No one had come across Major Blake. He wasn’t among the Union prisoners, nor with the wounded. Yet no one had found his body on the field, either.
In the weeks that followed, Ned’s parents and siblings suffered in excruciating uncertainty. Telegrams and letters flew back and forth between the family and Ned’s regiment. Then an officer in the same brigade, who’d been wounded and taken prisoner, “stated that the body of a major, near where he lay, was rifled by an enemy officer, who showed him among other things a gold pin (skull and crossbones) which he had appropriated.”55
Soldiers could see what happened to unidentified bodies after a battle: often, they were buried in mass graves without being marked. Since the government didn’t issue dog tags, the men solved the identification problem themselves. Alfred Bliss had a metal disc engraved with his name, unit, and hometown; he could pin it to his uniform or wear it on a string around his neck. His identification tag also bore the Masonic symbol, which might have earned Bliss special treatment if captured by a brother Mason from the South. George Stannard, a Clinton man in the 14th Connecticut, whittled a peach pit into a tiny basket (which later lost its loop) on which he carved his initials, company, and regiment number.
Two months after the battle, one of Ned’s friends wrote that he had located a soldier who had seen the major fall:
He tells me that in the second wood Major Blake told him they were falling back. He looked around & they two were almost the only ones of the regiment in sight. They went back to the fence & found Col. Chapman with a prisoner. They all started to go back across the wheat field and when half way across Col. C fainted (he had not been well) and Major Blake was struck, fell, and did not stir afterward.
Major told him in the wood he had been wounded twice. He did not know where he was wounded or where the last shot struck him but regarded his death as instantaneous from the fact of his making no motion afterward.56
Still, some of Ned’s family clung to the belief that he could have been merely unconscious. His body was never found.
A year and a half after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, an envelope addressed to Ned arrived at the Blake home in New Haven. It was an invitation to the wedding of a Yale classmate. Ned’s brother George wrote to the groom, explaining that Ned had fallen in battle. “For weeks, and agonizing months, we could not believe him dead, and eagerly clung to the hope that he might have been taken prisoner, but nearly two long years have long since blotted out that hope and we now know that he [has] bravely fulfilled his mission and fallen a martyr to his Country,” wrote George sadly.57
ANOTHER BULL RUN
Three weeks after Union general John Pope suffered the Cedar Mountain defeat at the hands of Stonewall Jackson, he faced him again at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Commanding the Army of Virginia, Pope aimed to protect Washington and the Shenandoah Valley, and distract the Rebels from General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac, which was still licking its wounds on the Virginia Peninsula.
None of the Union commanders had reckoned on the skills of Gen. Robert E. Lee, who saw a way to take the conflict away from Richmond, toward Washington. Lee ordered Stonewall Jackson’s troops to cut around Pope’s forces, and capture the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, thereby cutting off Pope’s communication with Washington.
Jackson’s forces tangled with Pope over several days in engagements along the Rappahannock River. On August 26, the rebels flanked Pope’s troops and took the railroad, then marched on to capture a Union supply depot. The Confederate troops went on to take up position on the old battlefield at Bull Run. Stonewall Jackson knew that Confederate general James G. Longstreet was nearby; sure of reinforcements, Jackson goaded Pope into an attack.
For his part, Pope felt he had Stonewall Jackson cornered. He assumed that Jackson’s troops were retreating, and planned a series of attacks that he thought would crush the Rebels. During two days of battle, both sides suffered heavy casualties. On August 30, Pope watched as Confederate artillery decimated his troops; then, as Longstreet sent forward his force of over 25,000 Rebel troops, the Union once again fled Bull Run.
Pope’s two defeats—Cedar Mountain and Second Bull Run—left the Union army demoralized, while the Confederates, buoyed by their victories and Robert E. Lee’s leadership, proceeded confidently with their plans.
NO TIME TO LOSE
In September of 1862, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac into Maryland, and McClellan hurried his troops north to block the Rebels’ access to Washington.
By now, Connecticut had numerous regiments in the south, among them the 14th, 15th, and 16th Regiments. Several of the green regiments were quickly gathered into McClellan’s command. “Here it was,” wrote a soldier in the 14th Connecticut, “that the torn and tattered veterans of the army of the Potomac, fresh from the swamps and battles of the Peninsula campaign, excited our wondering interest as they marched by on their way to the front. But how they repaid our deprecatory looks at the condition of their clothes and accoutrements with their jeering ‘Hulloa children! Poor boys, dark blue pants, soft bread three times a week, three hundred miles from home and ain’t got but one mother a piece.’”58
The Union army had to move fast. Men who days ago had been bank clerks, painters, barbers, and pastry chefs had to be soldiers. Instantly. Connecticut’s 8th, 11th, 14th, and 16th Regiments joined the thousands of troops hurrying north toward Frederick, Maryland. The 14th and 16th Regiments were still unaccustomed to their new rifle muskets, which they’d received just days earlier.
The men and boys of the 14th Connecticut—those who had impulsively burst into song before President Lincoln—swung along the road eagerly. “The boys were in the best of spirits and sang with a will ‘John Brown’s Body’ etc… . As they passed an old engine-house in which were a number of Confederate prisoners, one called out ‘What regiment is that?’ ‘The 14th Wooden Nutmeg’ was the reply, to which the audacious prisoner answered ‘You will soon get your heads grated.’”59
But even the most gung-ho soldiers began to sober up as their inexperienced eyes took in the sights of real war. “Step by step they saw the desolation and waste of war-ruined homes, dismantled gun-carriages, piles of muskets and the putrefying bodies of horses and mules.”60 In the dark, the regiment reached South Mountain, where a bloody battle between the troops of McClellan and Lee had left thousands dead and wounded. The next morning, the 14th men looked around them in horror.
“I awoke about five o’clock on the battle-field of yesterday,” wrote Benjamin Hirst, “and went out to see what war was without romance. I cannot describe my feelings, but I hope to God never to see the like again.”61
Nelson Bailey, nineteen, saw the bloody, broken bodies and swallowed hard. “We were in the enemy’s front yard,” Nelson realized, “and he was there with his lawn-mowers.”62
CHAPTER FOUR
War by Citizen Soldiers
THE MAKINGS OF AN ARMY
In Connecticut’s 26th Regiment, the men of Company I took their orders from Captain Bentley, an ice dealer. A bookbinder, assisted by a train conductor, commanded the 25th Regiment’s Company K. In the 2nd Heavy Artillery, men in their forties answered to an eighteen-year-old student, Lt. Augustus Fenn. In the ranks were lace weavers, oystermen, bartenders, and factory workers. How in the world could Abraham Lincoln hope to win a war with an army like this?
Just a few weeks after the war began, a Hartford doctor named George Clary had observed: “all sorts and conditions of men are enlisting here … A company is this moment marching by my windows. Some of the recruits are stout, hardy farmer boys from the