The possibility of a call to action at almost any minute was seen in April, 1863, when orders came that the regiment be held ready to march. Reinforcements were going forward to the Army of the Potomac, now under Hooker, in large numbers; but the Nineteenth was finally left in the Defences. Thus months were passed in the routine of drill and parade, guard mounting and target practice, varied by brief and rare furloughs, while the lightnings of the mighty conflict raging so near left them untouched. "Yet," it is related, "a good many seemed to be in all sorts of affliction, and were constantly complaining because they could not go to the front. A year later, when the soldiers of the Nineteenth were staggering along the Pamunkey, with heavy loads and blistered feet, or throwing up breastworks with their coffee-pots all night under fire in front of Petersburg, they looked back to the Defences of Washington as to a lost Elysium."
It was in November, 1863, that the War Department orders were issued changing the Nineteenth Infantry to a regiment of heavy artillery, which Governor Buckingham denominated the Second Connecticut. Artillery drill had for some time been part of its work, and the general efficiency and good record of the regiment in all particulars was responsible for the change, which was a welcome one, as the artillery was considered a very desirable branch of the service, and the increase in size gave prospects of speedier promotions.
Recruiting had been necessary almost all the time to keep the regiment up to the numerical standard; death and the discharge for disability had been operating from the first. It was now needful to fill it up to the artillery standard of eighteen hundred men, and this was successfully accomplished. Officers and men were despatched to Connecticut to gather recruits, and their advertisements set forth enticingly the advantage of joining a command so comfortably situated as "this famous regiment" in the Defences of Washington, where, it was permissible to infer, it was permanently stationed, a belief which had come to be generally held. The effort, however, was not confined by geographical limits, and a large part of the men secured were strangers to Litchfield County. Before the 1st of March, 1864, over eleven hundred recruits were received, and with the nucleus of the old regiment quickly formed into an efficient command.
In the Defences. Guard mount
"This vast body of recruits was made up of all sorts of men," the history of the regiment states. "A goodly portion of them were no less intelligent, patriotic, and honorable than the 'old' Nineteenth—and that is praise enough. Another portion of them were not exactly the worst kind of men, but those adventurous and uneasy varlets who always want to get out of jail when they are in, and in when they are out; furloughed sailors, for example, who had enlisted just for fun, while ashore, with no definite purpose of remaining in the land service for any tedious length of time. And, lastly, there were about three hundred of the most thorough paced villains that the stews and slums of New York and Baltimore could furnish—bounty-jumpers, thieves, and cut-throats, who had deserted from regiment after regiment in which they had enlisted under fictitious names and who now proposed to repeat the operation. And they did repeat it. No less than two hundred and fifty deserted before the middle of May, very few of whom were ever retaken and returned to the regiment. There were rebels in Alexandria who furnished deserters with citizens' clothes and thus their capture became almost impossible."
At first, and perhaps to some extent always, there was a mental distinction made by the men between those who had originally enlisted in the "old Nineteenth," and the large body which was now joined to that organization, many of whom had never seen the Litchfield hills. But there was enough character in the original body to give its distinct tone to the enlarged regiment; its officers were all of the first enlistment, and the common sufferings and successes which soon fell to their lot quickly deprived this distinction of any invidiousness. The Second Artillery was always known, and proudly known, as the Litchfield County Regiment.
