This event gives me a chance to talk about some of the
many Manchester soldiers in Our War, including
Martin Alonzo Haynes, a brave, articulate young man. Haynes was a private in the Second
New Hampshire Volunteers, the first three-year regiment from this state. He is
featured in three battle chapters in my book: first Bull Run, Gettysburg and
Cold Harbor.
Perhaps his role in the Gettysburg chapter best illustrates the
approach I took in writing Our War. I
had no interest in writing a comprehensive chapter on the battle’s second day.
What I was after was a chapter in which I could show how that day’s fighting affected
three individual New Hampshire soldiers – one each from the three infantry regiments
that fought there. I also wanted to show how the fate of each of those regiments affected the fates of the others.
I chose Col. Edward E. Cross from the Fifth New Hampshire.
Although Cross led a brigade of the Second Corps that day, his old regiment was in
that brigade. I chose Sgt. Richard Musgrove from the Twelfth. He left a rich
memoir of his service at Gettysburg and elsewhere. And I chose Haynes, a cub reporter
before the war and his regiment’s historian after it.
Among Haynes’s published works my favorite is A Minor War History Compiled from a Soldier
Boy’s Letters to “the Girl I Left Behind Me.” Published in 1916 in
Lakeport, N.H., it comprises the wartime letters Haynes wrote to Cornelia Lane,
his girlfriend when he left for the war, his wife at the time of the Gettysburg
battle (he married her on furlough in the spring of 1863).
Only 60 copies of A
Minor War History were printed. You can read it here. Although such online
publication is useful, during this 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the
Haynes book is one of several New Hampshire letter collections and memoirs that
deserve to be reprinted with fresh introductions.
In the meantime I was blessed to find Haynes’s letters and other writings and to give him a star turn in Our War.
Thanks for this, Mike. It is available on Amazon, as a paperback reprint, for about $20. I just bought one.
ReplyDeleteJust finished reading "A Minor War History" - a very interesting story of one NH soldier's life for three years of war. I particularly noted the references to the arrival of substitutes with the 5th NHV at Point Lookout and the lengths necessary to keep them from deserting.
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