Dots, Dashes, and Determination: John C. Watts in the Civil War

Monday we wrote about this boy's father. Here is the son's story.

From a Lawrence County hotel to the Union military wire, John C. Watts built a remarkable life around nerve, railroads, and the sound of dots and dashes.

Born near Chauncey, Illinois, on February 16, 1847, John Culbertson Watts grew up in a world newly connected by rail and wire. In 1860, his father kept a hotel in Christy Township where two telegraph operators boarded. Family historians recalled that young John lingered at the railroad station in Sumner, learning to recognize messages by sound and practicing Morse code on a door latch at home.

The Civil War soon tested that curiosity and courage. At 14, Watts traveled to Missouri to care for his father, who was ill with typhoid while serving in the Union Army. When Confederate forces blocked the route home after the Union defeat at Lexington, the teenager reportedly slipped through their lines beneath the cover of a wagon carrying a dead Union officer.

Still determined to serve, Watts enlisted in the 130th Illinois Infantry on October 15, 1862. Because recruits were supposed to be at least 18, family lore says he placed a slip of paper marked “18” in his shoe and truthfully declared that he was “over 18.” His father, Captain John W. Watts, soon arranged for him to transfer to Company I, where he could keep watch over his underage son.

The regiment traveled through Alton to Fort Pickering near Memphis. There, muddy Mississippi River water helped spread disease. Watts spent his 16th birthday hospitalized with typhoid and received a medical discharge on April 1, 1863. He later remembered little of the journey home to Sumner, where he arrived weighing only 90 pounds.

Recovery did not end his desire to help the Union. Rejected when he tried to enlist again, Watts found another route into the war: the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps. With no money for a ticket, he persuaded a train conductor to carry him to St. Louis. After an interview and a brief wait, orders sent him overnight to Waynesville, Missouri. He served there as a civilian telegraph operator from May 1864 until the corps was discontinued in April 1866.

Telegraphy remained his livelihood after the war. Watts worked for the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, moving from East St. Louis to Vincennes, Indiana, and later joined the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he remained until four years before his death. The railroad also carried him west to court Helen Anna Lewis in Sumner; the couple married in Lawrence County on October 3, 1871, and raised three sons.

By 1900, the family was established in Vincennes, and by 1920 John and Helen were still living on Broadway Street. On September 13 of that year, Watts died suddenly at home at age 73, apparently from heart trouble, shortly after eating dinner. He was buried in Greenlawn Cemetery in Vincennes. His life traced the telegraph’s rise from childhood wonder to wartime necessity—and showed how a boy too young for the battlefield found another way to assist the Union.