Radio Script #1006

Little Talks on Common Things
March 24, 1974

On this program there have been through the years several references to Colby graduate, General Benjamin Butler, the military commander of captured New Orleans during part of the Civil War. Recently there came to my attention letters written from Ship Island by certain soldiers and sailors that cast some light on what was happening at the mouth of the Mississippi in the first year of the great conflict.

For a small island only seven miles long and one mile wide, Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico, assumed large importance when the war broke out. It commanded the approach to the Mississippi River from the sea, and that meant access by water to New Orleans, Mobile, and other strategic river ports, vital to the Confederacy.

When the year 1861 began, Ship Island was occupied by a small encampment of Louisiana militia. When war was declared, a regiment of Confederate troops took over. They were soon increased because of threats that Union gunboats were on their way by sea. That proved true, and what the U.S. Navy designated as the Gulf Blockading Squadron was soon at work. A unit of that Squadron, the U.S.S. Massachusetts, took possession of the island, after ousting the Confederates, in September, 1861. From then until the capture of New Orleans in April, 1862, it was used as a base for the combined army and navy campaign to open the lower Mississippi and its ports for the Union.

A letter by one Maine sailor written to his father in Cape Elizabeth, tells of his ship picking up prizes, that is, capturing Confederate supply boats. Among their seizures were molasses, flour, sugar, and in one case $2000 in Mexican pesos.

In the early years of the war, the Navy like the Army was always having trouble with discipline. The hastily recruited men from Yankeeland were not easily submissive to rules. This letter said: “When we left Key West, we found some of the crew missing, so we put back. We brought off the missing eight men drunk as you please. They were at once put in irons and kept so for a week.”

Here’s what the sailor wrote about one captured prize: “Two of our boats were sent off yesterday after a sloop just visible from the mast head. After dark our boats returned with the captured sloop. They had set the secession flag upside down under the Union flag.”

In another letter the same sailor said his ship needed cleaning. “I think we shall have to come home in the fall and scrape the barnacles off our hull. It is getting terribly foul and we cannot make over eight knots an hour.”

In another letter to his mother, the sailor expressed concern about conditions at home. “I was surprised to hear that you had consented to let Levi go to war. He should be at home, but if he feels he has to go, it may do him some good, make him tough. He will see hard times, I will bet, if the war lasts any time. I am sorry to hear he is a corporal. That is the hardest place in the army, if they have to do as the corporals do in the companies on board our ship, that we are taking up to the Island. Here on one night they get only four hours sleep, then seven hours the next night, and there are only four corporals to a company. You must not let Father go off to war, for then you would have no one to take care of you. The most I dislike here is the food. We get good raw food, but the cooks spoil it. We get meat, beans and rice, all constantly boiled. These cooks never heard of baking and frying.”

Other letters from Ship Island came from a soldier in the 8th Maine, one of the regiments assigned at that time to General Butler’s army. He wrote to his father in Bangor on December 16, 1861. “We are encamped on Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico. It is a hard place, I can tell you, the most barren place I ever saw. Part of the camp ground is sand, the rest is swamp where the mosquitoes are monstrous and make frequent attacks at night. Sentinel duty is bad enough anyway, but to spend it fighting mosquitoes instead of rebels is not what we enlisted for.

“We have to sleep right on the sand. We have to go a couple of miles to get wood for a fire to cook with. We get no news about the war here, and don’t know whether our boys in Virginia are winning or losing. We know they took a licking at Bull River but have heard nothing since. The rumor is we shall leave here soon and capture either New Orleans or Mobile.

“There are only two women on the island, General Butler’s wife and maid. They are the only women I have seen since I left Boston.”

History records what happened after that. Because New Orleans, the largest city near the river’s mouth, was of great strategic importance, its capture was a key action in the Civil War. Admiral David Porter conceived a joint army – navy action to be carried out by a naval squadron under Admiral Farragut with 24 wooden ships, and a land force under General Benjamin Butler. In April, 1862, Farragut’s vessels ran successfully past the Confederate forts and captured New Orleans on April 24.

With eight regiments, Butler then entered the city and accepted its surrender. It was because he became the military commander of a captured Confederate city that quite naturally made Butler unpopular with the local population. Out of that unpopularity arose many scurrilous accusations against Butler, some of them believed even to this day.

The references to that phase of American history made on today’s program are only to bring out what I have so often tried to do – show the viewpoint of the common soldier and sailor, not of the history books, on incidents in the Great Rebellion.

Through the courtesy of Chester Basford of Benton Station, I have examined a Maine Militia order issued 132 years ago in 1842. At that time the Aroostook War was only three years in the past, and some of those militiamen had seen service in Aroostook in that farcical war in which no shot was fired. The order was issued to Robert Alley by Captain John Estes, commanding officer of Company A, First Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 2nd Division, Maine Militia.

“You are hereby to warn and give four days notice to all non-commissioned officers and privates enrolled in the company under my command, a list thereof being attached, either verbally or by delivery to each man in person, or by leaving at his last and usual place of abode, a written or printed order directing him to appear, with arms and equipments required by law, at the store of B. L. Hammond in Vassalboro on Tuesday, May 3, 1842, at one o’clock in the afternoon, for military duty and inspection. Hereof fail not, and make return to me of your doings herein before the day of appearance. Dated at China this 28th day of April, 1842.”

This list contains 147 names. Seven of them have been crossed out, implying they were no longer in the company. Nine names were not checked, implying that Alley could not find them. He delivered the summons to 131, a very sizable militia company. Of course we do not know how many actually showed up on that militia day in May, 1842. Some of the names on the list are of families long known in the Vassalboro-China area. There were three Burgesses – Hartson, Isaiah and Elisha, four Braggs – Hollis, Harris, Wilson, and Getchell, and three Ballards – Charles, Hanson, and Albert.

That’s a pretty good record: ten men with three family names all beginning with B.

On the list there were just as many from the Priest family as from the Burgesses. The four Priests were Asa, Otis, Jonah, and John. The well known family of Rollins had five representatives: John, James, Charles, George and Augustus. And the Taylors also contributed five militiamen: Jefferson, Eldridge, Amos, Harmon, and Thomas. The Lord family had four: Joshua, Peter, John and William. Other names that ring memory’s bell are Henry Cates, James Wixon, Joseph Bowman, Abial Getchell, William Hobby, Prince Hopkins, Isaac Bangs, Robert Clark, and Samuel Chaffee.

In the 1860’s and 1870’s, following the Civil War, the mails were filled with papers regularly published by religious denominations. One such was a Free Baptist paper that had wide circulation in Maine, though it was printed in neighboring Dover, N. H. Recently I saw a copy of the issue of February 6, 1867. Called The Morning Star, it was put out weekly by one Silas Curtis at $2.50 a year, or $2.00 if paid in advance. All Free Baptist ministers were made agents for the paper, and were allowed ten percent of all they collected. Agents were cautioned that “we want not the names of town where subscribers live, but the post offices where they receive their papers.”

Another cautionary note on the masthead said: “All obituaries must be accompanied with the names of the writers. We have in the past received notices of death of persons we have later found to be still living.”

As I have often told you, it is not the articles or even the religious news in these old papers that best reveal the times. It is, rather, their ads. What was being advertised in a Free Baptist paper that reached Maine homes in l867?

Bowdoin College advertised its medical department, soon to be officially known as the Maine Medical School. The school had seven part-time teachers, all engaged in active practice of medicine. Their instruction covered anatomy and physiology, chemistry and pharmacy, surgery, obstetrics, theory and practice of medicine, and medical jurisprudence.

Other ads called attention to Morton’s gold pens; Wistar’s Balsam of Wild Cherry for throat, lungs and chest; Medalion sewing machines at $25; mineral baths to be taken at home; Dr. Stephen’s cornea restorers for failing eyesight; Dr. C. L. Blood’s oxygenized air for paralysis and epilepsy, and Perusian Syrup for anything that ailed you. Do I need to tell you that the period was the heyday of patent medicines?

But medicine was not all that was advertised. If you would buy the Penn. Salt Co’s Saponifier, you could make your own soap. For home or chapel there was the Smith Reed Organ, with a reverberating sound box and large bellows. From Lothip and Co. in Dover, you could buy all sorts of Bibles and a great variety of Sunday School award cards. Gardeners could get Flour of Bone Fertilizer, and a Pennsylvania supplier offered fruit plants and vines, including gooseberries. For $10 you could get 275 plants of 32 different varieties, all delivered as the ad put it, “at wherever there is a post office, free of charge.”

Year: 1974