“Doctor Livingston, I presume.”
Those famous words were spoken by Henry Morton Stanley, a reporter who was sent to Africa to find missionary doctor David Livingston, who hadn’t been heard from in quite a while. Henry Morton Stanley bears a unique historical distinction. He is the only man known to have served in the Confederate Army, the Union Army, and the Union Navy.
As an Englishman, he had no strong allegiance to either side. He was living in the South when the war started, so he joined the Confederate Army. He was soon captured and taken prisoner. The Union Army had a program whereby captured Confederate soldiers could avoid prison by joining the Union Army and going out west to fight Indians with the Cavalry. They would get out of prison and they wouldn’t have to fight against their former countrymen. Such soldiers were known as Galvanized Yankees. Stanley took them up on the offer.
Shortly before his unit was to ship out, he was struck by a serious illness and wasn’t able to go. He somehow slipped through the cracks and went AWOL. He was an experienced sailor, so later, using an assumed name for fear of being detected, he joined the Union Navy.