Heroes for All Time. Dione Longley
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Heroes for All Time
A DRIFTLESS CONNECTICUT SERIES BOOK
This book is a 2015 selection in the Driftless Connecticut Series, for an outstanding book in any field on a Connecticut topic or written by a Connecticut author.
Heroes for All Time
Connecticut Civil War Soldiers Tell Their Stories
Dione Longley and Buck Zaidel
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2015 Dione Longley and Peter A. Zaidel
All rights reserved
Manufactured in China
Designed by David Wolfram
Typeset in Palatino, ITC Stone Sans, and OPTI York
The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Longley, Dione.
Heroes for all time : Connecticut Civil War soldiers tell their stories/
Dione Longley and Buck Zaidel.
pages cm. — (A Driftless Connecticut series book)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8195-7116-8 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-8195-7117-5 (ebook)
1. Connecticut—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. 2. Connecticut—
History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives.
3. Soldiers—Connecticut—History—19th century. 4. United States—
History—Civil War, 1861–1865. 5. United States—History—
Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives. 6. United States—History—
Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. I. Zaidel, Buck. II. Title.
E499.L66 2014
973.7’446—dc23 2014022334
5 4 3 2 1
Cover illustration: Eight comrades in the 26th Connecticut taking their ease in their “home away from home” in Louisiana (photographer unknown). Courtesy of the Middlesex County Historical Society.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
This is a book of stories.
Every Civil War soldier had a story. The stories were as varied as the men and boys who enlisted. And over 50,000 of them came from Connecticut.
In this book you will hear the voices of those Connecticut soldiers—not the interpretations of modern Civil War scholars, but the words of the men who actually fought the war.
Many were eager to share their war experiences in letters home, often finding relief in pouring out their feelings. “That night after the battle I never shall forget the groans and sreiks of the wounded,” a shaken soldier reported to his mother.1 Others kept diaries, recording dramatic events and snippets of daily life. “Thanksgiving. Snow Storm. Shoes full of holes, think of home,” wrote a woebegone teenager from Gales Ferry.2 And in the years after the war, some veterans felt the need to preserve their stories in memoirs. A Suffield cigar maker hoped his reminiscences would “awaken in my Children a deep love of the Government that their Father shouldered his musket to defend.”3
Some soldiers wrote eloquently, like Henry Camp, a Yale graduate and infantry