Plymouth memories of an octogenarian

by William T. Davis

In my memories of the Civil War I shall confine myself as closely as possible to events which I saw, and in an humble way, a part of which I was. When on the 18th of April, 1861, the train bearing the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment to Washington, halted at the Trenton station in New Jersey, the Governor of that state walking in a thoughtful mood up and down the platform, was asked by a friend, what he was thinking about. He replied, “I am thinking about that damned little state of Massachusetts. Here she is two days after the call for troops, with seven states between her and Washington, half way to that city with a full regiment armed and equipped, bearing the first relief to our beleaguered capital. How could she do it?” My answer to the Governor’s question is that Massachusetts had an executive who knew how to do things, and a people accustomed to take the initiative in important emergencies. Governor John A. Andrew was inaugurated on the 5th of January, 1861, and before he slept that night he despatched confidential messages to the Governors of the other New England states urging preparations for the crisis, which he believed to be impending. Realizing also that the 8th of January would be the anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s victory in the battle of New Orleans, though Massachusetts had not been in the habit of celebrating that day, he seized the opportunity to arouse the spirit of patriotism among the people and ordered a hundred guns to be fired on the noon of the 8th on Boston Common, and national salutes to be fired in Charlestown, Lexington, Concord, Waltham, Roxbury, Marblehead, Newburyport, Salem, Groton, Lynn, Worcester, Greenfield, Northampton, Fall River and Lowell. The guns fired on that day were the first guns of the war, and, as a note of defiance to South Carolina, which had voted itself out of the Union, they sent a thrill through every loyal heart, and turned the minds of the people into channels to be gradually familiarized with thoughts of war. On the 16th of January, eleven days after the inauguration, he directed the promulgation of an order requiring the commanders of all volunteer militia companies to take immediate steps to fill their ranks with men ready to respond to the call of the commander-in-chief, discharging any who were not so ready, and supplying their places with those who were. At a later date the Governor by contracts afterwards confirmed by the legislature, ordered six thousand yards of cloth, a yard and a half wide at $1.37 per yard, two thousand military overcoats at $2.15 each, two thousand knapsacks of the army pattern at $1.88 each, one thousand pairs of blankets at $3.75 a pair, two thousand haversacks at 75 cents each, coat buttons costing $740, two hundred thousand ball cartridges at $14 a thousand, and three hundred thousand percussion caps. The legislature adjourned on the 11th of April, having appropriated one hundred thousand dollars as an emergency fund, twenty-five thousand dollars for overcoats and equipage, and having so far amended the existing militia law which limited the active militia to five thousand men, as to give the Governor authority to organize as many companies and regiments as the public exigency might require. Such, your Excellency, the Governor of New Jersey, was the condition of Massachusetts, when the first call for troops was made on the 15th of April, and thus is your question answered. Massachusetts was ready with her toe on the line when the call to arms was sounded.

On the 15th of April, Company B, 3rd Regiment, the Standish Guards of Plymouth, was without a captain. Charles C. Doten, 1st Lieutenant in command, was at that time in charge of the telegraph office, in the rooms now occupied by Mr. Loring’s watchmaker’s-shop on Main street. In the early evening of that day he received a despatch from David W. Wardrop of New Bedford, Colonel of the Third Regiment, ordering him to report with his company to him on Boston Common the next forenoon. A messenger bearing an official order reached Plymouth during the night. The news of the order spread like the wind through every street, and into every house and home. The excitement was intense. Every store was vacated by its loungers, every meeting was dissolved, and every family circle gathered around the evening lamp was broken up, and the armory of the Guards in Union Building on the corner of Main and Middle streets, became at once the meeting place of the citizens. One after another of the members of the company who were accessible, reported himself, every man ready to respond to the call. As chairman of the Board of Selectmen I gave the men assurances, which were reinforced by prominent citizens, that their families would be provided for during their absence, and ready hands were offered to take up and finish any work which they might leave uncompleted. The call was for three months’ service, and at nine o’clock the next morning nineteen members of the Company marched to the station, escorted by a large procession of citizens, and embarked for Boston. With the addition of two members joining at Abington, and two others joining in Boston, the company was quartered that night in the hall over the Old Colony Railroad station, and Wednesday morning received nineteen recruits from Plymouth. In the afternoon of that day the Company embarked on the steamer S. R. Spaulding, which hauled into the stream, and anchored for the night. After the steamer had left the wharf, seventeen additional recruits reached Boston, and quartering in Faneuil Hall, joined their comrades aboard ship on Thursday morning. On Thursday the 18th, the steamer sailed for Fortress Monroe with sixty men in the ranks of the company.

I do not propose at this stage of my memories to follow the Plymouth soldiers to the front, but shall at a later point in my narrative include a list of their names, and as far as possible an account of their services in the field. While in Boston with the Plymouth Company, I offered to the Governor on Wednesday in behalf of the Plymouth bank, of which I was President, the use of twenty thousand dollars as a contribution to an emergency fund to meet expenditures which must at once be made. I have every reason to believe that this was the first contribution made by the banks of Massachusetts to a fund, which when an extra session of the legislature convened on the 14th of May, had reached the sum of thirty-six hundred thousand dollars. This fund was necessary, as when the extra session met the amount of the emergency fund provided for at the regular session, had been exceeded by expenditures and liabilities by the sum of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. On my return home the Selectmen called an informal meeting of the citizens to meet on the afternoon of Saturday the 20th to consider ways and means to provide for the families of the soldiers. At that meeting it was voted, “That the Selectmen be requested to apply and distribute at their discretion a sum not exceeding $2,000 towards the assistance of those families who by the sudden departure of the troops are left in need of pecuniary aid—such sum to be raised in the name of the town, or in such other way as the Selectmen shall deem expedient.”

On Wednesday, April 24th, I was in Philadelphia, and after concluding the business which had called me there, I made up my mind that if possible I would run on to Washington. General Butler had left Philadelphia on Saturday the 20th, and at Perryville on the north bank of the Susquehanna River, had with the 8th Massachusetts Regiment embarked on board the ferry boat Maryland for Annapolis, as the railroad between the river and Baltimore had been obstructed, and the bridges burned. The 7th New York Regiment, at the same time took the steamer Boston at Philadelphia and started for Annapolis by the way of the Delaware river and the sea. Going to the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore station in Broad street, I asked Mr. Felton, the President of the road, if it were possible to reach Washington. He told me that there was no communication by rail or wire with any point south of the Susquehanna, and that nothing was known of the movements of the Maryland since she left Perryville on the previous Saturday. He said that Major T. W. Sherman’s Battery was at Elkton on the line of the road awaiting an opportunity to go to Washington, and that when the Maryland returned from Annapolis he should despatch a train, with the view of following in the wake of Gen. Butler. After waiting in his office an hour or two, he told me that the boat had arrived, and that he should start a train for Perryville at four o’clock. At that hour the train started, made up of a single passenger car, a combination car, and a platform car, carrying two guns protected by a portholed sheet iron casemate. There were only three or four on board, and not wishing to be discommoded by impedimenta on a somewhat doubtful excursion, I left my valise at the hotel. Arriving at Perryville in the early evening with the Battery which we found waiting at Elkton, we embarked on the Maryland for the trip down the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay outside of Baltimore to Annapolis, which we reached about midnight. On our way we passed over the anchorage ground where Francis Scott Key, while a prisoner on board of a British man of war in the war of 1812, witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry, and wrote the “Star Spangled Banner.” As we sailed over the spot the Battery men gathered on deck and sang the song with the very scene in view which had originally inspired it. Lying at the entrance of Annapolis harbor until we had communicated by rockets with the town, we finally reached the wharf, passing the frigate Constitution on the way, which with sails bent by members of the Marblehead companies in the eighth regiment was about to be taken for safety to New York, manned with the Marblehead men. At Annapolis we learned that when General Butler arrived with the 8th Massachusetts, the rebels had torn up the track of the branch road connecting Annapolis with the Baltimore and Washington railroad, and disabled the locomotives. But the General was equal to the emergency, and with mechanics in his command he relaid the track, with machinists also in the ranks he repaired the locomotives, and also with his Marblehead soldiers he bent sails on the Constitution. The day before he had marched on to the junction, and was then with the 7th New York artillery at the junction, or in Washington.

We arrived in Washington about daylight on Thursday morning, the 25th, and while registering my name at Willard’s hotel, I heard the cry of fire, and going out found a fire well started in a building on the avenue next to the hotel. The efforts of the firemen seemed to be unavailing, with ladders too short, and no means of reaching the roof of the building. Directly cheers and the rattle of wheels were heard up the avenue, and the Ellsworth Zouaves appeared on the scene. They were quartered in the Capitol, and hearing the alarm had jumped out of the windows, and breaking open an unused engine house in which was stored an old engine, they dragged the machine down the avenue at a double quick, and were at once the chief actors in the scene. They were nearly all New York firemen, and hence were called the Fire Zouaves, and shinning up the water spouts they were soon on the roof, where I saw two of them hang a comrade by his legs over the eaves so that he could reach the hose held by a ladderman, and be pulled up with it to the flat roof above. What was mere play for them was done in the presence of a cheering crowd, and the fire was soon extinguished.

There were then four Regiments in Washington, the Sixth Massachusetts, the Ellsworth Fire Zouaves, the Seventh Regiment of New York and the First Rhode Island commanded by Colonel Ambrose E. Burnside. The two first were in the capitol, the Rhode Island Regiment was quartered in one of the public buildings, and the Seventh Regiment was encamped. All of these Regiments, except the 6th Massachusetts, had reached Annapolis by the sea, and the 8th Massachusetts Regiment was still encamped between Annapolis Junction and Washington. I called on Col. Jones of the Sixth, and visited the quarters of the other regiments. The tale told by Col. Jones of his passage through Baltimore, and his reception in Washington, was pathetic, indeed, and aroused a feeling of pride in my state, which I had never so completely experienced before. This feeling was intensified by the tales told me by men of Washington who with tears in their eyes described the march up the avenue of the regiment on the nineteenth, and the sudden transformation from despair to hope, from despondency to joy, from the fear of the capture of the city to an assurance of its safety, the tale always ending with the exclamation, “God Bless old Massachusetts.” Wherever it was known, whence and how I came to Washington, I found everything wide open. In the evening I returned to Annapolis, and so on to Philadelphia, and reached home on Saturday.

After my return the Selectmen issued a warrant for a town meeting to be held on the 11th of May to further provide for soldiers’ families, and to appropriate money for uniforms and equipments. At that meeting it was voted to confirm the vote passed at the informal meeting on the 20th of April, and in addition it was voted to pay six dollars per month to each soldier with a family, who shall enlist for the war, and four dollars per month to each unmarried soldier during the term of one year from the first of May. It was also voted to appropriate $1,500 for equipping volunteers for three years’ service, who might be citizens of Plymouth. At the special session of the legislature convened on the 14th of May, the state adopted the monthly pay to the soldiers, and it became henceforth what was called state aid. Before the 6th of May Samuel H. Doten had been authorized to recruit a company for three years’ service, and had promptly enrolled sixty-seven men, including himself, whose enlistment papers bore the above date. By authority of the Selectmen, acting under the vote of the town, passed on the 11th of May, the ladies of the town at once bought materials, and in Leyden Hall, met daily for the purpose of making uniforms. The company was equipped at an expense of $1,025.49, and on the 18th of May left for Boston. They marched directly to the State House, where they were drawn up in Mt. Vernon street some hours awaiting acceptance, and a supply of muskets and equipments, including overcoats, blankets, knapsacks, and haversacks. The acceptance of the company was delayed by the interference of Hon. Henry Wilson, who had arrived that morning from Washington, and was urging upon the Governor a stoppage of enlistments. When I went to the Governor’s room to report the arrival of the company, I met Mr. Wilson at the door, and he said, “Davis, carry your company home, we have got all the men we want, and more, too;” but notwithstanding he was chairman of the committee on Military Affairs on the part of the United States Senate, Governor Andrew disregarded his opinion, and finally in due form accepted the company and ordered the necessary arms and equipments. On the 1st of January, 1861, the state owned ten thousand serviceable muskets and twenty-five hundred Springfield rifles, and after ineffectual efforts of myself and Capt. Doten, to secure the rifles, the company was obliged to take up with the inferior arms. On that afternoon, the 18th of May, the company went on board the steamer Cambridge, and sailed for Fortress Monroe, where it was attached to the Third Regiment during that Regiment’s three months’ service.

After the departure of the Standish Guards, Plymouth was left without a military company, and to meet any possible emergency it was thought advisable to organize a Home Guard. Its ranks were at once filled, and meetings were held for drill in Davis Hall, which continued for several months. Nathaniel Brown, who in earlier days was skilled as a drill master in the volunteer militia, was chosen captain, and I held the position of 1st Lieutenant. As chairman of the Board of Selectmen I urged the formation of the company, believing that it would serve as a preparatory school for military instruction; which would in due time develop a military spirit, and promote enlistments. Such proved to be the effect of the organization as of those who were at various times its members, nearly all joined the army.

At the time of which I am speaking wage earners in Plymouth found little to do, and the monthly pay to soldiers’ families was proving inadequate to meet their necessities. The wives and mothers of the soldiers were anxious to add to their means of support if work could be furnished them. In order to do what I could to help them I made arrangements with a clothing house in Boston to send me such quantities of cut out clothing as they were able, which was eagerly taken and made up, and sent back to Boston. For some weeks my house looked like a clothing store, with cases packing and unpacking, and applicants for work coming and going with bundles of garments either cut out or made up.

In the last week of May, Governor Andrew asked me to visit the Massachusetts soldiers at their various camps, and report to him in writing concerning their condition and needs, and any complaints they might make of their treatment in the service. These troops consisted of the 3rd, 4th, 6th and 8th Massachusetts Regiments, already referred to, to which the 5th Regiment, Cook’s Battery and the Third Battalion of Rifles had been added.