Buell, Augustus C., 1847-1904

Augustus Caesar Buell was born in 1847, and fought in the Civil War as a member of Company L of the 20th New York Cavalry, having enlisted in August 21, 1863. Although he was promoted to corporal the following November, by April 1864 he had been demoted back to private. He was mustered out of service at the end of July 1865 and returned to New York. Buell was living in the area of Chittenango and Utica in upstate New York, near Syracuse, when he kept his diary/sketchbook, which contains entries dated 1867 and 1868. In 1890, Buell published a fraudulent Civil War memoir, "The Cannoneer," Story of a Private Soldier, in which he claimed to have fought in the Battle of Gettysburg in early July 1863. He would later find fame for his mostly fabricated biographies of naval hero John Paul Jones (1900) and President Andrew Jackson (1904). A spurious account of the life of William Penn was published shortly after Buell's death in 1904. His writings were debunked in "Augustus C. Buell, Fraudulent Historian" by Milton W. Hamilton in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography v. LXXX (1956) and "Pursuing the Elusive 'Cannoneer'" by Silas Felton in Gettysburg Magazine, July 1993.