Dr. R. M. Swearingen was a descendant of Garret van Sweringen, a native of Holland, who in his early youth entered the service of the Dutch West India Company, and whose duties as an employee of the company brought him in 1657, when he was only twenty years of age, to New Amsterdam. After van Sweringen's arrival, he gave up his place with the company, and a little later he settled at New Amstel (New Castle.) After the English conquest of the Dutch settlements in that quarter, he moved to Maryland. 93 Samuel Swearingen, grandson of Gerret v. Sweringen, migrated from Maryland to North Carolina. Samuel's son Frederick moved from North Carolina to Alabama, and Frederick's son, Richard J., moved thence first to Mississippi, and then to Texas. Richard J.'s son, Richard M., is the subject of this paper.
Richard Montgomery Swearingen was born in Noxubee County, Mississippi, September 26, 1838. In 1848 his father moved, as already noted, to Texas and settled in Washington County. Such general literary and scientific training as Richard had from schools was obtained at Chappell Hill College, Chappell Hill, Texas, and from Centenary College, Jackson, Louisiana. He attended Centenary College during the year 1857-1858, and up till December, 1858, when he was called home by the serious illness of his mother. On account of her death in January, 1859, he remained at home the rest of the year. The next fall he went to the New Orleans Medical College, where he attended lectures during the session 1859-1860. His return to the same institution for another year's work was prevented by the excitement then prevailing throughout the South over the prospect of secession. This movement he opposed as effectively as he could; but when the ordinance was adoptd by the people of Texas he felt it his duty to go with his state.
Young Swearingen volunteered in response to the first call for Texas troops. February 28, 1861, he joined Captain Ed. Waller's company at Galveston and was sent to Brownsville. After remaining there six months, during two of which he lay ill with a fever, he was discharged and returned to Chappell Hill. He had been back only a short time, when he received a commission to raise a company; but while he was engaged in the effort he learned that his younger brother, who was with the Confederate troops at Cumberland Gap, was sick and needing attention. On hearing the news, he went thither at once, enlisted as a substitute for his brother, and sent him home.
The day after his arrival in camp, his company was sent on a scouting expedition into the edge of Tennessee; and, though he was at the time quite ill with pneumonia, he went along. At evening the second day, the company reached Sneedville, Tennessee, and the surgeon ordered Swearingen to seek shelter for himself. He went to the hotel, but found its accommodations already exhausted. He then went out into the village to look for quarters at a private residence. Attracted by the sound of a piano, he entered the house whence it came, and was heartily welcomed and given the attention he was needing. The home into which the young soldier had wandered was that of Mr. Lea Jessee. He remained there a month, during which time he was nursed back to health and strength by Miss Jennie Jessee, the daughter of his host; and the romance culminated in their marriage in the fall of 1864.
Shortly after Swearingen had relieved his brother, the Tennessee company which he had joined was reorganized, and he was elected first lieutenant. His fitness for promotion was soon tested. In the summer of 1862 his battalion was sent on a scouting expedition in the neighborhood of Cumberland Gap, and he was put in command of the advanced guard, a detachment only six in number. On June 12, as he was riding along with his little party, he found the way blocked by a handful of Federals. He opened fire on them, but immediately he observed a large body of troops hurrying to cut him off from his battalion, then some distance further back on the road he had come. He gave the order to retreat, and he and his men dashed off at full gallop. As they passed they received the fire of a whole regiment which had halted in line parallel to the road and within twenty paces, and they had to ride six hundred yards before they reached shelter. Lieutenant Swearingen's horse was shot and brought to his knees, but regained his feet and carried his rider out of danger. In spite of the concentrated fire, only one man of the party was struck, and he was not killed.
During the fall of 1862, when the Confederate forces under General Bragg advanced into Kentucky, Lieutenant Swearingen's brigade participated in the movement, and he had his full share of marching and fighting. A brief and general account of his experiences during that campaign written by himself many years afterward, but with such characteristic modesty as evidently to conceal much that one would like to know, gives, when read between the lines, a vivid impression of what peril and suffering he must have had to undergo. He did not, however, participate in the battle of Perryville, for the reason that his brigade was engaged at the time with a division on the left of Buell's main army, and some ten or fifteen miles away.
On December 15, 1862, Lieutenant Swearingen was promoted to the captaincy of his company. Soon afterwards he took part in the battle of Murfreesboro. The night before the battle he was very ill—so ill, indeed, that the officers of his company concealed from him orders that had been received to march during the night, and the whole body stole away in the early morning without notifying him. When the fighting began, however, he made his way first to a hospital where the wounded were receiving attention and where he gave such help as he could, and then to the field. On the second day of the battle he succeeded in finding his company once more. That day, in obedience to orders from General Hardee, he led a detail of thirty men in a perilous charge to ascertain the exact location and strength of a body of Federal troops stationed in a clump of trees a half mile in front of the Confederate left wing, which he accomplished to Hardee's entire satisfaction.
Captain Swearingen's narrative covers only a few days subsequent to the battle of Murfreesboro, and for a detailed account of the rest of his war experiences I have no materials available. Suffice it to say that he was with Joseph E. Johnston in the retreat through Georgia, and later in North Carolina, and that he remained in service till the war was over.
On one occasion during the course of the operations in which Captain Swearingen's company was engaged in East Tennessee, as it approached Hume's Ferry on the Tennessee River above the town of Loudon, information was received to the effect that a band of bushwhackers was in waiting to contest the passage. The company had to cross by a ford which was about one hundred and fifty yards wide, where the current was swift, and the extreme depth of the water was from four to five feet. The bushwhackers were known to be good shots, and the bank towards which the crossing must be made, and where they were supposed to be concealed, was steep and heavily timbered and an excellent place for a force to lie in ambuscade. The danger of the crossing was evident; and, when the company reached the ford, Captain Swearingen called for volunteers to lead the way and draw the fire of the enemy, but none responded. Thereupon he gave some directions to his first lieutenant, 94 bade his men goodbye, turned his horse, and rode into the stream alone. In a moment or two, hearing a great noise behind him, he looked back and found the whole company was following. It proved that the alarm was false, and that there was no enemy in wait; but this happy issue of the affair had been foreseen neither by Captain Swearingen nor by his men, and it was none the less a supreme test of his soldierly manhood, as well as of their own.
September 12, 1864, Captain Swearingen was married to Miss Jessee. Ten days later he was captured at the home of her father in Sneedville by a party of bushwhackers. He was kept a prisoner in their camp for weeks, with the prospect of death before him unless he could procure a money ransom. His wife meanwhile sought to effect his release by exchanging for him some of the bushwhackers who had been captured by the Confederate troops. Accompanied only by her little brother, she undertook toilsome and perilous journeys on foot to the Confederate camp in order to get assistance from the officers in accomplishing her object. Twice she reached the spot where the camp had been located, only to learn that it was moved. Finally she went to her husband himself, but after a short interview she was forced to leave him in the hands of his captors. 95 Every means of saving his life had now apparently been exhausted, and the day for his execution was appointed; but it may have been that this was intended only as the final test of the resources of his friends. At any rate, the captain of the gang, who was under strong personal obligations to Mr. Jessee, instead of carrying out the sentence, himself escorted Captain Swearingen safely to the home of his wife.
When the war was over, after a little exciting experience as a schoolteacher in West Virginia, Captain Swearingen returned to his old home at Chappell Hill, Texas. Taking up again the thread of his normal life where it had been broken off in 1860, he resumed his work at the New Orleans Medical College and finished his course there in 1867.
The professional knowledge and skill of the young physician were immediately put to the test by one of those calls which he was always quick to heed for their employment in the service of humanity. The occasion referred to was the spread of yellow fever through southeast Texas in the summer of 1867. On the outbreak of the disease in Chappell Hill, Dr. Swearingen at once threw himself into the struggle against it with exhaustless courage and energy. He and his wife and their baby daughter were all stricken with the fever, and the little one died, but the father and mother recovered.
Eleven years later Dr. Swearingen answered an appeal for like humanitarian service in another state. Meanwhile—in 1875—he had moved to Austin. In the fall of 1878, when the yellow fever was raging in Memphis and in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and there was a call for medical assistance, he immediately volunteered, and with him went another physician from Austin, Dr. T. D. Manning. Because the necessity of Holly Springs seemed greatest, they went there. In seventeen days from the time they left home, Dr. Manning died of the fever, but Dr. Swearingen continued at his post until the plague was over. What feelings towards him this inspired among the people of Holly Springs may be inferred from the expression of the local paper of the town, which said that, while not intending to single out as pre-eminent for service and self-sacrifice any one among those who had come to the help of the town, “a common sense of justice impels us to give to the world the name of Dr. R. M. Swearingen, who for measureless energy and conspicuous devotion to his sick is facile princeps.”
One result of the epidemic of 1878 was the appointment by President Hayes, in pursuance of action taken by Congress, of a commission of nine experts to investigate and report on the subject of epidemics. Dr. Swearingen was a member of this commission. The outcome of its report was the creation of the National Board of Health, which was later merged in the Marine Hospital Bureau.
In 1881 Dr. Swearingen was appointed state health officer of Texas, and with the exception of the four years 1887-1891 he held the position till his death. In the discharge of his official duties, his courage, tact, and patience were often severely tested, but he was always equal to the emergency. In spite of the fact that he frequently had to resist the popular impulse, he attracted and held popular commendation with rare success.
Not the least of Dr. Swearingen's public services was his activity in organizing the public schools of the city of Austin. He was for many years an active and efficient member of the board of public school trustees, being for most of the time its president.
Dr. Swearingen died of Bright's disease, August 9, 1898. He had been for years a sufferer from this malady; but, knowing its nature as he did, he had been able to keep it in check. In his anxiety, however, to guard the interests of the state during the epidemic of yellow fever in 1897, he neglected his own health and thus shortened his life.
Though the subject lends itself to such treatment, this is no eulogy. It is intended rather as a plain, uncolored account of a life which the writer believes to be a genuine historical influence. Because he so believes, he has undertaken to prepare this brief sketch, doing it in the hope that it may assist some reader the better to understand the generation which was at once the mold, and also bears the permanent impress of that life.
93. In John Bennett's Barnaby Lee, which first appeared as a serial in St. Nicholas and was afterwards issued in book form by the Century Company, Gerret van Sweringen is one of the most important characters. How faithful the portrait of him there may be, it would be difficult to judge; but it is in some respects at least well drawn.
94. This was S. M. Inman, afterwards a member of the well-known firm of S. M. Inman &Co., of Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Inman is yet living, and this account is based mainly on letters written by himself.
95. Whether anything was done to raise the money needed for a ransom the available accounts do not show. Under the circumstances, that was doubtless impossible.
How to cite:
Garrison, George P., "RICHARD MONTGOMERY SWEARINGEN ", Volume 008, Number 3, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online, Page 225 - 231. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/publications/journals/shq/online/v008/n3/article_2.html
[Accessed Mon Dec 1 23:50:25 CST 2008]
