What Bobby Orr was to hockey, Di Longley is to Civil War research—always looking for stories of sacrifice, duty, courage, and humor buried in libraries, museums, graveyards, or webpages. And thank God for beer drinking after Panthers hockey games, or this book might never have been written.
CHAPTER ONE
Men of Connecticut!
WAR BEGINS, SPRING 1861
“Men of Connecticut! to arms!!” thundered the Hartford Daily Courant on April 13, 1861.1
Splashed across the newspaper was the shocking news: The day before, the Confederate military had opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Forty-three Confederate guns and mortars pounded Sumter until the Union commander surrendered the fort to the Southerners. With undeniable certainty, civil war had arrived.
Suddenly the Land of Steady Habits was anything but. Agitated and confused, people drew together to discuss the astounding events.
“Large groups were congregated upon the streets, and … the war was the all absorbing theme … In the conversation, heated and passionate, in which the crowds participated, there was but little to be heard except indignation at the outrage of the Southern Rebels. It was deep and earnest.”2
In the quiet town of Winchester, it wasn’t much different. “The bombardment of Fort Sumter flew over the telegraph wires on Saturday, April 14, 1861, and electrified the country,” wrote resident John Boyd. The Winsted Herald declared grimly, “Northern blood is up, and history, faster than the pen can write, is making.”3
But not everyone was astonished by the South’s attack. For months, Governor William Buckingham had vigilantly followed each development in the national conflict. After Abraham Lincoln’s election on November 6, 1860, South Carolina had moved to secede. Six other states had quickly followed. When Southerners fired upon an unarmed ship bringing troops and supplies to Fort Sumter on January 9, 1861, Buckingham had quietly directed his state quartermaster to order equipment for 5,000 troops, and advised militia units around the state to fill their ranks and stand ready.
Just days before Fort Sumter fell, members of the Governor’s Foot Guard assembled at the state armory. Before long, many of the men—like George Haskell—would lay aside their ceremonial Foot Guard uniforms to don the utilitarian blue wool of the Union army.
An impassioned early broadside proclaimed, “Your country is in danger!” and urged Connecticut men to “drill, drill with such muskets as are at hand” in preparation for war.
Buckingham’s forethought was providential: on April 15, President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to suppress the rebellion. The governor turned to his citizens and asked for a regiment of volunteers. Would Connecticut respond?
FOR OR AGAINST
“You must be counted for or against the government: which shall it be?” the Hartford Daily Courant demanded. “Descendants of those who marched under the banner of George Washington, which shall it be? … Sons of the old Charter Oak State, on which side do you enlist?”4
The answer came swiftly, from virtually every community in the state. Men crowded into hastily called meetings in town halls, assembly rooms, and churches. In Hartford, “men of all parties met, buried in a common grave all differences of opinion, and stood up as one man, brave, earnest, and steady for the contest. There was no faltering voice.”5
Men gave passionate speeches, calling for volunteers to defend the nation. George Burnham, a clerk, “said that if he had been so mean and despicable as to hesitate about his duty to his country’s flag, he could not have hesitated longer after seeing the brave, determined men before him … what he could do, he would do, and with his whole heart.”6
The dispute between North and South, and between Republicans and Democrats, was many years in the making. In 1859, John Brown, a deeply religious native of Torrington, Connecticut, brought the situation to a boiling point. A radical abolitionist, Brown advocated violence against slaveholders. He and twenty-one followers tried to initiate a slave rebellion, seizing a Federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with the aim of arming slaves and abolitionists to fight for freedom. The plan failed. Captured and convicted of treason, an unrepentant Brown was executed on December 2, 1859. Brown’s plot outraged and frightened Southerners, and fueled the antagonism of Democrats everywhere. Slavery was now the issue dividing the nation, and the Republicans and Democrats squared off.
Farmers, teachers, factory workers and college students jumped to their feet and cried, “I’ll go!” At a meeting in Brooklyn, Connecticut, a town of perhaps 2,000 people, 60 men enlisted in the space of half an hour.7 John Boyd, the secretary of the state, enrolled in the 3rd Regiment—at the age of sixty-two.
“O! Pa. you do not know what enthusiasm, what patriotism, there is here among all classes,” a New Haven woman wrote excitedly to her father. “Party distinctions are not named, every body is for our country and the right. Not only the American born but the Irish and the Germans [immigrants] are ready to take up arms in our common defense.”8
WIDE AWAKE
The spirited support for the Union had emerged in Connecticut more than a year earlier, in February of 1860, sparked by the enthusiasm of a group of young Republican men in Hartford.
A group of Northerners had formed the Republican Party in 1854 to fight the spread of slavery into the nation’s western territories. Steadily, the Republicans gained support in the Northern states and began to challenge the long-established Democratic Party, which supported the extension of slavery.
In early 1860, Connecticut’s gubernatorial race was in full swing. Thomas H. Seymour, a pro-South Democrat, faced Republican governor William Buckingham, who strongly opposed the expansion of slavery. Connecticut’s election for governor was viewed as a bellwether for the upcoming presidential election.
“It is the commencement of the contest between free and slave labor,” announced the Hartford Daily Courant, adding that “a vote this spring in Connecticut for Thomas H. Seymour, is a vote for slave labor in the territories. Laboring men—young men of enterprise and muscle—you are interested in this decision! … Shall the territories become plantation of negroes?—or shall they be the homes of … every man following his own plow, on his own soil, working for his own family?”9
The young men that the Courant addressed were not asleep. Daniel Francis, twenty-four, and Edgar Yergason, nineteen, were clerks in a dry-goods store in Hartford. In February of 1860, the two attended a meeting of Hartford Republicans, which closed with an enthusiastic torchlight parade. Several hundred men lined up and lit kerosene torches, only to find that many were leaking. Just a few steps away was the store where Francis and Yergason worked; they hurried in and emerged with lengths of inexpensive black fabric which they and a few others tied around their necks like capes to protect their clothing from the kerosene. The capes gave the men a military look, and the procession’s organizer put them at the head of parade.
A few days later, Dan Francis, Ed Yergason, and thirty-four other young working men formed a Republican club. The group would promote the election of Republican candidates, beginning with William Buckingham. The members decided their organization would assume a military air: they would wear dark capes and caps as they escorted Republican speakers, kept order at political rallies, and generated enthusiasm for the upcoming elections. Francis, Yergason, and the others might as well have slapped the Democrats in the face