Charles B. Brockway was born on April 1, 1840, in Pennsylvania, probably to Beckwith S. Brockway. At the age of 10, according to an early biographer, he “commenced driving a team on the canal during the summer months and in winter hired out his services as best he could.” In 1858, he became a clerk in the state attorney general’s office. Soon afterward, he served as private secretary to the American resident minister in Quito, Ecuador.

 

By 1860, he was living in the household of lawyer Ephraim H. Little in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. He was studying law, and he owned $200 of personal property. He supported the Democratic Party, and he spoke at a local party meeting in September 1860.

 

He enlisted in the Union army on April 21, 1861, and he mustered in as a sergeant in Company A of the 35^th Pennsylvania Infantry the following day. According to his service records, he was 5 feet, 5 ½ inches tall, with dark hair and hazel eyes. In July 1861, he was transferred to Battery F of the 1^st Pennsylvania Light Artillery. The battery took part in the Second Battle of Manassas, the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Battle of Chancellorsville, the Battle of Gettysburg, the Overland Campaign, and the siege of Petersburg. He was promoted to 2^nd lieutenant in February 1862 and to 1^st lieutenant in March 1863. Confederate forces captured him at Second Manassas in August 1862 and imprisoned him at Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. He remained there for several months. He mustered out on October 22, 1864.

 

He returned to Bloomsburg after leaving the army, and he earned a living as a lawyer. He played an active role in local Democratic politics. In August 1865, he celebrated the Union cause, declaring that “the grand moving cause was patriotism, the desire to perpetuate the government of our fathers, and to transmit it to our posterity…We could not bear that one star should be taken from its sky.” He accused Republicans, however, of waging war “for the negro and not for the Union.” He denounced the Emancipation Proclamation, insisting that “the sufferings of imprisonment were nothing compared to the mental torture on finding the high and noble cause for which I enlisted debased by being made a struggle for giving freedom to a few degraded negroes.”  

 

He supported President Andrew Johnson’s lenient plan for Reconstruction. He “want[ed] Virginia, South Carolina, and the rest in the Union not as territories, but as free, sovereign and independent States, as they were when Washington gave them to us.” He also fiercely opposed Black citizenship and suffrage. Radical Reconstruction, he warned, would “give [African Americans] 6 United States Senators, about 15 Congressmen, and place the white race in many other localities completely under their control…they would wreak vengance [sic] upon their former masters, incited to it by fanatics of the North.”

 

In early 1867, he received an appointment as consul for San Jose, Costa Rica. He probably returned to Pennsylvania soon afterward. He married Lucy Cosper, and they had at least three children: Alice, born around 1869; Laura, born around 1873; and Anna, born around 1879. By 1870, they owned $5,000 of real estate and $15,000 of personal property. He served as editor of the Bloomsburg Columbian, and he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress in 1870. He served in the state legislature from 1872 until 1874. He applied for a federal pension in September 1881 and eventually received one. He died in Bloomsburg on January 3, 1888.

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