at St. Mary’s Church,” a June 24, 1864, fight in Virginia in which he had two horses shot from under him and suffered a severe thigh wound but continued leading his men throughout the battle; he received a Medal of Honor on April 11, 1865, for his actions at St. Mary’s Church. He would later be wounded in the ankle in a fight at Ream’s Station on August 23, 1864.

In October 1864, he commanded a cavalry brigade with which he fought in four separate engagements on October 27. He was wounded at Dinwiddie Courthouse during the 1865 Appomattox Campaign, with a bullet going through his leg and killing his horse. He received a brevet promotion to major general of volunteers on March 13, 1865, “for highly distinguished and meritorious service.” He mustered out of service on August 11, 1865.

Immediately after the war, he served as aide-de-camp to the governor of Maine “to aid in suppressing the Fenian outbreak” and was elected to the state Senate, serving one term before returning to the regular U.S. Army as colonel of the Twenty-eighth Infantry in 1866. He received brevet promotions in the regular army as a brigadier general “for gallant and meritorious service in the battle of Sailor’s Creek, Va.” and as major general “for gallant and meritorious service during the war”—both promotions made on March 2, 1867.

It was during that same month that Smith became the third assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Arkansas, following John W. Sprague and Edward O. C. Ord. Historian Thomas A. DeBlack wrote that “Smith’s twenty-six-month tenure with the Freedmen’s Bureau in Arkansas…was the longest of any of the assistant commissioners, and he guided the bureau during some of the most difficult and troubled times of the Reconstruction era,” dealing with rising political violence, the Ku Klux Klan, failing crops, falling prices for cotton, and efforts by planters to cheat the formerly enslaved people working as tenants on their farms. Smith wrote that “freedmen in many places are still freedmen, not freemen.” His tenure ended in May 1869, two months after he transferred to the Eighteenth U.S. Infantry.

Smith married Mary R. L. Livermore; they had a son and a daughter.

He retired as colonel of the Eighteenth Infantry on November 1, 1891, and lived in Washington DC, where he died on July 17, 1902. He is buried in Section 1, Grave 128-A in Arlington National Cemetery.

For additional information:
“Charles Henry Smith.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/5845779/charles-henry-smith (accessed October 10, 2025).

DeBlack, Thomas. With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861–1874. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003.

Finley, Randy. From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: The Freedmen’s Bureau in Arkansas, 1865–1869. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996.

“General Smith to Be Buried at Arlington.” [Washington, D.C.] Times Herald, July 19, 1902, p. 2.

Moneyhon, Carl. The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas