Battle of Bull Run July 21st, 1861, Claims Life of Colonel James Cameron of Northumberland County

Pennsylvania native Colonel James Cameron was commanding the Seventy-ninth New York Highlanders on July 21^st, 1861, when he was killed by a Confederate bullet at the First Battle of Bull Run, near Manassas Junction, Virginia.

James Cameron was born in Maytown, Lancaster County on March 1,1801, and spent his boyhood there. When James was eight years old, the family moved to Northumberland County. His father died at Lewisburg. His mother was left with eight children and without means of support. Simon and James thus had to make their way in the world at an early age.

James chose the trade of a blacksmith and worked steadily at it till he was nineteen years of age when he entered the printing office of his brother Simon, in Harrisburg. His position as a printer led him, by an easy transition, to the establishment and management of a paper. The first paper which he conducted, was the Lycoming Gazette at Williamsport, which came to his hands about 1824, but in 1827 he accepted an invitation to and assume the direction of the Political Sentinel in Lancaster Pennsylvania. Cameron married a widow, the former Rebecca (Lemon) Galbraith, in 1829. It was about this time that he purchased a farm along the Susquehanna River, just below the borough of Milton.

Cameron left politics for a time and appeared to handle any business in which he became involved. On his forty-seventh birthday, he summarily reviewed his life: " This day, forty-six years ago, a child was born in a beautiful, obscure town in the interior of Pennsylvania, whose Christian name was James. This child has passed through most of the thorny thickets of life. He was a cowboy, a plough boy, a collier, a blacksmith, a tanner, a tailor, a printer, a brewer, a contractor, an alderman, a superintendent of railroads, a lawyer, a prosecuting attorney, an aid to the governor,—in short, almost everything but a Christian, and that I might even add this to my biography someday, would not be a bit more strange than some things I have accomplished."

During the Mexican War, he accompanied the volunteers of Pennsylvania as a sutler in January 1847. In 1856 he sought a seat in Congress but was defeated for the Democratic nomination.

When the Civil War broke out, Cameron had already retired to his home along the Susquehanna, but after some urgency, he agreed to accept the command of the New York Highlanders. By that time, his brother Simon Cameron had been sworn in as Secretary of War in Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet on March 12, 1861.

On the day James Cameron was killed, he was trying to rally his troops and was at the head of his command when he was killed. Colonel Cameron's body with hundreds of others, was left on the field and afterwards buried in a trench. Through the efforts of his brother, a party led by Cameron's adjutant at the battle, Sgt. John Kane found a slave who had helped bury the dead. He testified that Cameron's body had lain unburied in the hot summer weather for a few days before being placed in a common grave with the other Union dead and that he had made a mental note of where it was buried after hearing that a reward was being offered for its recovery. Upon digging in the spot that the slave had pointed out, they found Cameron along with the remains of several enlisted men. Cameron's personal effects and $80 in cash he had been carrying were missing; the slave said that Confederate cavalrymen had looted the body of anything valuable.

The remains were taken to Lewisburg, in a cemetery near the University of Lewisburg (Bucknell University), and reinterred with military honors. Colonel Cameron left a wife but had no children. Historians report Colonel Cameron was the first soldier from Northumberland County to lose his life in the war. He was the first officer of his rank in the Union Army and the first officer from Pennsylvania to fall in battle in the Civil War.

The Northumberland County Soldiers' Monument Memorial Association was organized on May 25, 1872. On July 4, 1872, a site at the eastern end of Market Square in Sunbury, was marked out by Judge Alexander Jordan and General Simon Cameron, for the erection of a memorial honoring the men who had lost their lives.

It includes a life-size statue of James Cameron clad in his military uniform. One of the monument panels carries the inscription “James Cameron, of Northumberland County, Colonel of the Seventy-ninth New York Cameronian Volunteers. Fell at the head of his regiment at the Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861, aged sixty-one years.