I thank Mom and Pop for the 1965 trip to Gettysburg, and the set of toy Civil War soldiers, which proved to be the seeds of a lifelong interest in history. Your enthusiastic and enduring support, encouragement, and occasional funding was and is most appreciated. Pop in particular would have loved to see this book and passion come to fruition. No folks ever did more for a number one son.
To S.P., Peter, and K.K.: thanks for the photo log, typing, transcriptions, and the annual trips to Gettysburg. Thank you for patiently listening to another story about some new little sepia-toned photo that’s neater than the last one. Peter said it best as a four-year-old at Civil War Day, when asked why we were there: “To remember the soldier men.”
Many thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Ramisk for many good newspaper clips on Lincoln and the Civil War, plus years of support for the C.W.R.A.F. Thanks to Unkie Mike for his insightful collecting philosophy: “I like what I like.”
I will always appreciate the late Bernie Rogers, whose stories of the early days of collecting could fill a ten-hour car ride (with no radio), and who always had a kid’s enthusiasm for what we would find at the next show. I thank Tom Harris for his keen artist’s eye that made me search for the fine line where art and history meet.
What Bobby Orr was to hockey, Di Longley is to Civil War research—always looking for stories of sacrifice, duty, courage, and humor buried in libraries, museums, graveyards, or webpages. And thank God for beer drinking after Panthers hockey games, or this book might never have been written.
CHAPTER ONE
Men of Connecticut!
WAR BEGINS, SPRING 1861
“Men of Connecticut! to arms!!” thundered the Hartford Daily Courant on April 13, 1861.1
Splashed across the newspaper was the shocking news: The day before, the Confederate military had opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Forty-three Confederate guns and mortars pounded Sumter until the Union commander surrendered the fort to the Southerners. With undeniable certainty, civil war had arrived.
Suddenly the Land of Steady Habits was anything but. Agitated and confused, people drew together to discuss the astounding events.
“Large groups were congregated upon the streets, and … the war was the all absorbing theme … In the conversation, heated and passionate, in which the crowds participated, there was but little to be heard except indignation at the outrage of the Southern Rebels. It was deep and earnest.”2
In the quiet town of Winchester, it wasn’t much different. “The bombardment of Fort Sumter flew over the telegraph wires on Saturday, April 14, 1861, and electrified the country,” wrote resident John Boyd. The Winsted Herald declared grimly, “Northern blood is up, and history, faster than the pen can write, is making.”3
But not everyone was astonished by the South’s attack. For months, Governor William Buckingham had vigilantly followed each development in the national conflict. After Abraham Lincoln’s election on November 6, 1860, South Carolina had moved to secede. Six other states had quickly followed. When Southerners fired upon an unarmed ship bringing troops and supplies to Fort Sumter on January 9, 1861, Buckingham had quietly directed his state quartermaster to order equipment for 5,000 troops, and advised militia units around the state to fill their ranks and stand ready.
Just days before Fort Sumter fell, members of the Governor’s Foot Guard assembled at the state armory. Before long, many of the men—like George Haskell—would lay aside their ceremonial Foot Guard uniforms to don the utilitarian blue wool of the Union army.
An impassioned early broadside proclaimed, “Your country is in danger!” and urged Connecticut men to “drill, drill with such muskets as are at hand” in preparation for war.
Buckingham’s forethought was providential: on April 15, President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to suppress the rebellion. The governor turned to his citizens and asked for a regiment of volunteers. Would Connecticut respond?
FOR OR AGAINST
“You must be counted for or against the government: which shall it be?” the Hartford Daily Courant demanded. “Descendants of those who marched under the banner of George Washington, which shall it be? … Sons of the old Charter Oak State, on which side do you enlist?”4
The answer came swiftly, from virtually every community in the state. Men crowded into hastily called meetings in town halls, assembly rooms, and churches. In Hartford, “men of all parties met, buried in a common grave all differences of opinion, and stood up as one man, brave, earnest, and steady for the contest. There was no faltering voice.”5
Men gave passionate speeches, calling for volunteers to defend the nation. George Burnham, a clerk, “said that if he had been so mean and despicable as to hesitate about his duty to his country’s flag, he could not have hesitated longer after seeing the brave, determined men before him … what he could do, he would do, and with his whole heart.”6
The dispute between North and South, and between Republicans and Democrats, was many years in the making. In 1859, John Brown, a deeply religious native of Torrington, Connecticut, brought the situation to a boiling point. A radical abolitionist, Brown advocated violence against slaveholders. He and twenty-one followers tried to initiate a slave rebellion, seizing a Federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the aim of arming slaves and abolitionists to fight for freedom. The plan failed. Captured and convicted of treason, an unrepentant Brown was executed on December 2, 1859. Brown’s plot outraged and frightened Southerners, and fueled the antagonism of Democrats everywhere. Slavery was now the issue dividing the nation, and the Republicans and Democrats squared off.
Farmers, teachers, factory workers and college students jumped to their feet and cried, “I’ll go!” At a meeting in Brooklyn, Connecticut, a town of perhaps 2,000 people, 60 men enlisted in the space of half an hour.7 John Boyd, the secretary of the state, enrolled in the 3rd Regiment—at the age of sixty-two.
“O! Pa. you do not know what enthusiasm, what patriotism, there is here among all classes,” a New Haven woman wrote excitedly to her father. “Party distinctions are not named, every body is for our country and the right. Not only the American born but the Irish and the Germans [immigrants] are ready to take up arms in our common defense.”8
WIDE AWAKE
The spirited support for the Union had emerged in Connecticut more than a year earlier, in February of 1860, sparked by the enthusiasm of a group of young Republican men in Hartford.
A group of Northerners had formed the Republican Party in 1854 to fight the spread of slavery into the nation’s western territories. Steadily, the Republicans gained support in the Northern states and began to challenge the long-established Democratic Party, which supported the extension of slavery.
In early 1860, Connecticut’s gubernatorial race was in full swing. Thomas H. Seymour,
