Hidden History of Connecticut Union Soldiers

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REMEMBERING

LET US CHERISH THIS LOVE

In the history of Connecticut’s state capital, one date remains unsurpassed.

On September 17, 1879, fifty-seven thousand people—more than double the city’s population—packed downtown Hartford to watch eight thousand Civil War veterans march from the Old State Armory with their fragile, soiled battle flags to place them in the new state capitol building. Months in the making, Battle Flag Day was a celebration, and a remembrance, of the service of more than fifty-five thousand Connecticut men and boys who fought to crush the Great Rebellion.² Seventeen years to the day after more than two hundred sons of the state were killed or mortally wounded at the Battle of Antietam, the conflict’s bloodiest day, memories of the war remained fresh.

The weather was ominous the day before, but that Wednesday morning, the skies cleared, and when the sun rose, many anxious hearts were filled with gladness.³ In the Hartford Daily Courant, headlines trumpeted, The Day We Celebrate! and All honor to the Old Flag and the heroes who defended it! Another story in the newspaper that morning declared:

To-day is the people’s festival. It is a day of triumph, but not of ostentation over a conquered foe. We shall see in our streets today no Roman triumph, with trains of subjugated races and spoils of ravaged territories, nor any of the glittering emblems of conquest. We shall see advanced high the standards of a free people, standards that have been heroically borne in battle and storm to a victory won not only for the union of these States, but for a common humanity everywhere.

Civil War veterans march through Hartford on Battle Flag Day, September 17, 1879. Author’s collection.

Crowds gathered shortly after sunrise, and by 8:00 a.m., martial music filled the air in the state capital, where nearly every building was decorated with patriotic symbols. The Connecticut State Mutual Life Insurance Building was draped with red, white and blue bunting four stories high, and a massive Goddess of Liberty painting hung from the City Hotel, which was covered from top to bottom with folds of the national colors.

Across from city hall, flags, eagles, wreaths, a latticework of evergreens and banners with the names of Connecticut regiments and battles they fought in decorated a huge thirty-three-foot arch—the most extravagant of four memorial arches that spanned city streets. (In a spectacular display that night, city hall was illuminated from its base to its dome by gas lamps and Chinese lanterns, and newfangled electric light was reflected off a fountain of water, much to the crowd’s delight.) In another highlight of the day, 130 little girls, each wearing a red, white and blue sash, formed a twenty-fivefoot-high pyramid in stands set up at South Green.

Even smaller patriotic displays had their charm.

On Main Street, a large image of Sherman’s March to the Sea appeared in the window of Stevens Market, and under a stuffed eagle in front of a candy store, a sign read, Let us Scream! At the office of Dr. Nathan Mayer, a brilliant man who survived a bout with yellow fever as 16th Connecticut regimental surgeon, a large crimson banner with gold lettering proclaimed, Through battle-smoke and prison pen. You’ve brought your flag, ye Sixteenth men.

The grand day also appealed to the veterans’ stomachs.

In dining tents in West Park, opposite the State Capital Building, a massive feast included 700 pounds of tongue, 2,500 pounds of corned beef, 500 pounds of roast beef, 3,000 pounds of ham, 300 pounds of cheese and 12,000 pounds of doughnuts—so much food that half as many more veterans could have been comfortably fed.⁴ After the veterans were served, the culinary delights were made available to the public, and there was a general clearing out of all the whole stock provisions by more than ten thousand people in all.⁵

But the greatest highlight, of course, was the veterans’ march shortly after noon from the state armory to the new state capitol building, where the battle flags, lovingly repaired by a ladies’ committee, found a new home. The streets were black with humanity, church bells pealed and the veterans received a thunderous ovation during the parade of nearly ten thousand marchers over a three-mile route.⁶

The disabled veterans occupied two large four-horse omnibuses and several carriages, all prettily decorated, according to an account of the parade. Back of them the eye rested upon a solid swaying mass of veterans, filling Main Street as far as the eye could see to the northward, flags and guidons fluttering in the breeze, band instruments glittering and mingled strains of music falling on the ear.⁷ Perhaps the oldest marcher was eightyone-year-old Thomas G. Brown, a War of 1812 veteran who as chaplain of the 21st Connecticut was wounded while praying over a dying soldier at Battle of Drewry’s Bluff in Virginia 1864.

After the veterans reached the capital building, Hartford’s Joseph Hawley, one of the state’s more highly regarded commanders during the war, spoke of the great meaning of the day. Before the Civil War, he was editor of the Hartford Evening Press, a major supporter of Abraham Lincoln. Enlisting as captain in the 1st Connecticut six days after the war began, the North Carolina–born soldier would finish the war as a brigadier general. After the war, Hawley served as a one-term governor of Connecticut from 1866 to ’67 and later became the influential owner of the Hartford Courant.

It is quite certain, the fifty-two-year-old veteran said during his Battle Flag Day speech, that we shall never again be summoned as battalions, with trumpet and drum, banner and cannon, for even a noble holiday like this. Let the flags rest. In a few years these men will no longer be able to bear arms for the land they love, but these weather-worn and battle-torn folds shall remain through the centuries testifying that Connecticut was true to free government, and pledging her future fidelity.⁸

Among at least five Union generals in attendance was sixty-five-year-old Ambrose Burnside, who as commander of the IX Corps at Antietam steered the 11th and 16th Connecticut regiments to disaster. The love of these old flags and the love of the Union, he said in a short speech, are coincident. Let us cherish this love, comrades, do all we can by example and precept to transmit it to posterity.⁹

The next day, the Daily Courant raved, Probably never in this country, certainly never in any other, was seen exactly such a spectacle.

The veterans who marched in Battle Flag Day must have been pleased—and many should have been quite thankful. More than 5,300 of their comrades—about 10 percent of the state’s contribution to the war effort—died during the Civil War.¹⁰ They perished in well-known battles at Gettysburg, Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg as well as in more obscure engagements at places such as Pocotaglio, South Carolina; New Bern, North Carolina; and Deep Bottom, Virginia.

At the infamous POW camp in Andersonville, Georgia, more than three hundred Connecticut soldiers died of disease or ill treatment.¹¹ It was a place so terrible that William Nott recalled seeing fellow prisoners lying in the open without protection from the elements, covered with maggots. The food they got, the 16th Connecticut sergeant recalled of the sickly soldiers, "just past [sic] through them and lay right beside them. Ah, it was horrible."¹²

Sadly, the remains of many of the state’s dead at Andersonville, and elsewhere throughout the South, were never recovered by their families. Decades after the war, a 10th Connecticut veteran who returned to North Carolina, where his regiment fought in 1862, regretted being unable to find his comrades’ graves. I could find the graves of only four who were killed at the battle of Newbern, he wrote. The graves of the rest of my friends were all marked ‘Unknown.’ Such is fame, to be buried in a strange land and graves marked ‘Unknown.’¹³

Many Connecticut soldiers died in obscurity, largely forgotten in their home state. In a little-known collision of ships on the Potomac River fourteen days after Lee surrendered to Grant, seven soldiers from the star-crossed 16th Connecticut—young men who survived Antietam and Andersonville—drowned. The story was barely covered in Connecticut newspapers—or anywhere else.

The war rocked families in Connecticut to an unreported degree—until now. At least forty sets of brothers from the state died, and stunningly, three families each lost three sons. Further research will undoubtedly reveal more.

There were also many stories of triumph and heroism, also relegated to the margins of history. While a prisoner of war in Georgia, the 16th Connecticut chaplain boldly disregarded a Rebel commander’s order that forbade him to pray aloud for President Lincoln. Beloved by his comrades, Charles Dixon survived his prison experience and after the war was a frequent attendee at veterans’ gatherings. And there were villains, too. One Connecticut soldier was murdered in battle by a comrade, who was tormented in his dreams by his victim.

Some who survived spent the rest of their days crippled physically or mentally—or both. At the Battle of Cold Harbor on June 1, 1864, Robert Coe, a private in the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, was shot in the foot and left arm, which was amputated. After the war, he returned to Connecticut to farm in Bristol and Harwinton. [Coe] has done with one arm almost everything that could be done with two—plowing, hoeing, chopping and loading timber, a newspaper account noted. No man has showed greater pluck or fortitude. Coe’s health declined because of his war wounds, and he died in 1869, five days short of his twenty-ninth birthday.¹⁴

The Civil War is still commemorated in Connecticut today, albeit on a much smaller scale than the grand Battle Flag Day celebration of long ago. On Memorial Day in the village of Collinsville, small American flags are placed around a granite monument that honors area soldiers whose bodies were not returned to Connecticut. And in the hamlet of Northfield, citizens have gathered nearly every year since 1870 at the town’s Civil War memorial on the small village green to honor veterans. Nine names of soldiers who died during the rebellion are etched on the brownstone monument, which was dedicated in 1866, making it one of the country’s older Civil War memorials. Above the raised letters LINCOLN on the north side of the monument is a phrase borrowed from the Bible: So That The Generations Might Know Them.

Like that phrase on the Northfield memorial, this book is a small effort to remember a remarkable generation. Here is a Hidden History of Connecticut Union Soldiers.

BROTHERS

A HIDEOUS DREAM

Dressed in their Sunday best, the well-to-do Hopsons stared intently into the camera at a sitting for a family portrait about five years before Americans slaughtered one another during the Civil War. Edward, better known as Ned, sat at the far left in the front row, wearing a bemused look and an oversized bow tie. His handsome elder brothers, William and George, stood in the back row with sisters Elizabeth and Carrie. Oliver—the family patriarch and a well-regarded Protestant Episcopal minister from Vermont—sat in the front row with his wife, Caroline, and their youngest children, Mansfield and Mary. More than two decades earlier, the Hopsons had mourned their firstborn child, a son named Richard, who died in infancy.

The three eldest Hopson sons were great achievers: George, like his father, found his calling in religion and became a minister after attending Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; William, the eldest, had an aptitude for business; while Ned, an excellent student, also followed in the footsteps of his father and brother, attending Trinity and rising to second in his class. Fortunate to be alive, he had survived a severe illness as a toddler, prompting a clergyman who had been told to prepare for his burial to remark to Edward’s father, He is spared for some good purpose.¹⁵

Less than a decade after the photograph was taken, two of Oliver Hopson’s sons were in the army—one serving for Connecticut and the Union, another for Georgia and the Confederacy. One of the brothers died in battle and was buried in a shallow Virginia grave with twelve of his comrades near the large white house of a country doctor. During the war, the Rebel of the family left little doubt that he thought the Hopsons were strong enough to survive his allegiance to a foreign flag.

In a prewar image of the Hopson family, Edward, who joined the Union army, sits at left. His brother William, who joined the Rebel army, is the tallest man in the second row. Courtesy Charlet Roskovics.

There is a great gulf opening between us, William Hopson told his mother, but it can never be so wide that our love cannot cross it.¹⁶

In the winter of 1861, Georgians were consumed by talk of the state’s secession from the Union. On January 19, Georgia became the fifth Southern state to join the Confederacy, prompting celebrations from the capital in Milledgeville to the small town of Perry, which was half wild with enthusiasm, according to William Hopson, a transplanted Northerner.¹⁷ When he was nineteen in 1855, William left his family in Vermont to settle in Macon, Georgia, where he became a cotton merchant.

Although the New York–born businessman hoped to avoid politics, William found that impossible as the country found itself on the precipice of war. In Perry’s town square, a Georgia flag fluttered atop a liberty pole, fiery speeches were made and several Northerners even declared themselves loyal to the South. One of them got so wound up that he was ready to sacrifice his abolition father should they meet in the conflict, Hopson told his twenty-one-year-old sister, Carrie.

And should war indeed break out, William made his allegiance clear.

Judging from the warnings to ‘come home’ received by some northerners residing here, he wrote from Perry on February 3, 1861, I presume they breathe out threatenings and slaughter. But I will not even begin a political discussion. I will remark however that in my opinion the man who would leave this section of the country now is a dastardly coward.

Although William didn’t like to write about himself, he was eager to ease the anxiety of his family back in New England, given the perilous state of the country. He quietly went about his business and, for a time, didn’t wear symbols of his Southern loyalty. Likewise, his business partner, a man named Davis, largely avoided politics, although he wore a South Carolina rosette and talked rather blood thirsty.

Hopson took great pleasure in his standing in his adopted state, writing that my course has won the confidence of the whole community. And when his name was discussed by locals, even one of the hardcore secessionists vouched for him. I am convinced, he wrote, that I am liked and trusted as much as I deserve to be.

On April 12, a little more than a month after Hopson wrote a letter to his sister, the Confederates bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The Civil War had begun. Eight days later, on his twenty-fifth birthday, William enlisted in the Confederate army. His status as a Rebel was official.

Soon after reports of Fort Sumter’s surrender reached Connecticut, Hartford citizens were swept up by patriotic fervor. Giant red, white and