Tag Archives: Oliver Otis Howard

Bath taxes the rich to recruit 90 soldiers

Known as the City of Ships, Bath on the lower Kennebec River already swarmed with soldiers when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issued General Order No. 94 on August 4, 1862. The order called for the loyal states to draft 300,000 militia for nine months’ service in the army. On Tuesday, July 8, Maine […]

Oliver Otis Howard recognizes the Copperhead threat

Home on furlough after Gettysburg, Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard feared that loyal Mainers (and Americans) might throw away at the ballot box the blood and guts spilled on the battlefield since April 1861. Sent to Maine to rest, Howard chafed to rejoin XI Corps. “It will be impossible for me to comply with any […]

Typhoid fever sweeps away the 7th Maine Infantry’s top dog

“Mr. Editor: We have lost our colonel,” a 7th Maine Infantry Regiment private informed the Bangor-published Daily Whig & Courier’s William H. Wheeler on Saturday, October 26, 1861. The news shocked many people in the Pine Tree State — and opened the promotion door to an Army captain. Hailing from Belfast, Thomas H. Marshall had joined […]

Lookout Mountain park commemorates the November 1863 “Battle Above the Clouds”

Point Park on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee rates among my favorite Civil War sites. Made famous during the November 24, 1863 Battle Above the Clouds (one battle that Joe Hooker did right), this ragged spur on the mountain’s north-facing summit gained perhaps greater fame from the photographs taken immediately afterwards. Its dramatic outline dominating […]

Union soldier murders Otis Howard’s black servant

A vicious Union soldier fatally shot a black servant employed at Brig. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard’s headquarters — and literally got away with murder in winter 1863. Many Union officers hired black servants during the Civil War. Other officers (particularly generals) assigned a white soldier to serve as what the British called a “batman,” an […]

North Yarmouth Academy alumni fought during the Civil War

Depending on the town, Maine schools operated “hit or miss” prior to the Civil War. Students might learn the “three R’s: reading, riting, and rithmetic,” but not much more, particularly in rural areas where mud season, spring planting, and fall harvest restricted students’ educational availability to the winter months. Some opportunities existed for higher learning. […]

Artillery back story at Gettysburg, part 4, all hell breaks loose at the seminary

As his North Carolina brigade emerged from McPherson’s Woods outside Gettysburg and started down the swale separating McPherson’s from the Lutheran seminary, all hell broke loose. Opposite on the seminary campus stood a 10-gun Union artillery line, comprising the six bronze Napoleons of Capt. Greenlief T. Stevens and the 5th Maine Battery and the four […]

Lottery winner catches the Maine-bound boat

However badly that Joseph Hooker blew the Battle of Chancellorsville, an order he issued on January 30, 1863 went over very well with the Army of the Potomac’s rank-and-file. “Orders were given on January 30th from the headquarters of the army that furloughs might be granted for fifteen days to one regimental and two line […]

Yakking about Lincoln sinks a Phippsburg officer

There’s a time to yap and a time to shaddup, as a promising Maine officer discovered in winter 1863. Having toyed with its wording for months, President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation in autumn 1862 and set January 1, 1863 as its effective date. All slaves in areas hostile to the United States government […]

A nurse goes to war, Part 1 — “such suffering and confusion I never before witnessed”

After receiving a telegram on Wednesday, May 7, 1862, Bath nurse Sarah Sampson hurried to the war zone, which in that far-away spring was Virginia’s so-called “Peninsula.” What she saw and did there launched her into history as a 3rd Maine Infantry Regiment legend. Sarah Sampson had traveled with her husband, Lt. Col. Charles A.L. […]