Heavy Artillery, and have narrated some of the more memorable events
of its history. Enough has been told of what it did to furnish grounds
for deducing what it was; but to deal with the regiment on the
personal side is hardly possible within the limits of such a sketch as
this, though it is a matter that cannot be entirely passed by. It need
not be said that there is abundant human interest attaching as a
matter of course to such men as were in the aggregate the subjects of
so fine a record.
Any body of men--a college class, a legislature, a regiment--is in
character what its component members make it; in this case there was
the material, which, furnished with worthy leadership--and it
unquestionably had that--made up the organization whose not uneventful
existence has been described. That they were better men, or worse,
braver men, or more patriotic, than their descendants and successors
would prove under similar conditions, or than the hundreds of
thousands of their contemporaries who devoted themselves to the same
service, is not to be believed; yet to have passed through such
experiences as have been recounted, which became for them for a time
the commonplaces of every-day life, is enough to place them apart from
ordinary men in the eyes of our peace knowing generation. In fact, to
have passed the tests of so fierce a course of education gives them a
title to a place thus apart. The university man of to-day, as the
burden of the baccalaureate sermons so frequently testifies, is
consigned to a special place of responsibility in life because of his
training; these men surely earned one of special honor by reason of
theirs, which was, too, not like the other, preparation alone, but
also fulfilment. The realization of how typical it all was of that
generation and that time, brings the clearest understanding of the
real scope of the Civil War.
* * * * *
To the members of the Litchfield County University Club it is perhaps
a point of interest to take brief notice of those names on the
regimental rolls which would probably have been found upon its list of
members had the organization been in existence in that earlier time. A
number of the officers and men were college graduates when they
enlisted, and others gained degrees after the war ended; the list
which follows is, however, necessarily incomplete; in fact, an
absolutely correct list is no doubt hopelessly impossible.
Major James Q. Rice, who was killed at Winchester, was a member of the
class of 1850 at Wesleyan, and received from that institution the
degree of Master of Arts in 1855. At the time of the regiment's
formation he was conducting an academy in Goshen, and was enlisted as
captain of a company which he had been active in recruiting.
Lieutenant-Colonel Nathaniel Smith of Woodbury entered the Yale Law
School in the class of 1853, but did not graduate. Ill health forced
him to relinquish his commission early in 1864, and until his death in
1877 he was a leading citizen of the county.
Judge Augustus H. Fenn, Major and Brevet-Colonel, came back from the
war, having lost an arm at Cedar Creek, to take a course in the Law
School at Harvard, and Yale made him a Master of Arts in 1889. His
prominence for many years in public life and as judge in the highest
courts in the state is well known. At the time of his death in 1897,
he was a lecturer in the Yale Law School, and member of the Supreme
Court of Errors.
Rev. James Deane, Captain and Brevet-Major, was a graduate of Williams
in the class of 1857. He was pastor of the Congregational church at
East Canaan when the regiment was organized, and was one of its
recruiting officers.
Adjutant Theodore F. Vaill, the historian of the regiment, was a
student before the war at Union College, but did not graduate.
Captain George S. Williams, of New Milford, was a member of the class
of 1852 at Yale for a time, and received a degree from Trinity in
1855.
Surgeon Henry Plumb, and Assistant-Surgeons Robert G. Hazzard and John
W. Lawton were all graduates of the Yale Medical School, in the
classes of 1861, 1862, and 1859. Assistant-Surgeon Judson B. Andrews
graduated at Yale in 1855. He was captain in a New York regiment in
the early part of the war, and became afterward superintendent of the
Buffalo State Hospital, and a recognized authority on insanity before
his death in 1894.
Chaplain Jonathan A. Wainwright graduated at the University of Vermont
in 1846, and after the war was for some years rector of St. John's
Church in Salisbury. He was later connected with a church college in
Missouri, where he died in 1898.
Captain William H. Lewis, Jr., studied after the war at the Berkeley
Divinity School, and has been for many years rector of St. John's
Church in Bridgeport.
Lieutenant and Brevet-Captain Lewis W. Munger, graduating at Brown in
1869 and later from the Crozier Theological Seminary, entered the
ministry of the Baptist church.
Corporal Francis J. Young entered the Yale Medical School before the
war, and returned after its close to take his degree in 1866.
Hospital Steward James J. Averill also graduated at the Yale Medical
School after the war.
Sergeant Theodore C. Glazier was a graduate of Trinity in the class of
1860, and was a tutor there when he enlisted. He was later made
colonel of a colored regiment, and served with credit in that
capacity.
Corporal Edward C. Hopson, a graduate of Trinity in 1864, was killed
at Cedar Creek.
Sergeant Garwood R. Merwin, who had been a member of the class of
1864 at Yale, died at Alexandria in 1863.
Sergeant Romulus C. Loveridge, who had been entered in the class of
1865 at Yale, received a commission in a colored regiment.
Colonel Mackenzie graduated at West Point in 1862, but he was never a
resident of the county, or of Connecticut, and his only connection
with either was through his commission from Governor Buckingham.
There are not a few other names upon the rolls of the regiment which
upon more thorough investigation than has been possible in the present
case would certainly be added to the list. A complete history of the
organization would also give a large place to the association of its
veterans formed shortly after the war, whose frequent gatherings have
more than a superficial likeness to the reunions of college classes.
Memorable among these meetings was the one held on October 21, 1896,
the occasion being the dedication of the regiment's monument in the
National Cemetery at Arlington, with a pilgrimage also to the scenes
of its battles and marches in the Shenandoah Valley near by.
As a whole, the regiment was a body thoroughly representative not only
of the army of which it was a fraction, an army as has been often said
unlike any other the world has known, but also of the population from
which it was drawn. It was made up of men of almost all conditions of
life and of widely different ages, though naturally with young men in
a large majority; of mechanics from the Housatonic and Naugatuck
valleys, and farmers' boys from the hills; of men of education and men
of none. Though the large addition to its numbers which the increase
in size necessitated made it perhaps somewhat less homogeneous than at
first, it did not greatly alter its essential characteristics.
The records kept by the association referred to, furnish suggestive
revelations as to the various elements that composed it. The names of
men of every sort and kind are found upon the rolls. There were
veterans of the Mexican War; there were refugees from the
revolutionary uprisings in Europe of 1848; there were some who had
served under compulsion in the armies of the South; there were men
whose obviously fictitious names concealed stories which could be
guessed to be extraordinary; there were names which have been for
years among the best known and most honored in this state; and there
were those of outcasts and wrecks.
A large part of these men came back after their service ended to
resume the peaceful life of citizenship, and every town among us has
known some of them ever since among its leading figures, while
some in quarters far distant have also attained to honors and
responsibilities, as the records show. Connecticut has known for many
years no small number of them as foremost in all lines of activity,
and knows to-day, in official station and in private life, men of many
honors, who count not least among these the fact that they were
enrolled among the soldiers of the Second Connecticut Heavy
Artillery.
End of Project Gutenberg's The County Regiment, by Dudley Landon Vaill