Rethinking the American Civil War, Through the Eyes of a Teenager

Two weeks after the local debacle surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation, Whitcomb tells her diary that she has finished reading Caroline Lee Hentz’ 1854 novel, The Planter’s Northern Bride, which ‘show[s] the lights of Southern life.’ Hentz’ novel was a pro-slavery response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written two years earlier, about Eulalia, the daughter of a New England abolitionist who marries a slaveholder. Initially appalled by her husband’s maintenance of human property, after observing how well he treats his slaves and how content they are in his charge, Eulalia discards abolitionism as a valid philosophy. Whitcomb felt that, ‘if more books of this kind had been circulated and read it would have done much towards tearing down the prejudices of the North and averting the present great calamity of civil war.’11

We went out and saw the company of volunteers this forenoon.

While never herself a proponent of the war, Whitcomb nonetheless took part in observing the spectacles that accompanied it. It seems likely that Fort Sumter’s penetration of her disinterest in national affairs was due to the spectacular community reaction. Handbills began circulating on 19 April for a mass meeting of Cheshire County citizens to assemble in Keene on the 22^nd. The ensuing swarm of citizens was the largest ever held in the Square, overflowing every possible indoor accommodation. Leaders of both political parties rallied the citizenry in favor of the Union cause while men enlisted and organized themselves into military units. Whitcomb was not there, but she kept abreast of war news, occasionally entering scraps of information into her diary.

By coincidence, Whitcomb was in Keene during these days of heightened community mobilizing, but it was because of the Cheshire County Teachers’ Institute, in which she was ‘considerably interested.’ Yet even the educational assembly, while ‘not wholly neglected’ was ‘seriously affect[ed]’ by the war excitement. Mr. Titus, the Cheshire County School Commissioner, who had evaluated Whitcomb’s school three months earlier and whom she liked ‘very much,’ stepped away from the Institute to not only speak at the rally on the 22^nd, but to put his name first on the list of volunteer recruits, thus beginning his ‘gallant and meritorious services during the war’ that won him a series of promotions from private to his eventual commissioning as Brigadier General in 1865 upon the war’s close. Though it did not launch a military career for him, Professor Bailey of New Haven, whose lectures Whitcomb had been attending at the Teachers’ Institute, also took a break from the Institute to ascend the podium, addressing those concerned with fighting a ‘fratricidal war,’ rebuffing them with, ‘Traitors are not our brothers, nor cousins.’12

Whether watching the companies drilling or departing, or attending the ceremonial burials of soldiers, Mary Whitcomb included herself in the supportive community upon which the enlistees relied. She did not attend Union War-Clubs, but neither does she seem to be among those who would demand of an enlistee, ‘why he was fighting in this “black Republican” war.’ To her diary, however, she does not hide her consternation at the voluntary service of her neighbors. ‘It is strange how they can go so willingly. I cannot make it seem that it is their duty to go.’13

We are all somewhat excited. It is apprehended that drafting will be resorted to in less than two weeks.

Whitcomb’s diary, 7 August 1862

Whatever community enthusiasm had existed in Swanzey for suppressing the Southern rebellion had exhausted the town’s supply of voluntary recruits after the fifth federal call for troops. The sixth call on 4 August 1862 for an additional 300,000 troops came with an attached provision to draft whichever men and boys could not be enlisted voluntarily. Whitcomb was nineteen, she had marked the twenty-first birthday of her brother George a month earlier, confident that she will, ‘always be proud of him as now.’ George Edwin Whitcomb was now in the pool of boys and men called out to Keene to enroll themselves for the draft on 8 August 1862.14

By this time, Whitcomb’s experience of the Civil War included attending three military funerals, with two of the soldiers dead from disease and the third killed in Williamsburg. Another one of her acquaintances was discharged with disability after coming down sick during Bull Run.15 It is unlikely that Whitcomb failed to absorb the contents of local newspapers, whether by reading them or hearing them read or retold, which carried letters from soldiers on the front lines and reprinted lists of the sick and wounded New Hampshire soldiers in distant hospitals, frequently quite grisly in nature.

With George’s fate uncertain, Whitcomb wrote of ‘the suffering of the last three days. We have hardly slept or tasted food.’ She does not ascribe cowardice to her brother, or to the thirty some ‘lost boys’ missing from the town in the wake of the draft announcement—‘nearly a thousand cowardly copperheads,’ if the New Hampshire Sentinel is to be believed. Instead, of the young man who once spent three hours and twelve miles searching for a girl’s lost bracelet, Whitcomb finds it ‘terrible to think that he was taken and to be pressed into service. Almost like death.’ Whether out of paternal concern for his young son, economic investment in the promising young worker, political disdain against the reigning Republican Party, or a combination of factors, the open actions of her father Roswell, being ‘upon the go all of the time trying what could be done,’ seem to belie a masculine culture of bellicosity. The appearance at the Whitcomb home the following day of ‘many sympathizers’ further impugns the town’s overall investment in and sense of obligation toward the War of the Rebellion. Whitcomb’s derision is saved for young men who are ‘so enthusiastic about this glorious cause.’16

While the casualties piled up, the supply of volunteer soldiers dried up, and the demand for troops led to the call for drafting on 4 August 1862. Towns were desperate to avoid the stigma attached to conscription and began offering bounties, or monetary enticements, to enlistees. Following the 1 July 1862 call for 300,000 troops, New Hampshire started by offering $10, but when it failed to attract the requisite numbers, they doubled it to $20, then $50 soon thereafter. Men willing to enlist could examine their options and search around for the highest bounties, with the National Eagle’s grumbling that New Hampshire men ‘swelled the ranks of Vermont,’ which had consistently been offering higher rewards. Following the 4 August threat of the draft, the Northern Advocate noted with ‘surprise’ the ‘alacrity of our smaller and purely agricultural towns in adopting measures to fill their quotas.’ Claremont and Newport, New Hampshire were each offering $50 bounty to enlistees. Chelsea, Maine was offering $125. As Mary Whitcomb in Swanzey wrote on 11 August 1862, ‘They think there will be no drafting at present as they voted at Town meeting to day to pay $200 bounty from the town and many stand ready to enlist.’17

On 30 August the New Hampshire Statesman printed the quotas of soldiers required from each town, with Swanzey bearing the burden of providing 115 men and boys for service, ‘but we trust now that George will not be one of them.’18

Who is there so base, amongst the sons of New Hampshire as to hesitate in duty? We trust, not one.

The New Hampshire Sentinel, 18 April 1861

As Whitcomb’s journal concluded, more men and boys continued to die of disease and in battle. Out-of-towners from as nearby as Boston and Lawrence, Massachusetts, others from as far away as England and Ireland came to collect Swanzey’s generous bounty and credit their names to the town’s quota. Some of these enlistees went on to receive wounds in battle, some would die from disease, but a great many grabbed the bounty money and deserted at the nearest opportunity. Nor was desertion limited only to the substitutes and bounty-seekers. Despite the lack of anonymity that came with fighting alongside one’s neighbors, friends and families, and despite harsh punishments threatened against and occasionally doled out to deserters, at least five local men and boys, longtime residents of Swanzey, deserted before the war’s close. Indeed, for every thousand New Hampshire enlistees, 112 would desert.19