Timothy Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman was an American Union Army soldier of Native Hawaiian descent. Pitman served as a private in the Union Army fighting in the Battle of Antietam and the Maryland Campaign. On the march to Fredericksburg, he was separated from his regiment and captured by Confederate guerrilla forces. He died on February 27, 1863, a few months after his release on parole in a prisoner exchange. Modern historians consider Pitman to be the only known Hawaiian or Pacific Islander to die as a prisoner of war in the civil war.
About Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman in brief
Timothy Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman was an American Union Army soldier of Native Hawaiian descent. He was among a group of more than one hundred documented Native Hawaiian and Hawaii-born combatants who fought in the American Civil War. Pitman served as a private in the Union Army fighting in the Battle of Antietam and the Maryland Campaign. On the march to Fredericksburg, he was separated from his regiment and captured by Confederate guerrilla forces. He died on February 27, 1863, a few months after his release on parole in a prisoner exchange. Modern historians consider Pitman to be the only known Hawaiian or Pacific Islander to die as a prisoner of war in the civil war. In 2010, these \”Hawaiʻi Sons of the Civil War\” were commemorated with a bronze plaque erected along the memorial pathway at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. For a period of time after the end of the war, the legacy and contributions of Pitman and other documented Hawaiian participants were largely forgotten except in the private circles of descendants and historians. The Pitman family was quite prosperous and were host to the Hawaiian royal family when they visited the island of Hilo. In the Hawaiian language, the name “Ho Honolulu” means ‘to lie in the sheltered waters’ Pitman’s father was an early pioneer, businessman and sugar and coffee plantation owner. His mother was a Hawaiian high chiefess and half-sister of Maria Kinooliliha, who was married to Benjamin Pitman, an American pioneer settler from Massachusetts.
On his father’s side, Pitman is a great-grandson of Joshua Pitman, an English-American carpenter on the ship Franklin under Captain Allen Hallett during the American Revolutionary War. He shared his Hawaiian name with his maternal grandfather Ho Honolulu who, along with his brother Hoili, helped conceal the bones of King Kamehameha I in a secret hiding place after his death in his death. The name Hoolulu means’sheltered waters’ in Hawaiian. He and his older sister Mary were educated in the mission schools in Hilo alongside other children of mixed Hawaiian descent and his siblings were Mary Pitman Ailau, Benjamin Franklin Keokalau, and Maria Pitman Morey. His father remarried to the widow of a missionary, thus connecting the family to the American missionary community in Hawai’i. He left school without his family’s knowledge, he made the decision to fight in the Civil war in August 1862. He was forced to march to Richmond and incarcerated in the Confederate Libby Prison, where he contracted ‘lung fever’ from the harsh conditions of his imprisonment and died in February 1863. He is buried in Honolulu with his sister Mary and his half-brother Benjamin Aililau. He also shared his paternal grandfather’s name with Ho Honolulu, who hid his brother’s bones in a hiding place in his brother Iapapapalu.
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This page is based on the article Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
