Charles P. (Charles Palfray) Bosson

Charles P. Bosson, also listed as Charles Palfray Bosson, was a 19th-century American nonfiction writer whose surviving works show two very different interests. In 1846 he published Observations on the potatoe, and a remedy for the potatoe plague, a practical book on cultivation and plant disease, and in 1886 he published History of the Forty-Second Regiment Infantry, Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862, 1863, 1864.

That later book is the work he is best known for. Contemporary library and ebook records identify him as Sergeant-Major Charles P. Bosson, and the book’s own preface says he undertook the history at the request of officers who knew he had already written down material about the regiment soon after its service ended. That gives the account much of its value: it comes from someone close to the events, writing with both memory and documentary care.

Reliable biographical details about Bosson himself are scarce, so it is safest to let the books speak for him. What comes through clearly is a writer drawn to close observation, useful facts, and lived experience—whether he was explaining an agricultural crisis or recording the service of Massachusetts volunteers during the Civil War.