(Click on the Bold Underlined sections. They are links.)

       A while back, I became a little confused. I was driving down one of the side roads in my home town of Cheshire, CT., and I noticed a sign which said “Medal of Honor Recipient” in a local cemetery. Being a veteran myself (as well as a History major in college), I am intrigued by Medal of Honor winners and I decided to take a look. It turns out that he (Eri Davidson) was awarded the Medal of Honor because he captured a Confederate flag at Cedar Creek, VA., on 19 October 1864. He received the medal before it bore the significance that it possesses today, but that is an entirely different story (Read the fourth paragraph in the remarks section by clicking here).

       Well, this got me wondering. Walter Van Rensselaer had done the same thing at Gettysburg. I sent an email to Seward Osborne, the expert on the 20^th (80^th) NYVI and asked if Walter had received any medals. He said he had not but probably should have. After all, he had been injured twice and captured an enemy flag. I began to look around the internet for other examples of soldiers receiving the Medal of Honor for capturing enemy flags. There are a lot of them. I got up to about fifteen before I just stopped counting.

       So now I had a mission. I had seen/heard of people setting out to get medals awarded posthumously, and I thought that would be something I could do. I began looking into ways to start the process for posthumous awards. One website said that officers were not given the Medal of Honor for most of the Civil War, so that was a little disheartening. Anyway, during this search, I came upon a website which said he had received the brevet rank of Colonel. So now I had to figure out what a brevet rank was. This wasn’t quite so difficult. There are some links below which explain it very well. Basically, it is basically an award for an officer. Rather than receive a Medal of Honor, Walter Van Rensselaer was given the brevet rank of Colonel.

 

About brevet ranks:

 

Brevet Rank in the Civil War

 

Excerpt from U.S. Civil War FAQ, Part 1/2:

A brevet rank was an honorary promotion given to an officer (or occasionally, an enlisted man) in recognition of gallant conduct or other meritorious service. They served much the same purpose that medals play today (our modern system of medals did not exist at the time of the Civil War).

A brevet rank was almost meaningless in terms of real authority. For example, a major who was a brevet colonel collected the pay of a major, wore the uniform of a major, could not give orders to lieutenant colonels, and was only eligible for commands that normally fell to majors. But he was allowed to use the title of colonel in his correspondence.

In addition, there were some unusual circumstances where brevet rank carried authority. For instance, when a force consisted partly of Regular troops and partly of state militia, command would go to the officer with the highest brevet rank (who might neither be the highest ranking regular officer nor the highest ranking volunteer!). This came up during the Mexican War on some occasions, and seems to have been designed to allow Regular officers with brevets (implying experience) to assume command over higher-ranking militia officers who had neither experience nor brevets.

An officer could also claim his brevet rank when serving on court-martial duty. Since an officer cannot be tried by officers ranking lower than himself, using brevet ranks allowed more people to qualify as possible court members.

During the war itself, brevets were very difficult to get and were a sign of valor, but on March 13, 1865, the War Department gave one brevet and sometimes two to nearly every officer on duty with the army. This angered many officers and men, who saw it as trivializing the efforts of men who won brevets in combat. (J.L. Chamberlain mentions this in his memoirs, for instance.)

Like regular ranks, brevets were kept separately for the U.S. Volunteers and the U.S. Army. Thus one man could have four ranks: an actual Volunteer rank, a brevet Volunteer rank, an actual Regular rank, and a brevet Regular rank. Brevets in the Regular army were sometimes used to honor men who had already been brevetted Major General in the Volunteers and could not be brevetted again (in the Volunteers), as no brevet Lieutenant Generals were created during the war (Winfield Scott had been made Brevet Lieutenant General [of Regulars] during the Mexican War).

Brevet ranks were authorized for the Regular Army in the Articles of War of 1806; they were authorized for the US Volunteers on March 3, 1863. Partly as a result of dissatisfaction with the end-of-war brevet giveaway, brevet promotions were discontinued in 1869; although officers who had been given brevets before that date continued to use them. They were reinstated for the Spanish-American war and continued in use until after World War I.

The Confederate army did not award brevet promotions.