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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

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Manufactured in China

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	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
1 Men of Connecticut! War Begins, Spring 1861	1
2 No One Dreamed of Anything but Victory Bull Run, Summer 1861	15
3 The Voice of Duty A Long War Ahead, Autumn 1861 to Summer 1862	27
4 War by Citizen Soldiers The Makings of an Army	49
5 I Never Knew What War Meant till Today Antietam, September 1862	61
6 Emancipation Is a Mighty Word Freedom Arrives	91
7 No Men on Earth Can Be Braver Fredericksburg, December 1862	105
8 Who Wouldn’t Be a Soldier? Life in Camp	127
9 All This Heroism, and All This Appalling Carnage Fighting in Virginia and Louisiana, Spring and Summer 1863	157
10 That Place Long to Be Remembered Gettysburg, Summer 1863	183
11 There Will Be No Turning Back Stubborn Fighting, July 1863 to June 1864	211
12 Hope Never Dying From the Siege of Petersburg to the Sea, June to December 1864	239
13 Our Army Perfectly Crazy On to Appomattox, 1865	263
14 Soldiers of the Union Mustered Out The Aftermath	283
Notes	295
Illustration Credits	311
Index	317

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

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