 Leaving school without his family 's knowledge , he made the decision to fight in the Civil War in August 1862 . Despite his mixed @-@ race ancestry , Pitman avoided the racial segregation imposed on other Native Hawaiian recruits of the time and enlisted in the 22nd Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry , a white regiment . He served as a private in the Union Army fighting in the Battle of Antietam and the Maryland Campaign . In his company , Private Robert G. Carter befriended the part @-@ Hawaiian soldier and wrote in later life of their common experience in the 22nd Massachusetts . <unk> decades afterward from old letters , Carter 's account described the details surrounding his final fate in the war . On the march to Fredericksburg , Pitman was separated from his regiment and captured by Confederate guerrilla forces . He was forced to march to Richmond and incarcerated in the Confederate Libby Prison , where he contracted " lung fever " from the harsh conditions of his imprisonment and died on February 27 , 1863 , a few months after his release on parole in a prisoner exchange . Modern historians consider Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman to be the only known Hawaiian or Pacific Islander to die as a prisoner of war in the Civil War . 
