Any body of men—a college class, a legislature, a regiment—is in character what its component members make it; in this case there was the material, which, furnished with worthy leadership—and it unquestionably had that—made up the organization whose not uneventful existence has been described. That they were better men, or worse, braver men, or more patriotic, than their descendants and successors would prove under similar conditions, or than the hundreds of thousands of their contemporaries who devoted themselves to the same service, is not to be believed; yet to have passed through such experiences as have been recounted, which became for them for a time the commonplaces of every-day life, is enough to place them apart from ordinary men in the eyes of our peace knowing generation. In fact, to have passed the tests of so fierce a course of education gives them a title to a place thus apart. The university man of to-day, as the burden of the baccalaureate sermons so frequently testifies, is consigned to a special place of responsibility in life because of his training; these men surely earned one of special honor by reason of theirs, which was, too, not like the other, preparation alone, but also fulfilment. The realization of how typical it all was of that generation and that time, brings the clearest understanding of the real scope of the Civil War.
To the members of the Litchfield County University Club it is perhaps a point of interest to take brief notice of those names on the regimental rolls which would probably have been found upon its list of members had the organization been in existence in that earlier time. A number of the officers and men were college graduates when they enlisted, and others gained degrees after the war ended; the list which follows is, however, necessarily incomplete; in fact, an absolutely correct list is no doubt hopelessly impossible.
Major James Q. Rice, who was killed at Winchester, was a member of the class of 1850 at Wesleyan, and received from that institution the degree of Master of Arts in 1855. At the time of the regiment's formation he was conducting an academy in Goshen, and was enlisted as captain of a company which he had been active in recruiting.
Lieutenant-Colonel Nathaniel Smith of Woodbury entered the Yale Law School in the class of 1853, but did not graduate. Ill health forced him to relinquish his commission early in 1864, and until his death in 1877 he was a leading citizen of the county.
Judge Augustus H. Fenn, Major and Brevet-Colonel, came back from the war, having lost an arm at Cedar Creek, to take a course in the Law School at Harvard, and Yale made him a Master of Arts in 1889. His prominence for many years in public life and as judge in the highest courts in the state is well known. At the time of his death in 1897, he was a lecturer in the Yale Law School, and member of the Supreme Court of Errors.
Rev. James Deane, Captain and Brevet-Major, was a graduate of Williams in the class of 1857. He was pastor of the Congregational church at East Canaan when the regiment was organized, and was one of its recruiting officers.
Adjutant Theodore F. Vaill, the historian of the regiment, was a student before the war at Union College, but did not graduate.
Captain George S. Williams, of New Milford, was a member of the class of 1852 at Yale for a time, and received a degree from Trinity in 1855.
Surgeon Henry Plumb, and Assistant-Surgeons Robert G. Hazzard and John W. Lawton were all graduates of the Yale Medical School, in the classes of 1861, 1862, and 1859. Assistant-Surgeon Judson B. Andrews graduated at Yale in 1855. He was captain in a New York regiment in the early part of the war, and became afterward superintendent of the Buffalo State Hospital, and a recognized authority on insanity before his death in 1894.
Chaplain Jonathan A. Wainwright graduated at the University of Vermont in 1846, and after the war was for some years rector of St. John's Church in Salisbury. He was later connected with a church college in Missouri, where he died in 1898.