Concord, N.H., May 1864: Endless war, boom times

Note: Friday, May 23, marks the 150th anniversary of the first edition of the Concord Monitor. This is the first of a series I wrote for the paper for the occasion. My aim is to show what Concord, N.H., was like in May of 1864 as the Civil War entered its fourth year.

Lewis Downing & Sons carriage factory was north of the police station on Main Street across from the Phenix Hotel. 

The Concord of May 1864 had developed the split personality required of a war capital.

The Civil War crept all around the city, bringing sorrow to hearts and hearths. After three years it ground on with no end in sight. Another fighting season had arrived, and a close reader of dispatches from the tangled woods north of Richmond could see that the war had become deadlier than ever.

But alongside this reality, life in the city was richer than ever. Business boomed. Vacancies were rare at the Phenix, the Eagle, the Columbian and the American House. Like livery stables and boarding houses, the hotels “just coined money,” as one resident put it. The telegraph clacked morning to night. For a time the baker James Norris made two tons of bread a day for soldiers encamped across the Merrimack River on the Dark Plains (today’s Concord Heights).

Lewis Downing (1792-1873)

The shops of Lewis Downing and Joseph Abbot had manufactured wagons for New Hampshire regiments. Now their mechanics worked overtime turning out gun carriages, caissons and coaches. Orders for flannel meant steady work at B.F. and Daniel Holden’s mill and factory in West Concord. The merchant John H. Hill could barely keep belts and harnesses in stock. 

The military draft stoked the wartime economy with government cash. In 1863 the draft had caused riots in New York, Boston, Portsmouth and elsewhere. To resist an uprising in Concord, the city council authorized Mayor Benjamin F. Gale to appoint 100 special police officers and buy 100 pistols and ammo. It set aside $10,000 to put down a riot.

The riot never happened. Big bounties for substitutes gave the unlucky men chosen in draft lotteries one more way to avoid service. The federal, state and local governments all chipped in, and bounties for three-year men rose as high as $1,000. Veterans got cash for re-enlisting, too.

In the end, few drafted men actually served. Their substitutes met city or town draft quotas. Concord was in the middle of a fiscal year in which it would pay out $113,550 in bounties to 93 men. This was more than five times what it paid to the wives and families of soldiers at the front.

Easy money for soldiers kindled a run on luxury items and necessaries in downtown Concord. At Elijah Knight’s or Stanley & Ayer on opposite sides of Main Street, bounty men scooped up high-priced watches and chains, rings and flasks. In between, where Main met School Street, they could buy stationery, Havana cigars, razors and pocketknives. A captain earned roughly 20 times a private’s pay, and many bought fancy swords and silk sashes, fine riding boots and epaulettes gilded with bullion. Hand-sewn shoes were all the rage.

Concord residents also indulged in this time of plenty. By ordinance, Main Street sidewalks were now eight feet wide. Although neither walks nor streets were paved, most merchants had canopies out front and Main Street was sprinkled to keep the dust down. After shopping for jewelry or for a fashionable bonnet at Mrs. M.M. Smith’s, Miss J.L. Crawford’s or one of the other downtown milliners, women and their mates could stroll down to Piper & Haskins opposite the train depot for fruit, candy or ice cream.

Gone were the days when R.A. Houston, who took pictures above Edward H. Rollins’s drugstore opposite the State House, advertised a daguerreotype or ambrotype for “One Bright Quarter.” But soldiers and their sweethearts could choose from at least four Concord salons to have portraits made: W.G.C. Kimball’s, John Morgan’s, George B. Farley’s or E.J. Hunt’s.  

The war caused inflation. The price of needles doubled. Prices at the Stewarts’, Main Street tailors and clothiers, jumped to $70 for a beaver overcoat and $30 for a business suit. Even a pair of farmer’s boots from Charles W. Clarke’s dry goods store sold for $5. Coffee from Java or Rio at Franklin Evans’s store went for 65 cents a pound, and tea, brown sugar and molasses were all up, too.

A surreal contrast took hold of the war capital. Opulence and profit ruled on Main Street while an unforeseen human calamity played out in the distance.

War hits home

It wasn’t that the city hadn’t seen and felt the war personally, but as the war entered its fourth year, its human toll had become numbing.

In June of 1861, Lt. Charles W. Walker fell off the train on his regiment’s way south. The train crushed a leg, and the amputation finished him off. He was the first Concord man killed in the war, and newspapers competed for the details of his demise.

For Walker’s funeral city streets teemed with mourners and businesses closed. He lay in state for three hours in the State House rotunda before white horses with black plumes pulled the Downing funeral coach to the Old North Church. There wasn’t an empty seat for the service.

A company of the 15th New Hampshire Volunteers on Concord's Dark Plains in 1862.

Since then, among the 2,000 Concord and Fisherville boys who would serve in the war, dozens had come home in coffins – or not come home at all. They included young Tom Leaver of West Concord, whose letters in the newspaper had kept homefolks in touch with the men in the field, and Capt. Leonard Drown of Fisherville, gunned down under a flag of truce. Edward E. Sturtevant, Concord’s beloved night watchman, disappeared at Fredericksburg.

Horace Lamprey's temporary
grave marker in Virginia. 

Stephen Bartlett, Howard T. Hill, Curtis Flanders, James Brickett, Hiram Durgin, Horace Lamprey, George Ladd, George Bucknam, George Sylvester, Horace Ames, Emil Arlen, Lucius Chandler – on and on went the roster of the Concord dead.

Ghostly figures and men with empty sleeves and pants-legs walked the streets. When trains brought regiments home to Concord for furlough or discharge, they often carried wounded and sick men. In August of 1863, local Sanitary Commission volunteers had to transport dozens of feverish skeletons from Louisiana forts to beds in city hall on Montgomery Street. A new 100-bed hospital wing attached to the building was just going up.

Now, in May 1864, after seeing Gen. Ulysses S. Grant for the first time, an artilleryman under the pseudonym “Laconia” made a revealing remark in a letter to a Concord editor. The war’s aim was no longer to capture Richmond, satisfying as that might be. The hope, “Laconia” wrote, was that Grant’s army might eventually “whip the Rebel Armies out of existence.”

Such destruction of the Union armies had long been the quest of Robert E. Lee.

The slave pen

Thirteen New Hampshire infantry regiments were in the field, and most of the training camps on the Dark Plains were empty. But replenishing the ranks of these regiments required extreme measures. No longer did eager young men rush to enlist in local companies.

The government bought 40 acres in Concord’s undeveloped South End for a camp for draftees, substitutes and a few genuine volunteers. The tract was bounded roughly by today’s Allison, Kimball, Stone and Dunklee streets. Officially named Camp Gilmore, it was called the draft rendezvous or, informally, “the slave pen.”

A 12-foot board fence enclosed the pen. Veteran troops guarded it, as many of its temporary residents schemed to desert with as much bounty money as they could carry. Until they left for the front, they had to deposit their money for safe-keeping but could withdraw what they needed. Because many substitutes were foreigners who had been picked up at ports as far south as Baltimore, a currency exchange was set up so they could trade dollars for money to send home.

The pen’s capacity was 1,300 men. Its cookhouse stood on south Main Street opposite Lewis Downing’s carriage works, but food was prepared in camp as well. The 13 barracks were half-full when it opened in 

September 1863, but the pen soon became a crowded den of mayhem.

Col. John H. Jackson, 3rd New Hampshire

Roll was called four times a day. Even so, during the time Col. John H. Jackson of Portsmouth commanded the camp guard, his 3rd New Hampshire soldiers had trouble keeping track of the men. For one thing, three “John Smiths” might arrive the same day, and who knew which one was trying to withdraw another’s cash?

Whiskey was a prized commodity in the pen, and drinking, thieving and fighting were rampant. Loveland W. French of Concord, a 16-year-old musician from the 3rd New Hampshire, was poisoned in the pen, 

although his killer somehow left behind his bounty money. Merchants licensed to sell in the pen, known as sutlers, were caught peddling liquor under the table.

In one case, a guard smelled alcohol as a woman waited to visit her son. It turned out she had sprung a leak. Twenty-four canteens of whiskey hung from the three hoops of her skirt, and flasks were tucked into her stockings.

Edward B. Holt, also 16, volunteered for the 3rd and wound up in the camp. In a letter home to his family in Nelson, he described what he saw. “The whiskey is pretty plenty here today but how they get it in I don’t know unless the guard let it pass on purpose. . . .  A fellow here by the name of James Rogers . . . set the guard house on fire the other night and they had to let him out it smoked so. There is some that get robbed every night in some of the Barracks though they haint troubled me yet.”

Agents for New Hampshire cities and towns traveled to the slave pen to acquire soldiers to fill draft quotas. For a cut of the bounty money, brokers sold them substitutes and arranged for transport south.

Many bounty men deserted, leaving their uniforms in the pine trees south of the pen. More than 30 escaped in one group. Others deserted on the way to their regiments by jumping off trains or from hotel windows. Still others deserted in the face of the enemy.

When the army caught deserters, it sometimes punished them publicly. Henry Miller, a 3rd New Hampshire substitute who had been a New York City bartender before he wound up in Concord’s slave pen, deserted at the front. He was caught and convicted one day and shot the next.

This was known as a drum-head execution, and Miller was the only white deserter sentenced to one. The night of his conviction he gave friends in the regiment $638 in cash and two watches. Because his death was intended as an example, his regiment was ordered out to witness it.

Politics

Gov. Joseph A. Gilmore

The man after whom Camp Gilmore was named was Joseph A. Gilmore, the state’s Republican governor. A Concord railroad executive, he had won the office the previous year with just 43.6 percent of the popular vote. His wily son-in-law, William E. Chandler, succeeded in denying the Democrats a majority, bouncing the choice to the Legislature, which elected Gilmore.

In office Gilmore proved to be a tireless and generous advocate for soldiers and their families. Voters re-elected him to a second one-year term in March 1864 by a majority of more than 5,000.

In this outcome the New York Times saw good news for Abraham Lincoln and bad news for antiwar Democrats, known as Copperheads. Of the Copperheads, the Times said: “As the election in New-Hampshire unerringly betokens, the popular heart is set against them even more firmly. No earthly power can save them from a fatal overthrow in the coming Presidential election.”

Concord was home to former president Franklin Pierce, a Copperhead icon who had spoken bitterly against Lincoln’s wartime policies. Even in a culture of purple prose, his rants seemed disloyal to many soldiers and their families. The local Republican press ridiculed Pierce and printed every scrap it could find about his friendship with Jefferson Davis, his onetime secretary of war.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

That May, Pierce had other things on his mind. He had buried his long-suffering wife Jane in the Old North Cemetery just five months earlier. With the coming of spring he promised to take Nathaniel Hawthorne, a Bowdoin College classmate and friend of 40 years, to the White Mountains to restore his health.

The two took a train to Concord the second week of May and set out for the mountains in Pierce’s carriage. They made it only as far as the Pemigewasset House, a large hotel in Plymouth. In the wee hours of May 19, Pierce found Hawthorne dead in his bed. “He must have passed from natural slumber to that from which there is no waking without the slightest movement,” Pierce wrote to Hawthorne’s widow.

In Concord, a new political season was about to begin – first the inauguration of Gilmore in a downtown parade and festival called “Election Day” and then a legislative session. For city residents, one issue would animate this session: Would Concord remain the capital, or would the capital move to Manchester?

The local weekly newspapers and their Manchester counterparts teemed with commentary on the subject, although Concord’s Democratic Patriot was still recovering from a fire. Its offices in the Sanborn Block on Main Street had burned on April 27.

Earlier, soldiers of the 2nd New Hampshire had threatened the paper because of its Copperhead tilt, but there was no evidence of arson. William Butterfield, the editor, did blame city firemen for a half-hearted effort to put out the fire. “But for political hate,” he wrote, “it would have been extinguished without a loss of $1,000 to all concerned.” The loss was six times that.

Into the rough-and-tumble of wartime newspapering, into the debate over keeping New Hampshire’s capital in Concord, and into a city enjoying an economic boom while suffering the numbing tragedies of war, a new voice was about to emerge.

On the weekend of May 21-22, two respected local men and their hired help prepared the first edition of the Concord Daily Monitor.

Next: The Concord Monitor is born

'Is God trying our nation, or destroying it?'

While researching my upcoming series on the origins of the Concord Monitor, I looked again at research of five (and more) years ago on George Gilman Fogg. The Independent Democrat, an antislavery weekly that debuted in 1845, was the chief forerunner of the daily Monitor. Fogg edited the Democrat for 15 years beginning in early 1846. He helped give the antislavery cause traction in American politics.

George Gilman Fogg, from his portrait
in the New Hampshire State House 

My idea in 2009 was to write a book about Fogg. In fact, I started one that year but abandoned it for other projects. Reviewing chapter drafts and notes on Fogg’s correspondence rekindled my interest in doing the book. Like me, you’ll have to stay tuned to see if this spark ignites anything.

In the meantime, here is a letter Fogg wrote to John Parker Hale, the U.S. senator from New Hampshire who led the bolt from the Democratic Party by antislavery men in 1845.

After running Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 campaign as its national secretary and giving the president-elect an earful on his Cabinet selections, Fogg won an appointment from Lincoln as minister to Switzerland.

Fogg wrote this letter to Hale from Berne shortly after the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. This was a time of anguish among party men like Fogg and Hale, who had done so much to bring on the war. In his letter, Fogg shared his chagrin over Union battlefield reverses, aired doubts about God’s dependability in the strife and explained why Europeans he had met tended to favor the Confederacy.

Hale, incidentally, became the U.S. minister to Spain in 1865.

Berne

May 27, 1863

My dear Hale

Your very welcome but not very cheerful note of the 27th inst. reached me a few days since. I cannot very much wonder that you have not felt like writing letters even to old friends, for I confess to having experienced that weakness myself. I regret that you do not take a more hopeful view of our public affairs because my faith needed strengthening amazingly.

You give me only Providence to rely on, and that thus far has disappointed me about as much as the shortcomings of our statesmen and generals. It may blasphemous, but I must say that I have found myself at a loss alike to discover the finger of Divine or Human Wisdom in the management of our world’s affairs during the last two years. Is God trying our nation, or destroying it? Or has God abdicated to give the Devil a chance to do his devilishness? I confess I am less reverent & more unbelieving than ever before.

U.S. Sen. John P. Hale

I was getting to have faith in Hooker. But the latest telegraphic dispatches say that “faith is vain.” What a fatality has hung over that Army of the Potomac! Nothing but inefficiency & humiliating failures. The details of the late fighting on the Rappahannoc have not yet come to hand. There must have been terrible fighting and a fearful catalogue of the killed and wounded.

I agree with you that there has been, by somebody’s fault, a fearful squandering of the enthusiasm and life of a noble and great people. It has always seemed to me, and it seems to me so now, that our nation only needed leaders to have crushed the rebellion from the beginning of this war.

If there was an exception I had the benefit of it here in my republican mountain house. But even here at first opinion & sympathy was against us. It was so everywhere. Republicans in Europe were against us because, not understanding the causes of the war, they are always on the side of insurrection. Here “rebellion” is synonymous with “liberty.” And the people could not for a long time attach any other meaning to our rebellion. The abolitionists, aristocrats & tories, who really comprehended the rebellion in America, at the first favored it because they comprehended it. It was a rebellion in behalf of despotism – about the first of that sort on record – and for that they wished it Godspeed.

I assure you, my dear sir, to a man who really loved the honor of his country as that of his own mother, and who was anxious to do his duty, a residence abroad has not been “a bed of roses.” Many a time, as everything, in both the cabinet & field, seemed to be going wrong, have I been near throwing up my post & returning home in the desperate hope that I might do something to stay the evil which I could not endore to look upon. But a soberer view would come to tell me how easily I would “sink & leave no bubble.”

And so I am still here. Lately I have been hopeful, almost cheerful. How I will again despair, I know not.

Apart from these things – if the idea is possible – I find my posting here all that I could desire. I am in the midst of the grandest scenery in the world – within a day’s ride of all the capitals of central Europe – not overburdened with official duties – and surrounded with the most agreeable society which I can enjoy as much of as I please. I have a beautiful house and garden all to myself, barring servants – have the most magnificent Alpine view from my window – finest door to be had in all Switzerland.

Tell me that you are going to save our country at home, and I will be as happy for the next two years as a man can be who has not a wife & two charming daughters. If you doubt it, pluck up courage to challenge the Atlantic and come over & see. I can promise you the longest kind of a latch-string out, and a respectable larder with us.

I received the Concord papers – get letters which keep us pretty well posted in our State matters. What a shame that Joel Eastman should have been nominated over Marston. I have no tears to shed over E’s defeat unless the disloyal men should have the next Honor thereby.*

Now, my long time friend, good by. I know your weakness too well to expect a reply soon. Be sure when it does come will be welcome.

Give my love Mrs. Hale, Lizzie & Lucy & believe me,

Always yours

George G. Fogg

*Fogg refers here to the New Hampshire election in March. Joel Eastman, a Republican from Conway, had been nominated over the incumbent, Gilman Marston of Exeter, who was also a Union brigadier general. But Daniel Marcy, a Portsmouth shipbuilder and onetime sailor, defeated Eastman with 50.13 percent of the vote to Eastman’s 49.83. This gave the Democrats one of three of the state’s U.S. House seats. In 1865, Marston took it back from Marcy.

A war relic comes home to New Hampshire

George S. Gove, who made lieutenant in October 1863, apparently carried his company's medical supplies.

George S. Gove of Raymond, N.H., was a model soldier. He plays a supporting role in both My Brave Boys and Our War, and I’ve also written about his experience in battle on this blog.

Gove joined the 5th New Hampshire Volunteers as a 20-year-old sergeant in 1861 and was wounded three times, at Fair Oaks, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg. His listing in Ayling’s Register mentions only the Fair Oaks wound, but perhaps that is because all three wounds were in the same shoulder.

George S. Gove

We know about all three wounds because Gove described them in detail in his letters home. His wartime letters are now part of the Parsons family papers in the archives at the University of New Hampshire.

I bring up Gove again because the trunk in which he carried his gear late in the war has just sold at auction. It was part of the private collection of a couple from Wenham, Mass. M. Prudence Fleck and her late husband, Peter F. Frazier, used to show their extensive collection to friends in their home museum.

The auction estimate for the trunk was $600 to $800, but it sold for more than three times that. It wound up in the good hands of Greg Henderson, a 5th New Hampshire re-enactor whom I have known for many years. Greg is pleased to have it, of course, and like its previous owners, would like to figure out a way for New Hampshire people to see it and thereby learn more about Gove and the 5th.

He and I emailed about this. Given what I know about Civil War relics in New Hampshire, my pipe dream for years has been a modern, interactive Civil War museum in Concord. I can’t say this is a practical idea, given the attendance problems most museums are facing. But done right, it would be a great way to preserve and display a part of the past that has special appeal to Americans. As it stands now, the material is spread to the four winds.

Gove’s trunk is made of leather-covered wood. It is 2 feet long, 14 inches wide and 10½ inches tall. Another slightly smaller wooden trunk from the same private collection was stenciled “HOSPITAL STORES/5TH Regt. N.H.V.”

Greg sent along the snapshots of the trunk included here.

Thanks for those, Greg, and thanks for bringing the trunk back home.  

    

   

Coming soon: a new newspaper for the war capital

At the moment I am working on a series for the Concord Monitor on the 150th anniversary of the paper’s debut as the Concord Daily Monitor. Concord was a printing town and had several weeklies, but the Monitor was the city’s first year-round daily. Over the decades it absorbed the other papers and became the only game in town.

That first paper came out May, 23, 1864. Its publishers were two men with connections to Our War. One, P. Brainard Cogswell, was an abolitionist who accompanied the governor’s son on a mission to rescue sick men from the 16th New Hampshire. I tell this story in the book.

The other publisher was George H. Sturtevant, the older brother of Edward E. Sturtevant. Both were from a Keene family, and both came to Concord in search of printing jobs two decades before the Civil War. Edward was New Hampshire’s first volunteer and later died at Fredericksburg. He appears in several chapters of Our War.

My series will explore the Monitor’s history, but its major thrust will be that first paper and life in Concord in 1864. Thus I will post it on this blog.

*

The last month has been exciting for the blog. Readership has climbed steadily, especially during the first two weeks of May. The site surpassed 35,000 hits all-time yesterday. Thanks you for reading!

One consequence of the recent readership bounce was a big move up for a blog post on the 1888 North-South reunion at Gettysburg. In fact, it is the new No. 1 on the all-time list. But I’ll get to that in a moment. Here are the 10 most popular entries so far of those posted between March 15 to May 15.

1. Together again: They rode with Cross to Gettysburg

2. Coming to America

3. The Civil War created a boom for Yankee’s circus

4. So what became of Henry S. Hamilton?

5. A brutal beating in the 5th New Hampshire (part 3)

6. ‘Oh this pen cannot describe my feelings’

7. An immigrant bandsman in the face of battle

8. A nasty scrap with Col. Cross’s brother  

9. The terror of reading the casualty list

10. An immigrant’s first taste of camp life in South Carolina

Note that all four parts of my series on Henry S. Hamilton, the English immigrant and later cornet player for the 3rd New Hampshire, made the top 10. If you missed them, the best order in which to read them is Coming to America (No. 2 on the list), An immigrant’s first taste of camp life (10), An immigrant bandsman in the face of battle (7)  and So what became of Henry S. Hamilton? (4).

Hamilton wrote a terrific memoir, and telling his story on the blog was a pleasure.

Here are the all-time top 25, with hits ranging from 180 to 746. No. 1 has received more than 500 hits since April 15. The number in parentheses is last month’s rank:

1. Killing the Southerners with kindness (13)

2. Urgent! Telegram from Gettysburg (1)

3. Farewell, my teacher (2)

4 (tie). A Gettysburg veteran who knew the battlefield by heart (5)

           

           Exeter’s Civil War general (3)

6. A Gettysburg journal (4)

7. Did Abraham Lincoln really free the slaves? (6)

8. Unpacking the new ‘Gettysburg’ (8)

9. The soldier’s story behind the love story, Part I (7)

10 (tie). The Civil War: ‘It was not my fault,’ Buchanan insists (10)

             

              Faces of Fort Wagner, Olustee and Andersonville (9)

12. One school’s proud Civil War heritage (11)

13. A gift from the heart (12)

14. Gallery: Faces of the Fighting Fifth (part one) (14)

15. Backstage with Billy Collins (15)

16. The soldier’s story behind the love story, Part II  (17)

17. Kennedy gave FDR too much credit, shortchanged Ike (16)

18. History’s touch (18)

19. Gallery: Old soldiers (2), a New England brigade (20)

20. Harnessing the power of the telling detail (19)

21. July 2, 1863, Rose’s Woods, Gettysburg (22)

22. A souvenir from Harpers Ferry (23)

23 (tie). As its centenary nears, the Easter Rising provokes debate (24)

             My friend Chester (21)

25. A riddle wrapped up in an enigma (25)

Chancellorsville (3): In the aftermath of battle, horrors, sorrow, rumors and a march north to fight again

Officers of the 12th New Hampshire at Chapin's Farm, Va., 1864 (from left):  Lt. Alonzo W. Jewett, Capt. Ephraim W.
Ricker, Lt. George E. Worthen, Lt. John P. Lane, Capt. James W. Saunders, Capt. Arthur S. Smith, Capt. Jeremiah L. Saunders, Lt. Rufus E. Gale, Lt. Col. Thomas E. Barker, Maj. Nathaniel Shackford, Capt. Hosea Q. Sargent, Capt. Andrew M. Heath, Capt. John H. Prescott, Capt. Daniel W. Bohonon, Lt. Mayhew C. Batchelder.   

After the Army of the Potomac’s withdrawal from Chancellorsville, the first order of business for the 12th New Hampshire Volunteers was to count noses. In this endeavor Sgt. Richard W. Musgrove, like the other survivors, took a particular interest in his own company and his own town.

By Musgrove’s count Company D had marched to battle with 58 men and officers. Six were killed, 25 wounded and five missing. Twenty-two had returned to the camp near Falmouth, Va.

Men from Bristol, Musgrove’s hometown, served mainly in Cos. C and D. Four had died in battle: Henry R. Kidder, Charles W. Cheney, Sgt. Gustavus Emmons and Dan P. Nelson. Charles G. Smith died of his wounds. Also wounded were Louis Rowe, Benjamin Saunders, George W. Twombly, Henry Drake, L. B. Laney, Cpl. Albert Nelson, Major J. Nelson, Thomas E. Osgood and Oliver P. Hall.

As the survivors of the regiment absorbed their losses, rumors swirled in camp. Their brave chaplain, Thomas Ambrose of Ossipee, N.H., had refused to leave the wounded men in the woods when the 12th retreated. Now the word in camp was that Ambrose was dead. The chaplain of Hiram Berdan’s Sharpshooters even gave a eulogy for him. In fact, Ambrose had been captured and would soon return to the regiment.

Col. Joseph H. Potter

The men also believed the story that their colonel, Joseph H. Potter of Concord, had died in the Chancellor House from wounds in battle. In fact, Potter had indeed been wounded, but the rebels had captured him as well. He was held till October, when he was exchanged.

Potter never returned to the regiment, but Ambrose did. In the summer of 1864, he was shot in a trench at Petersburg and died a month later in the hospital. “Such devotion as his was rare even among the men of his cloth in the army,” Musgrove wrote.

In camp at Falmouth, the talk inevitably turned to notable events at Chancellorsville. Musgrove recorded a few of these. Five bullets perforated Roswell D. Swett’s uniform but none struck his person. Musgrove saw a man cowering behind a tree during the battle. Col. Potter “grabbed him by the collar and struck him with his sword. The man jumped to one side to avoid the blow, and they went round in a circle two or three times, the colonel hitting him a blow at every jump.”

Musgrove pieced together the story of the Nelson brothers from Bristol, Dan, 24, Albert, 23, and Major, 22. After a piece of shell struck Albert in the head, Dan went to help him. As they struggled toward the rear, they found Major. He had been wounded, too, but he was strong enough to help Dan prop up Albert. Suddenly a ball hit Dan in the back and went through his bowels. Dan begged his brothers to leave him, lest they all be taken prisoner. Reluctantly they did so, and Dan died in the hands of the enemy.

Pvt. William Martin of Sanbornton saw a sergeant from Company D skulking behind a tree. He demanded of Bradbury Morrill, a lieutenant from his own town: “You order that man from behind that tree.” Just then a minié ball hit Martin in the arm. He dropped his musket and loped to the rear. In the hospital he told a visitor, “Now I have something that will take me out of the service.” “It did, but not in the way in which he planned,” Musgrove wrote. Although the wound was slight, Martin died of it a few weeks later.

After a few days of rest, the men of the 12th were ordered to destroy their quarters and build new ones. They cleared the ground and started again. Musgrove found that the activity, strange as it seemed on one level, helped them put the past behind them and adapt to their shrunken state.

On May 12, they formed near division headquarters, where they heard the official announcement that Stonewall Jackson was dead. Jackson’s own men had shot him by accident the night of May 2, He died eight days later in Guinea, Va. As the death was announced, the Union soldiers doffed their caps and stood in silence.

Musgrove kept a diary, and the next two day he wrote these entries:

The Union landing at Aquia Creek, Va. The creek is a tributary of the Potomac River. It is quiet  in this photo, taken
early in the war, but was bustling with activity by the time Richard W. Musgrove visited it n 1863.

“I have just returned from Aqua [Aquia] Creek where I have been today and had a ‘right good time,’ to use an expression common to these parts. Joe and I got our passes and went down on the 8 o’clock train, and having arrived there, were not long in finding Edgerly [Charles E. Edgerly, a wounded private from their company], and we had a most pleasant visit. We had lemonade to drink and apples to eat, and a good dinner of soda crackers, ham, butter and coffee with condensed milk. Soon after dinner we were out near the steamboat landing and ran across French, another old schoolmate, who belongs to the band of the 1st Rhode Island cavalry. It seemed like old times. There were four of us who, a little more than a year ago, were at school together, met in the army in Virginia. We little dreamed it then. When we left this afternoon, Edgerly gave us some condensed milk, a can of condensed apple juice, lemonade powders, etc., etc., which were very acceptable.

“Thursday, May 14. I went down to Aqua Creek again today, as Dr. Fowler [38-year-old Hadley Fowler of Bristol was the regiment’s surgeon] wanted me to get some things for the sick, at the sanitary commission. I was very glad of the chance and had another pleasant visit.”

Warren Tucker of Alexandria returned to camp the next day. He was the first of the wounded to come back. He had been shot through the shoulder just beneath the blade. Maggots were crawling out of his wound, which Musgrove believed had received little care.

Letters soon began to arrive conveying the anxiety and sorrow of relatives in central New Hampshire. One of Musgrove’s letters was opened at the Bristol post office and read aloud to the crowd waiting there before it was delivered. The first news to reach the town was rife with errors about soldiers’ fates. Many men pronounced dead later turned out to be alive.

Sgt. Musgrove became an officer  in the regular army in 1864.

Stephen Nelson went to Washington looking for news about his boys but could at that point find out nothing of Dan, who had died in Confederate hands. George W. Hall, the first sergeant of Musgrove’s company, had been wounded, but he was well enough to be sent across the Rappahannock to retrieve the body of Orlando W. Keyes, the Holderness captain who had led Company E into battle. Hall found no trace of him but did report in camp that the Union dead had not actually been buried on the field. “Loose earth only had been thrown over the remains and they were not in a condition to be removed,” Musgrove wrote. Hall said the stench of the dead was overwhelming.

Before long the men of the 12th heard rumors of their immediate future. They liked best – and clung to – the one that they were to be sent home to refill their ranks. What bothered them most was a rumor that the 12th was to be disbanded and its soldiers sent to other regiments, including some from out of state. (See an earlier post on this rumor here.) 

On May 30, the regiment was assigned to picket duty. The men built comfortable quarters, dammed a river and made a small sawmill. After the mill began operating, Col. Berdan of the Sharpshooters visited. He said “none but New Hampshire men could put such an establishment in operation,” Musgrove wrote. Word of the siege of Vicksburg also lifted the men’s spirits.

Not all the news cheered. Musgrove heard from a lieutenant that another tent-mate, Cpl. William H. Straw of Hill, N.H., had fallen gravely ill. Musgrove visited Straw on June 5 and wrote a letter for Straw to his wife. He left thinking Straw could not last long. Straw was sent to the division hospital in Alexandria the next day and died there two weeks later.

Pvt. Asa Witham, a 44-year-old laborer from Northfield. N.H., who doubled as Company D’s Free Will Baptist preacher, was also sent to the division hospital in Alexandria. He was the last of Musgrove’s tent-mates from before the march to Chancellorsville. Knowing that neither Witham nor Straw would return, Musgrove felt deeply the loss of these “kindred spirits.”

About this time, women began arriving in search of their men. The wife of Cpl. Charles G. Smith came from Bristol to bring her husband home. Smith had been wounded, and she hoped she could nurse him back to health. On June 6, Smith died at Aquia Creek. At least William Martin’s sister knew she was coming for his body, as he had died on June 2.

In the first week of June the men of the 12th heard rumors that they might soon be on the move. When they learned the rebel army had headed north to invade the Union states, they were sure of it. Soon they began their long march in pursuit of Lee’s army.

The regiment had been woefully misused at Antietam. In its first stand-up battle, the men were put in an untenable position, not reinforced and left by the rest of their brigade to fend for themselves. But such stories of futile slaughter were legion during the war.

Perhaps less common was being subject to the same fate twice in two months. This indignity would befall the 12th again at Gettysburg. For Our War, I told the interwoven story of the three New Hampshire infantry regiments at Gettysburg through the experience of three soldiers. One of them was Richard W. Musgrove, whose regiment was put in an untenable position and paid the inevitable price for it.

Only one factor kept the 12th from suffering casualties on the same scale as at Chancellorsville: The earlier battle had so depleted its ranks that there were few men left to serve as sitting ducks for rebel infantry advancing in superior numbers.

Chancellorsville (2): 'The Johnnies were close at our heels and in advance of us on the right and the left'

Part 1 of this series on Richard W. Musgrove of the 12th New Hampshire Volunteers at Chancellorsville is here. The regiment took more casualties in the battle than any other regiment, Union or Confederate.

Alfred Waud's drawing of Chancellorsville on May 1, 1863. The Chancellor House is at far right. (Library of Congress)

On the morning of May 3, 1863, after more than an hour alone under fire near a clearing called Fairview, what was left of the 12th New Hampshire was at last ordered to retreat. As described by one survivor, Sgt. Richard W. Musgrove, the retreat bore much in common with the fight.

“The Johnnies were close at our heels and in advance of us on the right and the left,” he wrote in his memoir. “While on the retreat, several of our few survivors fell.”

He and the others, perhaps 25 in number at the start, ran from the woods and across an open field toward the Chancellor House. A comrade to his right fell with a scream just as a ball struck Musgrove’s musket in the stock, knocking it out of his hand. He ran on. It was about half a mile to the Chancellor House, and it was a miracle to him that anyone from the 12th made it.

Gen. Dan Sickles, 3rd Corps commander

“It seems a wonder that any man could pass through the storm of shot and shell that swept this field and live,” he wrote. “The air was full of flying missiles and the ground was plowed up in all directions.”

Wounded and dead men covered the plain, making the dash of the 12th more treacherous. “Many a harrowing scene presented itself,” Musgrove wrote. Two soldiers were helping a man whose hip had been shot away. Musgrove could see the man’s joints work in their sockets as he tried to move along.

Gen. Dan Sickles, the 3rd Corps commander, was forming a new battle line near the Chancellor House just as it came into Musgrove’s view. His gunners were about to fire on the charging rebels, apparently not noticing the Union men fleeing before them. Sickles noticed and ordered the artillery to hold its fire.

When the remnant of the 12th reached the Union battle line, Sickles ordered its commanding officer, Lt. Edwin E. Bedee, to have his men fall in and help stop the rebel charge. Bedee told Sickles they had no ammunition, and Sickles ordered them to the rear.

They passed the Chancellor House and entered the wood behind it. Musgrove lay on the ground and fell asleep. When he awoke, a comrade told him two women rescued from the house had just been escorted past. During the retreat the men of the 12th had seen the destruction of the brick walls of the house, which was being used as a hospital. It caught fire soon after they passed. As soldiers helped evacuate the wounded, an officer found the two women hiding in the cellar.

A well to supply the house stood nearby. Parched soldiers crowded around it, ignoring the shells and balls passing by them. Some were wounded and perhaps even killed. “My first impulse was to obtain water here myself,” Musgrove wrote, “but I quickly took in the situation and concluded to move on.”

Col. Hiram Berdan 

He and his comrades rested in the woods and then started toward the Rappahannock. They had crossed just the day before at U.S. Ford behind Col. Hiram Berdan, famed for his sharpshooters but a 3rd Corps brigade commander at Chancellorsville.

Walking back now, Musgrove overtook 22-year-old John Mooers, a private in his company from Sanbornton. Mooers had been wounded in the foot. Musgrove joined another comrade who was helping him to the rear. Along the way they asked two surgeons to dress the wound, but both hurried on. Finally, Musgrove stopped a man on horseback who took Mooers to a field hospital near the river.

The hospital was the large, two-story house of a Virginia planter. Wounded men filled the rooms. Perhaps a thousand more lay on the grass outside. Surgeons helped those they could and sent them across the river to more permanent hospitals.

Musgrove had a special mission at the hospital. After his musket was damaged during the fight near Fairview, he had picked one up off the ground. He saw the mark of his tent-mate, Louis Rowe, on the musket. He looked for Rowe and, not finding him, assumed he had been wounded and gone back.

In vain Musgrove searched every room in the house for Rowe. Then he roved among the wounded on the lawn staring into every face he could see. Suddenly he saw Rowe’s.

Rowe told him what had happened. During the fight he was about to fire when a rebel ball “ploughed a furrow along the back of his left hand and then entered his right breast.” He dropped his musket and knapsack and set out for the river, three miles away.

Rowe was cold. Musgrove made him tea and gave him his overcoat. He found a stretcher and bearers to carry Rowe across the pontoon bridge.

After Musgrove rejoined his comrades, his thoughts drifted from the terrible scenes he had witnessed. His mind “flashed to far-away home, and as I thought of the sad news that must be borne them, tears came freely, and I realized more than ever before that the immediate actors of the war were not the only sufferers in this great conflict. “

He and a comrade joined their pieces of shelter tent, but without his blanket and overcoat, he shivered all night. The men were called out after heavy firing on the picket line at 2 a.m., and after that, Musgrove lay awake till reveille.

Brig. Gen. Amiel W. Whipple was mortally wounded.

Roll call disclosed the 12th’s numbers: four officers and 97 men fit for duty. They formed into four companies, one under each officer. Col. Samuel M. Bowman, their brigade commander, started with them toward the front. They reached an enormous breastwork and convinced themselves the Union army could hold this position. They were told to relax. Many men used gun carriages as gambling tables.

The biggest danger in their new position was sharpshooters. One of them shot Amiel W. Whipple, the 12th’s division commander. Whipple died three days later and was buried in Proprietors’ Cemetery in Portsmouth, N.H., where he had been stationed before the war.

On the morning of May 5, just before noon, the men of the 12th were ordered to a fatigue detail. They were to leave their arms, knapsacks and haversacks. They marched through the woods and started digging trenches from which Union troops could resist a flank attack.

It began to pour. Though exhausted, the men kept digging even as water pooled in the trenches. At about 8 p.m., they were ordered to retrieve their gear. In darkness they walked gingerly through the woods to the road between U.S. Ford and the breastwork where they had left their equipment.

A  triumphant Hooker arrives at Chancellorsville on
April 30. Musgrove blamed him for not committing all
his troops during the battle. Many men resented his
having ordered the retreat on May 5.    

At that moment they saw for themselves that Joseph B. Hooker’s army was retreating. The artillery was speeding toward the river. The digging detail argued over whether to join the retreat or look for their muskets and knapsacks. “The officers were unequal to the occasion, and their command rapidly disappeared, every man striking out for himself,” wrote Musgrove.

He and Sgt. Alonzo Jewett, a comrade from Bristol, N.H., returned to the front, where they found only chaos. They had seen no infantry on the road, and they saw none here. “Where our brigade had gone no one knew,” Musgrove wrote. Soldiers were “destroying everything that could be of value to the enemy. Knapsacks were rifled and then burned, and muskets were heated and bent by a blow against a tree.” He found a haversack containing food, but the 12th’s arms and equipment were lost.

The men set out for the pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock. “But such a road!” Musgrove wrote. The artillery had churned a wide swath into knee-deep mud. Musgrove fell in the mud and wallowed in it until Jewett helped him up. For the rest of his life he wondered if he would have sunk and died had he been alone.

They reached a clearing near the river at midnight and warmed themselves and dried their clothes over burning fence rails. They scanned the passing infantry column, searching for their brigade. At 4 a.m. the 3rd Corps at last appeared, and they found their place.

In stops and starts they marched away. Some officers “who were not over conspicuous in battle” cursed them for not closing ranks. “More dead than alive,” the men reached their old camp after a 10-mile march.

As they sat before a fire that morning, their defeat set in. “Oh! our hearts were sad and heavy,” wrote Musgrove, “for more than half our number had fallen in battle.” In the case of the 12th New Hampshire this was no exaggeration. Of 558 men engaged, 317 had been left behind, dead, dying, wounded or missing.

Figuring out who among the casualties belonged in which category took time. Louis Rowe, Musgrove’s tent-mate, rejoined the 12th in the fall. He returned the overcoat his friend had lent him at Chancellorsville. Musgrove kept it as a souvenir and did not wash out his comrade’s blood. In 1882, at the age of 44, 19 years after being shot, Rowe died of complications from his chest wound.

Next: Aftermath

Chancellorsville (1): 'This was our first musketry engagement, and we did not know enough to retreat'

At the age of 21, Richard W. Musgrove of Bristol, N.H., abandoned his studies at nearby Tilton Academy and joined the 12th New Hampshire Volunteers. The regiment fought at Fredericksburg five months later, and its struggle at Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863, nearly destroyed it.

Richard Musgrove of Britol kept a diary and later wrote a memoir.

Musgrove kept a diary and later used it as the basis of a memoir, Autobiography of Captain Richard W. Musgrove. He died in 1914, and his daughter Mary had the autobiography published in 1921.

This is the first of a series recounting Musgrove’s march to Chancellorsville and his experience there. As he knew, his account was not a history of the battle but one man’s view of it. Where necessary, I have added context gleaned from the 12th’s regimental history and other sources.

Musgrove was a sergeant in Company D of the 12th. When he and the rest of the regiment set out from Falmouth, Va., at 2 p.m. on April 28, some men joked that they were headed “for Richmond or the grave.” They liked their new commanding general, the New Englander Joseph E. Hooker. After the day’s march they bivouacked, lying in overcoats on rubber blankets with shelter tents as covers. “Though cold, slept soundly,” Musgrove noted.

To the sound of musketry and cannon they fell in the next morning and marched to the bank of the Rappahannock River south of Fredericksburg. There they joined the large decoy force masking Hooker’s intention to mass his army at Chancellorsville.

With Dan Sickles’s 3rd Corps, Musgrove and his comrades waited in plain view of the enemy. “I could see on the other side of the river both armies drawn up in battle array, but neither side sought to bring on an engagement,” he wrote. He looked up and saw a hot-air balloon watching the rebels.

While the infantrymen waited, Hooker and his main body of troops crossed the river north of the city. A courier delivered this news. His message from Hooker said Robert E. Lee’s army now had two choices: withdraw or fight on ground “where certain destruction awaited him.” Hats and caps flew into the air, the men cheered and Union bands struck up martial tunes.

The 3rd Corps made a forced march toward the right wing of the army, traveling far from the river to conceal its movement from the enemy. Dust rose from its path, making it hard for the men to see and breathe. They stopped at 1 a.m. on May 1 near the Hartwood church, where Musgrove joined the rush for water. That night he drank coffee for the first time, leading to a lifetime habit.

The men slept on blankets on the ground, but reveille came early – 4 a.m. They crossed the Rappahannock on pontoon bridges at United States Ford and entered the woods south of the river at noon. At 4 p.m. Musgrove fell in with the others for the two-mile march to the front. After a short sleep in the chill, they heard gunfire at 5 a.m.

It was May 2, a lovely spring Saturday morning in Virginia, and all seemed well. A report made the rounds that the rebel army was surrounded and would have to surrender; another said the rebels were in retreat. Lt. John M. Durgin of Gilmanton mounted a stump and gave a five-minute patriotic talk. The hour of action had come, he said, and all must do their duty like men.

Remnant of Catharine Furnace at Chancellorsville 

The regiment marched to the Fredericksburg plank road and past the Chancellor house, a two-story brick plantation house which Hooker had taken for his headquarters. They followed a path through the woods to Catharine Furnace, which produced iron from local ore deposits.

Signs of fighting were everywhere. Fence rails covered with green branches lay in piles. Artillery on Fairview, a rise in front of the 12th, was firing on enemy supply trains. Many men thought the trains signified the retreat they had heard about, but Musgrove was skeptical. For one thing, Army of the Potomac veterans rejected this view. As it turned out, they were watching the march of Stonewall Jackson’s men to attack the Union 11th Corps from the rear.

That attack almost caused capture or worse for two companies of the 12th, including the one Musgrove was with. He had been designated left general guide when the regiment advanced to form a new battle line. He left behind his comrades and joined Company F on the extreme left. He held his musket reversed so the left companies could see his position and form on it.

As Jackson’s men rolled up the Union line late in the day, the 12th New Hampshire was ordered to withdraw to avoid being swept up. Only at the last minute did Lt. Col. John F. Marsh of Hudson, N.H., realize that the two left companies had been left behind. He risked capture to run back and order their retreat.

“We marched, or double-quicked, for nearly half a mile through the woods with Johnnies on either flank, all unconscious of our presence, or we of theirs, and when we rejoined the rest of the regiment there was general rejoicing, for all had thought we had fallen into the hands of the enemy,” Musgrove wrote.

It was a harbinger of worse to come.

Once darkness and the Union army had checked Jackson’s advance, the men of the 12th rested on the battlefield. They were in line near the left of the Union guns at Fairview. For some reason, their brigade under Col. Samuel M. Bowman was isolated there. The men were wet and cold, and the cheers of the rebels and moans of the wounded kept them awake.

Before them that Sunday morning was a larger force under J.E.B. Stuart, the cavalry commander who had joined in Jackson’s attack on the Union 11th Corps the night before. Because Jackson and A.P. Hill had been wounded, Stuart now commanded the Confederate 2nd Corps. Sickles had asked for reinforcements, and Hooker might have sent them had a rebel shell not incapacitated him as he stood on the porch of the Chancellor House. 

Musgrove had by now left his position at the far left of the regiment and returned to his company. The men lay along a brook in front of the Union batteries. They felt the heat of the guns and heard screeching shells and shot above their heads.

Fire from the enemy came soon enough. Beside Musgrove lay two brothers, Henry and Uriah Kidder, who were both from Bristol, his hometown. Uriah, a corporal and the older of the two, turned to him and said, “Richard, Henry is dead.” Musgrove saw that ball had struck him on the top of the head and come out near his right eye. “He did not move after being struck,” Musgrove wrote.

Col. Joseph H. Potter of the 12th N.H. 

After taking more casualties, the regiment was ordered into the woods and told to stop the enemy. “Here the real work of the day for us commenced,” wrote Musgrove. When they reached the crest of a hill, their colonel, 40-year-old Joseph H. Potter of Concord, haled them and said, “There the devils are. Give them hell.”

“We had reached a knoll near the edge of the woods,” wrote Musgrove. “The rebels were in the woods on lower ground and on the side of a hill beyond. They could see us better than we could see them.”

Nevertheless, the 12th New Hampshire held its ground even after the Union troops on both of its flanks retreated. This led to disaster. “This was our first musketry engagement, and we did not know enough to retreat,” Musgrove wrote.

Rebel soldiers advanced and moved around both flanks to the 12th’s rear. The men kept shooting but “received effective fire in return” from a force that soon overwhelmed them. “Our men fell rapidly,” wrote Musgrove. “We neither retreated nor advanced, and it was not long before one half of our men lay dead or wounded in a long windrow along our line.”

Musgrove’s company commander, Capt. Orlando W. Keyes of Holderness, N.H., had been wounded near the brook but came forward with his men anyway. He was standing next to Musgrove when a bullet pierced his heart. Keyes “sprang into the air, then dropped dead at my feet,” Musgrove wrote.

He saw a soldier from another company skulking behind a tree. Col. Potter “grabbed him by the collar and struck him with his sword,” Musgrove wrote. “The man jumped to one side to avoid the blow, and they went round in a circle two or three times, the colonel hitting him a blow at every jump.”

In the heat of battle, a piece of shell or a bullet took away the center band of Musgrove’s musket. He picked up another and resumed firing but soon noticed that its owner had marked it. The musket belonged to Musgrove’s tent-mate, Pvt. Louis Rowe, another Bristol man. “I glanced over the dead and wounded near me, but did not find its owner,” Musgrove wrote. He concluded that Rowe had been wounded but made it to the rear

Musgrove carried a tourniquet – a metal rod with an elastic band. When Pvt. George W. Swain of Sanbornton, N.H., was hit, Musgrove placed the tourniquet around Swain’s leg. But nothing could save Swain, who died later that day.

In more than an hour, many of the men fired all 60 of the rounds they had brought into battle. Some crept around gathering more cartridges from their dead comrades.

Capt. Edwin E. Bedee

Capt. Daniel Hall, a Dover, N.H., lawyer who had been valedictorian of the Dartmouth College class of 1854, was serving as an aide to Brig. Gen. Amiel Weeks Whipple, the 12th New Hampshire’s division commander. Years later, Hall remembered learning that the regiment “got separated, by some chance, pretty essentially from the rest of the division.” After the rebels broke the division line in many places, “A retreat or rout was imminent,” Hall wrote. But the 12th New Hampshire “was still maintaining itself and had not given up its ground.”

When the division retreated, Whipple’s staff wondered where the 12th was. There had been no communication from Col. Bowman, its brigade commander, or anyone from the regiment.

Finally, the last survivors in the 12th’s line could stay no longer. About 25 men were left, including Musgrove. Lt. Edwin E. Bedee of Meredith, the ranking officer, ordered them to lie down and load. “The boys hesitated,” Musgrove wrote, “and Bedee, seeing the Johnnies advancing, gave the order, ‘Rally round the flag, boys, and get out of this.’ ” With the rebels chasing them and looping around their sides, the remnant of the 12th New Hampshire retreated.

Among the many comrades they left on the field for dead was Lt. John M. Durgin, the officer who had given the patriotic talk the day before. Durgin was badly wounded but survived.

It took a while to calculate the regiment’s losses, but it turned out the 12th had suffered more casualties than any other regiment at Chancellorsville, North or South. Of the 558 men and officers it sent to battle, 41 were killed, 213 wounded and 63 missing – 317 in all.

Next: The retreat