Charles Carleton Coffin (July 26, 1823 – March 2, 1896) was an American journalist, war correspondent, author and politician.
Coffin was one of the best-known newspaper correspondents of the American Civil War. He has been called "the Ernie Pyle of his era", and a biographer, W. E. Griffis, referred to him as "a soldier of the pen and knight of the truth".
Life
A descendant of Tristram Coffin who arrived in the American colonies from England in 1642, Charles Carleton Coffin was born in Boscawen, New Hampshire, on July 26, 1823. Growing up in rural New Hampshire, he was home-schooled by his parents and briefly attended Pembroke Academy and Boscawen Academy. Village life revolved around the church, and in his teens Charles went to work in a lumbering operation and with $60 from his earnings, he purchased an organ, which he gave to the church, and became the first organist.
During an illness in 1841–42, he had purchased a book about surveying which had a profound impression on the young man. From it, he developed what one biographer calls "an engineer's eye," which led to an interest in roads, rivers and elevations. This interest became apparent later in his writings as a war correspondent. By age 21, Charles left Boscawen and went to the city of Boston where he hired on to a surveying crew working on the road from Boston to Concord, Massachusetts. While employed there, he suffered a severe injury to his ankle when accidentally struck by an ax wielded by a fellow worker. The injury ended that job and later prevented him from serving as a soldier in the Civil War.
