Heroes for All Time. Dione Longley
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Horace jotted the proceedings in his diary: “Wednesday April 17th … Attended a special meeting of the Guards at our Hall in the eve at which we volunteered our services to the Governor (Buckingham) as volunteers in the U States service in answer to the Presidents call for 75,000 troops. There were a large number of spectators at the room and when we with one voice offered our services, a long loud shout went up from the people.”24
Across the state, other militia units did the same, each acting as the nucleus of a company of 75 to 100 soldiers. Most community militias had drilled together and marched in parades, but few had serious military training. As the Hartford Daily Courant put it, “The Hartford City Guard was not organized for the purpose of performing military duty … But the time has come when men are wanted to protect the government, and the Hartford City Guard have overthrown their character as holiday troops, and are putting themselves in condition for acceptance as volunteers.”25
Soldiers of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd regiments enlisted for only three months—a term so brief that it was hardly an impediment to the mostly young men who in a surge of patriotism had stepped forward to volunteer. Gustavus Dana, a toolmaker who enlisted in the 1st Regiment, noted: “the general opinion was that the trouble would be ended and that we would be home at the end of the three months.”26
A Charter Oak insignia marked the militia uniform of an unidentified Connecticut man. Militia units from New Haven, Middletown, Danbury, Waterbury, and a host of other communities enlisted in Connecticut’s first three Civil War regiments in April and May of 1861 and made up the core of early officers.
While the governor appointed the colonels who would lead the regiments, the captaincy of each company was usually awarded to the man who had actively recruited most of its soldiers. Daniel Klein, the son of a German immigrant, became a captain in the 3rd Regiment after he enlisted scores of men from New Haven’s German community, with names like Gustav Voltz, Caspar Zimmerman, and Otto Frankel.
As each company filled, its soldiers left for training camp: New Haven, for the 1st and 2nd Regiments; Hartford, for the 3rd Regiment. As they left their hometowns, the soldiers found themselves surrounded by well-wishers. A young tinworker from Middletown described his departure:
In the early weeks of the war, stores around Connecticut could barely keep up with the demand for American flags, cockades, flag pins, and red, white, and blue ties. Other hot sellers were firearms and blankets for the soldiers, and military tactics manuals.
As our company were taking the [railroad] cars to Hartford, the rendezvous of the Third regiment, a good, honest farmer, from the village in which I had been living, came along … There was a large crowd around the cars, so that he could not get to the door, but he edged his way up to my window, and reaching up his hand, said, “Pull me up, I want to see you.” … He hung onto the car window for half a minute, wishing me the best of luck and good wishes generally, and then shook hands with me and left. As he shook hands, he left a five dollar bill in my hand … there was something in this man’s style that showed he was sincere in what he said; that his heart was with his country in the hour of trouble, and that his heart and sympathies were with those that were going to fight for the country’s honor. He might have made a patriotic speech two hours long, and it would not have impressed me as favorably as that five dollar bill did.27
George Branch, a harness maker in Hartford, enlisted in Connecticut’s 1st Regiment on April 16. On the evening of April 19 he got married; the next morning, his regiment departed for camp.
Military fever struck the children as well, and boys like this one contributed to “the din of war,” many forming their own drum corps. This young drummer wore an improvised uniform based on the colorful Zouave style—baggy red pants, short jacket, and a fez or turban on the head—adapted from the uniform of the French Zouaves in the Crimean War, and popularized in America by Col. Elmer Ellsworth, whose Zouave drill team had toured and electrified the country in 1860.
Sgt. Andrew Knox, a housepainter in the 1st Regiment, left behind his nineteen-year-old bride, Sarah. In a letter from training camp, he tried to explain why: “it was as much as I could do to tear myself away from you but my country called and I must obey my duty. For the first time the proud flag of my country has been insulted and disgraced it must be avenged at any cost and now my dear wife be true to me and I may soon [be] back but if I fall on the field of battle remember … that I die in [a] good cause the cause which our fathers fought for and died for.”28
THE BEGINNING OF SOLDIER LIFE
Once in camp, training began in earnest. Most men found it difficult, if not impossible, to adjust immediately to army life. “Discontent amounting almost to mutiny in our Co on account of our rations,” noted a private in the New Haven training camp of the 1st Connecticut.29 A number of men ran the guard and headed into downtown New Haven for breakfast, earning a stern reprimand from their colonel.
But time was short. The Confederates could attack Washington at any time. Connecticut’s green troops had to rush to learn drills, tactics, and the army’s daily routine. Many volunteers had never handled a musket. Now they struggled to learn “load in nine times,” the intricate nine-step process to load and fire a single cartridge.
Many officers were as inexperienced as the enlisted men, and had to learn as they went along. They consulted their new copies of Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics for the Exercise and Manoeuvres of Troops When Acting as Light Infantry or Riflemen, more commonly called Hardee’s Tactics. The men of the 2nd Regiment, quartered in New Haven, swallowed their pride as boys at William Huntington Russell’s military academy taught them their drills.30
Boys at the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven—like this young drummer—had been learning military drills for years before the war began. Students there put the new soldiers of the 2nd Regiment through their paces, drumbeats keeping the marching soldiers in step. Some 300 of the Institute’s former students would go on to become commissioned officers in the Union army.
Connecticut issued 700 of these nonregulation blue-painted canteens to men in the 1st Regiment. The state quartermaster’s report described them as “canteen-ration boxes.” The upper half contained two compartments for liquids with brass spout caps marked “patent April 2 1861” by Meriden inventor James Breckenridge. A swinging latch hook held the top and bottom compartments together. (Patent and quartermaster information courtesy of Dean Nelson, Museum Administrator, Museum of Connecticut History, Hartford.)
But being a soldier had its advantages, too: they hadn’t yet left for the war, and they were already heroes. “O, it was a glorious thing to be a soldier in those days!” recalled one volunteer.
[F]or those seventy-five thousand soldiers that had enlisted and were actually going to the war there was nothing too good. During the few weeks of preparation for the seat of war while they were at their rendezvous in their native states, they were petted and feasted, and grasped warmly by the hand with a fervent “God bless you” by the older people; smiled upon and urged to accept all kinds of presents, such as needle cases, pin-cushions, handkerchiefs, havelocks, pictorial newspapers, tracts and bibles, by beautiful ladies and bright-eyed girls, or invited into hotels and saloons and “treated” by some of their old chums who hadn’t quite courage enough to go for soldiers themselves, but heartily admired those who had; admitted to theaters and other places of amusement with no other ticket than enough of their soldier’s uniform on to show who they were.31
When they’d finished their brief training, the time came to depart for Washington.