Tag Archives: Manassas

A Hamlin could get away with cowardice

If he did not skedaddle from Manassas in late day on Sunday, July 21, 1861, then why did Augustus Choate Hamlin expend so much ink explaining why he was not a coward? Thanks to his vice-presidential uncle, Hamlin enjoyed a distinguished surname that fateful spring. A doctor by profession and a Republican by choice, he […]

Images of the Dead

During the early months of the Civil War, civilians and soldiers — North and South alike — viewed war as a grand adventure comprising glittering cavalcades of marching soldiers and held-high flags. Then came the reality of war, experienced first on the battlefield by amateur soldiers in early summer 1861 and next by civilians some […]

Mutineers could drive an officer crazy

Deserters were not the only man-made plague that drove Maine officers crazy during the Civil War; independent-minded Maine soldiers might mutiny, too, if they so decided. Patriotic fervor swept the Midcoast in mid-April 1861. A business partner with Hiram Berry, Elijah Walker sold coal and lumber in Rockland, recently split from Thomaston and designated the […]

If only Andrew Bean’s trunk could talk

  Sometimes we can almost reach across history and “touch” a Civil War veteran. At least with Andrew Derby Bean from Brooks, we can touch the trunk that he took to war in spring 1861, and if only that trunk could talk, If only the trunk owned by Andrew Derby Bean could talk, the war […]

Pro-Union mob violated the 1st Amendment in Bangor

Freedom of the press – at least the press owned by Bangor Democrat Marcellus Emery – literally flew out the window on Aug. 12, 1861. By that summer, many Maine Democrats opposed the fledgling Civil War. In his 1967 graduate thesis “Civil War Bangor,” Professor John DiMeglio wrote that Democrat State Committee Chairman Marcellus Emery […]

The 2nd Maine Infantry charges onto Henry House Hill at Manassas

    The importance of the battle fought at Manassas, Va. on July 21, 1861 cannot be over-emphasized.Two amateur armies – with the South’s better led and the North’s better equipped – fought a daylong battle across the rolling terrain that borders the Warrenton Pike north of Manassas. The amateur soldiers fought in stifling heat […]