Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard (Library of Congress).

Howard’s statue on East Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg (Tom Huntington photo).

Major General Oliver Otis Howard was seeking a measure of redemption at Gettysburg. His XI Corps had been routed at Chancellorsville when Stonewall Jackson fell on its unsuspecting right flank. Howard knew he and his corps had failed, and he understood that the rest of the army believed it, too. On May 10 he felt compelled to issue a general order acknowledging “a feeling of depression” in the corps. “Some obloquy has been cast upon us on account of the affair of Saturday, May 2,” he said. “I believe that such a disaster might have happened to any other corps of this arm, and do not distrust my command.” He said the events of May 2 would be a learning experience, and felt that his officers and men were eager for another chance to prove their worth.

Howard was up before dawn on July 1, 1863, to begin preparations to send his three divisions—under Francis Barlow, Adolph von Steinwehr, and Carl Schurz—forward toward Gettysburg. The long columns of men finally set out around 8:30 a.m. for the 11-mile march. After some morning showers, the day was promising to be hot and dusty. Howard rode along the Emmitsburg Road ahead of his corps, and he often had to detour through woods and fields to avoid the wagons and men of the I Corps. He had two Howard brothers with him on the march—his brother the major, and his minister brother Rowland, who had reached the XI Corps on June 24 with John Chamberlain as a member of the United States Christian Commission. Rowland had never experienced combat. He was excited by the “pomp and circumstance” of an army on the march, and the way the men waved their banners as they approached the Pennsylvania border.

The general remembered coming within sight of Gettysburg with his entourage at around 10:30 that morning. He could hear the roar of artillery and the ripping sheets of musketry ahead. For Rowland, the sound of the guns “excited a thrill of patriotic emotion.”

The rest of his corps was still coming up, so Howard spent some time examining the terrain. He rode through a peach orchard to the right of the Emmitsburg Road, and then along a ridge that ended on a hill south of town that was crowned by Evergreen Cemetery. He was there when a messenger arrived from Reynolds with confirmation that the battle had started. “Here was a broad view which embraced the town, the seminary, the college, and all the undulating valley of open country spread out between the ridges,” Howard said. “There was a beautiful break in the ridge to the north of me, where Culp’s Hill abuts against the cemetery, and touches the creek below. It struck me that here one could make a strong right flank.” He turned to Theodore Meysenberg, his adjutant. “This seems to be a good position, Colonel,” he said.

“It is the only position, general,” Meysenberg replied.

The pious, one-armed general from Maine had made a decision that would have enormous ramifications for the Union army at Gettysburg.

For the rest of his life, Howard believed that his decision to post his men on Cemetery Hill was the key to the Union victory at Gettysburg. It was his redemption for the disaster at Chancellorsville. He objected when one of Reynolds’s aides, Joseph George Rosengarten, claimed that Reynolds had made the decision and told one of Howard’s aides to have the general occupy Cemetery Hill. Howard refuted that account. The only aide of Howard’s who had spoken with Reynolds that morning was Capt. Daniel Hall, and Hall, he said, had received no such instructions. “General Reynolds gave no order whatever in regard to occupying Cemetery Hill, nor did he make any allusion to it,” Hall affirmed.

The weight of evidence tilts in Howard’s favor, although not everyone was convinced. Abner Small of the 16th Maine, who developed a poor opinion of Howard’s generalship, believed that Reynolds should receive the credit. “General Howard’s memory is conveniently defective,” Small averred, “as it would otherwise conflict with his claim to the championship of Gettysburgh.”

Maine Roads to Gettysburg is available for purchase now! You can find it on Amazon.com, or any fine bookseller near you.

Capt. James A. Hall of he 2nd Maine Battery (Maine State Archives).

The battery’s monument on the Chambersburg Pike (Tom Huntington photo).

To celebrate the publication of Maine Roads to Gettysburg, I am going to kick off a series of blog posts highlighting the monuments to Maine units and soldiers who fought at Gettysburg. As Selden Connor, formerly of the 7^th Maine, said at the 1889 gathering of veterans to dedicate the monuments, “In proportion to the number of her troops in the action, no one of the eighteen states whose regiments flew the stars and stripes on this hard-fought field contributed more than Maine to the victory. At whatever point the battle raged, the sons of the Pine Tree State were in the melee.” You can provide a good overview of the three days of fighting by telling the stories about Maine at Gettysburg and connecting the dots.

So let’s do that. I will start with a Maine unit that was in the thick of things on the morning of July 1, 1863: The 2^nd Maine Battery, under the command of James A. Hall of Damariscotta.

As I write in the book, “Capt. James Hall and the 2nd Maine Battery had no idea what the day had in store for them when they left Marsh Creek with the rest of the I Corps early on the morning of July 1. Hall, a stolid-looking 27-year-old redhead with a bushy walrus mustache and hazel eyes, had entered service with the battery as a lieutenant back in November 1861. He advanced to command when the unit’s original captain, former Maine adjutant general Davis Tillson, was promoted. On July 1 Hall had six three-inch ordnance rifles in his battery, with 127 men and officers reporting for duty.”

Hall reported personally to Maj. Gen. John Fulton Reynolds, who posted the battery in an advanced position along the Chambersburg Pike to shell Confederate artillery to the west. Hall wasn’t happy to have his guns so exposed, and his fears were soon justified when Rebel troops appeared on his right, rising up from the unfinished railroad cut. With their infantry support falling back, Hall and his battery were forced to make a fighting retreat.

“The boys fought like the d____ never better,” Hall later told John Hodsdon, Maine’s adjutant general. “You may judge when I tell you that many of our horses were not shot but bayoneted that it was a close and desperate struggle for our guns two of which they actually had hold of at one time. I have seen hard fighting before and been badly smashed up, but I never saw a battery taken from the field and its guns saved in so bad a state as the Old Second came off that day.”

The 2nd Maine Battery marker on Cemetery Hill.

The battery’s main monument in on the Chambersburg Pike, where it fought on July 1. There’s a smaller position marker on Cemetery Hill, where it fought on the afternoon of July 2, until the recoil from a shot shattered an axle and the battery had to move back to make repairs.

Maine Roads to Gettysburg is available for purchase now! You can find it on Amazon.com, or any fine bookseller near you.

Brigadier General George Bayard (Library of Congress).

While in Princeton, New Jersey, recently, I stopped by the historic Princeton Cemetery of the Nassau Presbyterian Church. Some famous people are buried there, including the 22^nd and 24^th presidents of the United States. (They are both Grover Cleveland. He served non-consecutive terms.) Aaron Burr reposes there, too. Burr, of course, was a vice president of the United States and the man who shot Alexander Hamilton. For that act, he has become a character in a famous musical.

I stopped by those two graves, but I was most interested in someone less notable. George Dashiell Bayard was a cavalryman in the Civil War. By the time of the Fredericksburg campaign in December 1862 he had risen to brigadier general and commanded a brigade of cavalry in the VI Corps, part of Maj. Gen. William Franklin’s Left Grand Division. Bayard was killed at Fredericksburg, but not in any grand cavalry charge. He was reclining against a tree at Franklin’s headquarters south of town on December 12 when a Confederate artillery shell hit the ground and ricocheted into him. He died two days later. “His loss is universally regretted,” said General George Gordon Meade.

I had encountered Bayard before while writing Searching for George Gordon Meade: The Forgotten Victor of Gettysburg. Bayard had offered to give Meade’s son a position on his staff, but the elder Meade had declined, saying he thought it best that the young man received some combat experience before becoming a staff officer. In a letter, Meade had reminded his wife about Bayard, telling her she might remember him “from the protuberance on his cheek, produced by an arrow wound.” (Before the war, Bayard had fought Native Americans out west.)

I ran into Bayard again while researching Maine Roads to Gettysburg. Artilleryman Charles O. Hunt of the 5^th Maine Battery encountered Bayard riding along the lines near Fredericksburg just days before the general died. “He was a young looking man, no more than twenty-six or twenty-eight, I should think,” Hunt wrote. “I liked his looks very much. He came sauntering along singing ‘Then let the wide world wag as it will, we will be gay and happy still.’ The only mark of any rank whatever about him was his brigadier’s buttons, which were on a very ordinary looking coat, which was anything but military. His pants were like a private’s, and his hat an old black felt. Poor fellow. I did not think then that he would so soon be shot.”

Bayard rests among other members of the Bayard family at the cemetery in Princeton, not far from Burr’s grave. I’m glad there was a cemetery map available at the entrance, because I doubt I would have found him. The crossed sabers on his obelisk would have provided a clue to his location, but the inscription on his tombstone has largely worn away and it’s nearly impossible to decipher his name. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Maine Roads to Gettysburg is available for purchase now! You can find it on Amazon.com, or any fine bookseller near you.

One of my favorite soldiers from Maine Roads to Gettysburg is Elijah Walker, who commanded the 4^th Maine at Gettysburg and was wounded during the fighting at Devil’s Den. He struck me as a typical Maine Yankee—flinty, outspoken, and unwilling to suffer fools gladly, even if those fools were his superior officers. For instance, he couldn’t stand David Bell Birney, who commanded his division (and the III Corps after Dan Sickles was wounded). Other soldiers testified to Birney’s bravery, but not Walker. He described Birney as “a sarcastic Philadelphia lawyer” who was as “brave as a lion, when in a safe place, but in danger he wilted.” He also had little respect for Maine governor Abner Coburn, feeling that the governor “yielded to the influence of political demagogues back home, and commissioned men who were the reverse of worthy and desirable.”

Walker was from Rockland, where he had served as the foreman of the town’s Dirigo Engine Company. When war broke out, Walker remained uncertain about enlisting. As a married man with seven children, the youngest a baby of seven months, he had pressing family obligations. Yet he decided to answer the call to preserve the Union. Not only did he volunteer the 25 men of his engine company, he also opened a recruiting office and signed up 80 more. He became the captain for Company B of the 4^th Maine, which was commanded by Hiram Berry, Walker’s former business partner. When Berry was promoted, Walker received command of the regiment.

At Gettysburg on July 2, the 4^th Maine was in Devil’s Den, protecting James E. Smith’s 4th New York Independent Battery. Worried that the Rebels might be able to outflank him from the left, Smith asked Walker to move his regiment to a belt of trees south of Devil’s Den and protect that flank. The battery, he said, could handle the front. Walker, independent as always, told Smith he could protect him just fine where he was. “I would not go into that den unless I was obliged to,” he said. Smith complained to brigade commander Hobart Ward, and Ward sent a staffer with orders for Walker to do as Smith asked. “I remonstrated with all the power of speech I could command, and only (as I then stated) obeyed because it was a military order,” Walker said. “The enemy were near, there was no further time for argument. I must obey and suffer the results, or disobey and take the consequences; I obeyed.” The disgruntled colonel moved his regiment to the woods south of Devil’s Den in the Plum Run valley.

The 4th Maine’s monument at Gettysburg. Little Round Top is in the background.

During the ensuing fight, a Rebel soldier yanked Walker’s sword from his hand, but the Maine colonel managed to recover it during the melee. Walker was also shot, the bullet almost severing his Achilles tendon and killing his horse. The wound left Walker unable to walk, so he had two sergeants help him to the rear. He was trying to mount a new horse when General Ward arrived. He asked Walker if he was wounded. “Slightly,” Walker replied, “but if I can get on the horse I can ride.” Ward looked him over and said he was wounded worse than he thought. Maj. Ebenezer Whitcomb had also been wounded, so Walker turned command over to Capt. Edwin Libby.

Walker abandoned his horse for an ambulance and a bumpy ride to the III Corps hospital. “I lay on the ground, in full view of our Third corps amputating table, congratulating myself that I was not obliged to lose a limb,” he said. A surgeon cut off Walker’s boot and dressed his wound. Helped onto a horse, he rode to the rear until he grew too faint to continue, and then he found a house and made a bed on a straw sack. Walker reached Baltimore in a cattle car on July 5, and was home in Rockland two days later. “I always have and ever shall regret that I obeyed the order and moved my command into that Den (the Devil’s Den) which caused our entire loss of prisoners and most of the other casualties,” he said.

Maine Roads to Gettysburg will be officially released on May 1, 2018. In the meantime, it is available for pre-order at Amazon.

It’s a long road to the point where a book finally gets published. If my calculations are correct, I started Maine Roads to Gettysburg in the fall of 2015. Yesterday the UPS guy brought me a big box (and one little one) with copies of the finished book. What a feeling!

The official book “launch” will be on Saturday, April 21, when I speak at the banquet for the Gettysburg Foundation’s annual spring muster. As far as I know, tickets are still available.

Material about John Chase from his pension file at the National Archives.

Private John Chase, a “rugged farm boy” who had been working as a soap boiler in the Augusta area, was with the 5th Maine Battery during the Civil War. He later won the Medal of Honor for his actions at Chancellorsville, but went through a much worse ordeal at Gettysburg

First, though, he underwent a religious conversion. He had never been particularly religious when he had been growing up, but that changed on the night of July 1, 1863, when he heard a chaplain preaching to the men on the Gettysburg battlefield. Chase went behind his cannon, knelt on the ground, and said his first prayer. When he stood up, Chase said, “I was a very different boy than I was when I knelt down. I felt light as a bird; all the darkness and doubts had disappeared, and I was rejoicing in God’s holy light.” Chase’s newfound faith would soon undergo a severe test.

The monument to the 5th Maine (Stevens’s) Battery at Gettysburg. Chase was wounded near here.

On July 2 Chase’s battery was engaged in an artillery duel with the Rebel guns on Benner’s Hill to the north when a shell exploded only three or four feet away from Chase. The effect was violent and terrible. The blast tore the clothes from Chase’s body, nearly ripped off his right arm, tore out his left eye, and riddled his body with 48 other wounds. It seemed that no one could have survived such horrible injuries, and two men carried what remained of Chase to the rear and placed him on the ground near the rock where he had prayed the night before.

Yet Chase wasn’t dead. Years later, he recollected having an out-of-body experience while he lay unconscious on the battlefield. He remembered feeling “perfectly happy” as he looked down on his mangled physical form. “I was taken to a very beautiful place where all was peace and joy,” he said. His visit was all too short.

On July 4 a burial party lifted up Chase’s apparently lifeless and placed it in the back of a wagon for burial. Chase moaned. As he regained consciousness, his first words were, “Did we win the battle?” He was taken to a field hospital at the Isaac Lightner barn on the Baltimore Pike, where he lingered for three more days. No one believed he had a chance to survive. Then he was moved to the Lutheran Seminary, where his wounds became infected. The medical personnel put him in a tent outside to die. A soldier from the 8th Virginia, considered another lost cause, was placed in the tent with him. The two men clasped hands, seeking comfort and hoping for survival, but the Rebel soldier died during the night.

A photo of Chase, showing the severity of his wounds.

Chaplain J. O. Sloan, who was ministering to the wounded for the United States Christian Commission, said that seeing Chase was “one of the worst scenes that ever came under my observation.” Even though the doctors said Chase could live for no more than a day or two, the chaplain decided to do what he could for the badly wounded man. Twice a day he applied poultices of “pulverized charcoal and flax seed” and tended to him. Whether it was the poultices, an act of God, or Chase’s own will, the wounded soldier defied the odds and was eventually moved to a hospital in Philadelphia, and then home to Maine. He was discharged from the army on November 25, 1863.

After the war, Chase married and had six children. He served as a messenger in the Maine House of Representatives, and became an inventor, with 47 patents to his name. His first was for a hoopskirt with an attached bustle; his last was for a flying machine. Said one newspaper account, “According to Capt. Chase the Wright brothers will have to look to their laurels, for he is more than confident that his ship will sail the balmy air in the near future and will turn all the somersaults that will be required of a faithful flying bird of the mechanical type.” Chase was living in Florida when he died in 1914.

Maine Roads to Gettysburg will be published on May 1, 2018, by Stackpole Books. You can pre-order it here.