Plymouth memories of an octogenarian

by William T. Davis

After the defeat of General Pope by General Lee at the second Bull Run, the rebel army crossed the Potomac at Noland’s ford, and reached Frederick in Maryland on the 6th of September, 1862. In the meantime General McClellan had been restored to the command of the army of the Potomac, and crossing the Potomac in pursuit of Lee, entered Frederick on the 12th, two days after its evacuation by the rebel army. On the 13th the union army passed through Frederick and overtook the rebel army at South mountain, where they fought a victorious battle on the 14th. The pursuit was kept up through Boonesboro and Keedysville, until Antietam river was reached, where the rebel army was strongly entrenched. Without intending to write a history of the battle, I think I can say as a result of my frequent studies of the conflict, that the Massachusetts troops acquitted themselves with special bravery. The battle was won, but while Burnside on the left was fighting desperately to hold a position, the loss of which would have involved the defeat of the army, and was calling on McClellan for aid, the 18th corps, under Fitz John Porter, to which the 18th and 32d Massachusetts belonged, was held fifteen thousand strong in reserve, and had no share in the battle. With the light we now have it is easy to see that if the reserves had been put in at the critical moment, as they were put in by Wellington at Waterloo, when he shut his field glass with a snap and gave the order, “Up guards, and at them,” the rebel army would have been destroyed before it recrossed the Potomac. The only excuse for McClellan was his belief that the battle was only suspended, not terminated, when night set in, and that on the morrow the army with fresh troops would win.

In the two battles, of South Mountain on the 14th of September, and Antietam on the 17th, the Massachusetts regiments suffered severely. In the first the 12th, 13th, 21st and 28th regiments, and the 1st and 8th batteries were engaged, and in the last the 2nd, 12th, 13th, 15th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 28th, 29th and 35th regiments, and two batteries. The 12th had seventy-four killed and 165 wounded, the 15th had 108 killed, and the 29th, 9 killed and 31 wounded, while the others suffered in various degrees between the highest and lowest as above. The most severely wounded were carried to hospitals on the field, and to temporary hospitals in Sharpsburgh and Frederick, while those less severely wounded were carried to Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, and some sent to their homes. Governor Andrew asked me to go out and visit the Massachusetts men, wherever they might be found in the hospitals. They needed no supplies, for they were abundantly furnished by the commissariat and the sanitary commission with everything from bedding and underclothing to wines and canned fruits and preserves. But there was something which neither of these agencies could supply, something to remove the depression of spirits which a sick man feels away from home, and which is the greatest obstacle to recovery. I have often seen the pallid cheeks of a soldier furrowed with pain, light up with a smile as he opened his eyes and found standing by his bedside a messenger from home.

Reaching Baltimore at night, I met at the hotel Dr. LeBarron Russell, and the next morning we went together by rail to Frederick, where we passed the night. Every available public building, including churches, had been converted into a hospital, and in one of these I remember finding Barnabas Dunham of Plymouth, a member of the 29th Regiment. In one of the church hospitals, I found Dr. Theodore Cornish in charge, brother of the late Aaron H. Cornish of Plymouth, who I think was either surgeon or assistant surgeon in a Rhode Island regiment. He gave us much information about the condition of the wounded in Frederick, and their dispersion to other places. About five years ago I met him on the steamboat coming to Plymouth, never having seen him since our interview in Frederick, and called him by name. He failed to recognize me until I reminded him of my encountering him in the hospital dressing the wound of a soldier who had been operated on by an excision of a section of the humerus to avoid amputation. The next morning we hired a conveyance to Boonesboro, a small village, through whose streets both armies had passed from South Mountain gap, where the battle of September 14th had been fought. The shattered trees and levelled fences and trodden down fields told their story of the conflict. We passed the night at Boonesboro, finding no Massachusetts wounded there. I was amused at a custom prevailing in that neighborhood disclosed to me by the landlady, when to a mild complaint of sleeping on a blanket, she answered that nobody thought of putting more than one sheet on the bed. The next morning we rode on to Keedysville, a straggling village of five hundred inhabitants, where nearly all the houses contained wounded men. There was a provost marshal stationed there, and going to his office we were surprised to find him to be Capt. Joseph W. Collingwood. His company was attached to Fitz John Porter’s Corps, held in reserve, and consequently had not been in the battle. Taking Capt. Collingwood into our carriage we drove to the Locust Spring hospital, containing under canvas about two hundred and fifty severely wounded men. Here Charles Henry Robbins, son of Hernan C. Robbins of Plymouth, died from a wound received in the battle. I saw his nurse, a fine woman from Chicago, named Mary Everingham, who expressed great interest in him, and I visited his grave in a pleasant field marked with a head and foot stone by a soldier named Keith of North Bridgewater, from which I took a stone to carry to his mother. Mr. Robbins belonged to Company H, 35th regiment, and enlisted in Weymouth. The next field tent hospital which we visited was at Smoketown, less than a mile from the extreme right of the Union line of battle, where hard fighting was done under Hooker in the early part of the day. This hospital contained about four hundred and fifty patients, under the charge of Dr. Vanderkeefe, a Hollander, who had served in the Crimea. His hospital was a model in care, cleanliness, distribution of comforts, and surgical skill. The work done by the sanitary commission was wonderful. At the first sign of a battle it despatched many wagons loads of sheets, coverlids, beds, towels, handkerchiefs, preserved meats, stockings, drawers, shirts, bandages, wines, etc., which reached the vicinity of the battle field before a gun was fired, and was ready for work when the wounded were carried to the rear. From this point we rode over the whole battle field, four miles in length, from Hooker’s cornfield to Burnside’s bridge, by the sunken road and the Dunker church, still littered with the debris of battle, and reached Sharpsburg late in the afternoon, on our way visiting Porter’s camp, and calling on Captains Charles H. Drew and Wm. H. Winsor of the 18th Massachusetts regiment. Late in the evening we reached Harper’s Ferry, where after a supper of ham and eggs we found sleeping quarters in an attic room, lighted and ventilated by a broken glass scuttle, and equipped with a bed with broken slats, leaving us to sleep on the floor, with our heads and feet on the rails of the bedstead. The next morning we went out to Boliver Heights, and visited the camps of the 15th, 19th, 20th and 29th Massachusetts regiments, the last having returned the night before from an expedition to Charlestown, and in the evening went by rail to Washington.

During my stay in Washington I visited all the hospitals, beginning with Lincoln Hospital. While passing through one of the wards I heard my name called by an occupant of one of the beds. Responding to the call I found a young man whom I had enlisted in Plymouth a few months before as a recruit for Col. Lee’s 20th Regiment. His name was Erik Wolff, a Swede of good education, who came to America to learn to become a soldier, and thought that promotion would be sure and speedy. His father, a merchant in Gottenburg, had had some years before business relations with Capt. John Russell, and having letters of introduction to Capt. Russell’s family he came at once to Plymouth on his arrival. He was now very sick with typhoid fever, and in his anxiety to be discharged, was so depressed in spirits that the surgeon said his recovery was hopeless, unless his discharge was secured. Col. Lee’s efforts had been unavailing, as at that time every application of the kind was rejected by the department. I told him that I would see what I could do, and jumping into a horse car, rode at once to the war department, reaching there before the office of the secretary was open. A long line of men and women stretched down the hall, all with anxious faces, evidently waiting to ask some favor of the secretary. When the door was opened the line shortened up so rapidly that I felt sure that short work was made of the applications. When I reached the door Mr. Stanton was standing at a small standing desk, and turning off the applicants right and left. I had never seen him before, and had no reason to believe that he had ever seen or heard of me. When my turn came I told him my story in as few words as possible, that I enlisted Wolff, that he was a foreigner, on whose service we had no claim, and was in the Lincoln hospital. Not a word was spoken by the secretary, not a single question asked, but as soon as I finished he touched a hand bell, to which an officer responded, and the secretary said, “Mr. Davis, if you will follow Major Hardee, he will make out the discharge.” Within two hours from the time I left the hospital I returned with the discharge to gladden the young fellow’s heart. He recovered after a protracted confinement, and returned to Massachusetts, receiving later from Governor Andrew a captain’s commission in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment. On my way home I visited the hospitals in Baltimore and West Philadelphia, carrying with me a realizing sense of the terrible incidents of war. I have told the story of my interview with Secretary Stanton to show the injustice of the charge that he was destitute of sympathy for the soldiers whom he used merely as a part of the machinery of war.

Proceeding in my narrative in chronological order, in the winter of 1862 and 1863, strenuous, but unavailing efforts were made by Governor Andrew to have the exposed harbors of the state properly protected. Finally it was determined to construct earthworks on the Gurnet and Saquish, and the work was entered upon at once under the direction of the Selectmen at the expense of the Commonwealth. I obtained from Mr. Fox, assistant secretary of the Navy, an order on Commodore Hudson in command at the Charlestown Navy Yard for seven guns for Fort Andrew, and five for Fort Standish, and had carriages made in Plymouth. These forts were completed in the early summer of 1863, and Governor Andrew was advised by the selectmen of their intention to name that on the Gurnet, Fort Andrew, and that on the Saquish, Fort Sandish. On the 16th of March I received from the Governor the following letter:

Dear Sir.—No fort as yet bears the name which your board of selectmen has so generously proposed for the larger fort now in progress in Plymouth harbor, nor had any ambition of my own ever suggested to my mind the possibility of becoming in that manner associated with such a work. I am deeply sensible of the honor; and while I feel that it does not properly belong to me, I can only leave to you and your associates the final decision, with a single suggestion that it would seem to be more fitting the occasion to connect the name of the first Governor of the Plymouth Colony with one of the fortifications of the harbor of Plymouth than the name you propose, even if I were a hundred times more worthy than I know myself to be.”

Notwithstanding Governor Andrew’s modest estimate of his public services, the fort received his name.

In 1862 I became quite intimate with Capt. James Birdseye McPherson of the United States Engineers. He was undoubtedly one of the ablest officers in the army, and his early death closed a career of great brilliancy. It was widely believed in the army up to the time of his death, that if Grant had died or resigned, he would have been his successor. During several years of the war I was obliged to spend much time in Boston, and while there I made the Tremont House my home. There were five or six regular bachelor boarders who occupied a table by themselves, one of whom was Capt. McPherson. He was born in Sandusky, Ohio, November 14, 1828, and graduated at West Point first scholar in the class of 1853. He rose rapidly, and while serving as an engineer in California, he became acquainted with General Halleck. When the war came on, having been promoted to a captaincy he was sent to Boston to mount guns on Fort Warren, and it was at that time that he boarded at the Tremont House, and at the table where he sat I was always when in town offered a chair. No one could meet and talk with him without being struck with his clear eye, his thoughtful face and thoroughly trustworthy deportment. One afternoon while I was at the Hotel, Captain Paraclete Holmes of Kingston, boarding there took up the Transcript and read aloud a news paragraph stating that Capt. McPherson had been ordered west to join the staff of General Halleck. When the Captain came in he was shown the despatch, and said that he knew nothing about it. When, however, he received his evening mail, his orders reached him. As he was ordered to report at once, we arranged a parting supper for the next evening, for which I remember, by the way, I ordered a gallon of oysters, which had been bedded on the Plymouth flats by S. D. Ballard, and which were pronounced by the supper party as the best they had ever tasted. When I bade the Captain good bye he said, “I shall have an opportunity now to see whether I have mistaken my profession.” The sequel demonstrated that he had not. He was soon promoted to be Major General of volunteers, and transferred to the staff of General Grant as Chief Engineer, serving with him at the battles of Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth and Iuka. He later commanded the right wing of Grant’s army, and at the siege of Vicksburg commanded the 17th Army Corps. After Grant assumed command of the army of the Potomac, he joined Sherman, under whom he was in command of 30,000 men. At the siege of Atlanta he was killed, July 22, 1864, at the age of thirty-five.

I was again in Washington visiting the hospitals after the battle of Fredericksburg, on the 13th of December, 1862, and after the death of Capt. Collingwood on the 24th, I sent a despatch to Andrew L. Russell, who informed his family and friends. I was on a visit to the College hospital in Georgetown, when Capt. Charles H. Drew was brought in severely wounded in the Fredericksburg battle. It fell to me while in Washington, during the battles of the Wilderness, to send a despatch to Mr. Russell, informing him of the death of Lemuel B. Morton, killed at the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, May 12, 1864.

On the 17th of July, 1863, as the result of a draft, one Plymouth man commuted, thirteen found substitutes, and three entered the service. In the autumn of 1863, under a call for 500,000 men, the quota of Plymouth was fixed at one hundred and seventeen. After the selectmen reported that the quota had been filled they were notified that in consequence of a delay in crediting enlistments for the army and navy, there existed a deficiency of twenty-five men, which must be filled by a draft. One man was held under the draft who found a substitute, and before another draft was ordered the selectmen had filled the quota by the purchase of recruits in Boston. A vote had been passed by the town offering to recruits a bounty of $125, and a committee of citizens were appointed to raise such funds to increase the bounty to such an amount as the selectmen might think advisable. The committee raised the sum of $3,776.25, and with this sum and the bounty, voted by the town, the selectmen secured twenty-two recruits for the army and four for the navy. Another call for 500,000 men was made July, 1864, and with money raised by the above committee to wit, $5,011.00, the selectmen obtained twenty-six recruits, who with the credit for the men in the navy heretofore withheld, and one representative recruit purchased by a citizen, filled the quota of the town.