ALEXANDER BUCHANAN – 96th INFANTRYDISMISSED IN 1864 - The 96th Infantry organized in Plattsburgh. They started recruiting for the regiment in late 1861 and left the state for Washington on March 11, 1862. Seventy-two men from the Mooers area enlisted during that recruitment – 9 of them died while they were in the military.Alexander Buchanan, the eldest son of Irish immigrants, Richard Buchanan and Isabel Alexander, enlisted on October 26, 1861, in Mooers. He was mustered in as a sergeant when he was 23 years old on November 17th. He was in the battlefield at the Siege of Yorktown on the Virginia Peninsula just a few weeks after they arrived in the capital. The 96th fought their way up the peninsula until July 2nd, the last of the Seven Days’ Battle at Carter’s Hill. In December they were transferred to the Department of North Carolina and stayed in that state until the end of 1863. During the summer of 1863, Alexander was promoted to 2nd lieutenant and on December 9th, he was promoted to 1st lieutenant.In the spring of 1864, the regiment was in the field in the Petersburg/Richmond are and were in some of the major battles of the war – Drewry’s Bluff, Bermuda Hundred, Cold Harbor and the 3-day Battle of Chaffin’s Farm at the end of September. On October 14, 1864, Alexander was dismissed from the Army by a sentence given by a General Court Martial.He returned home to Mooers and Daisy McConnell, his wife. They had several children and, for a while, lived in Colorado in the 1880s. They returned to Mooers, and Alexander died there in 1910 after receiving a pension for 30 years. His wife received a Widow’s Pension until she died in 1921. Both are buried in the Riverside Cemetery in the village of Mooers.
