USA > Massachusetts > Reminiscences of military service in the Forty-third regiment, Massachusetts infantry, during the great Civil war, 1862-63 > Part 14
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We found, as we got into Newbern, that two regiments of our own brigade, the Seventeenth and the Forty-fifth, were afoot, and also the Massachusetts Fifth and Twenty-seventh ; and out on the railroad we were joined by a Pennsylvania regiment, the Fifty- eighth. After a listless and wearisome waiting of two or three hours in the streets of Newbern, which provedl to be a foretaste of the most prominent peculiarity of the expedition, we got on to platform-cars, and started in the direction of Kinston. The train stopped at Bacheller's Creek, a fortified picket-station about eight miles from Newbern, which has been deemed the outer post in this direction, though I believe the road has been in working-order a few miles farther. Here a part of the foree left the train, our own regiment being among them. About sundown we again took the cars, and rode some eight miles farther, encamping with the Seventeenth and Forty-fifth. Meanwhile the Fifty-eighth and Twenty-Seventh march off on a side-road, with the intention of getting in the rear of a rebel pieket-post, which it is understood has been established within ten miles of this our last camp.
We remained in this eamp two days. About eleven o'clock in the forenoon of the first day, the Forty-fifth, lying alongside of us, received orders to " fall in." Without their haversacks, they were marched out upon the railroad to the before-mentioned picket- post, and, with the aid of the regiments which had already gone out, drove off the rebels, - a force of perhaps three hundred men, - with the loss of two or three killed and a few wounded on our side.
The next night afterwards, our regiment received orders to be prepared to go out on the railroad as guard to the pioneers of our own and the Forty-fifth Regiments, who were engaged in rebuilding the road. We accordingly went out about four miles, encamping in the forest, and remaining there until ten A.M. the next day. which was Friday, the 1st of May, when we had orders to fall in for Newbern. Large bodies move slowly ; and, although a single regiment is not much in these days, we had to wait nearly an hour before our piekets could be called in. Meantime some of the men had set fire to our huts and the trees about them, which burnedl very freely on account of having their bark taken off, for about one-third of the diameter and some fifteen feet high, to allow the sap to exude ; and this, by the smoke and fierceness of the heat. drove us away from our first line, toward the railroad, where we
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finally form, and march back on foot, hopping across the sleepers to our first camp, which we found deserted; the men who had occupied it being in two long trains of cars. We got on with them, and waited indefinitely to take aboard officers' horses, and quartermaster's stores, etc., a roasting sun beating upon us, cheer- ful, yet longing for the cooling breeze from the east, which re- freshes us every time the cars move. "We start along a few miles farther, thinking that we are finally off, when, behold ! we come to the Twenty-seventh, waiting for us in the forest. We thought our train was full, as great pains had been taken to pack us close together ; but we were astonished by the brigadier in charge of the Twenty-seventh telling us to move forward so as to make room for his men. As our boys complied slowly, he told them quietly, that his regiment had got to come on, and the quicker we moved, the less time we should have to wait. It was surprising to see how soon the matter was arranged, and we were speeding at a high rate on our way to Newbern. It was quite an exciting ride. The road was not in the best of order, and the train swayed heavily from side to side. We were stowed so closely, that nothing was visible to us except the locomotive and the men. It did not require a very violent exercise of the imagination to suppose ourselves to be a gigantic serpent, spitting fire and smoke, intent upon an assault on Newbern.
At Newbern there was another tedious delay, as all but our own regiment left the cars here. When this was accomplished, we went through one of the principal streets of the town, and over the railroad-bridge, across the Trent, stopping at the nearest point to our own camp, where we left the cars, and reached Camp Rogers about four o'clock P.M., having been gone nearly five days.
The birds whispered to me very early on this march, that there was a good deal of buncombe to it. Many of the men thought our hundred rounds meant an advance on Kinston, and plenty of fighting. I did not think any such thing. The repair of the road was a mere sham, only sufficient to give the impression, at a distance, that we were in earnest ; and other things, such as run- ning the trains up and down, blowing whistles, setting fire to forests, moving troops, etc., were all on a scale to alarm the enemy, and quite give them to understand that we did really intend to move on Kinston. Our ammunition was an awful load in such warm weather, weighing nearly ten pounds. This department is
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notorious for loading men in this way, in consequence, it is said. of some of the principal regiments at the battle of Newbern being reduced to one or two rounds, having gone in with only forty, and nearly losing the fight by it.
This was our last marching experience in North Carolina. On the 23d of May the regiment was under orders again, but was not sent out. The occasion was as follows. Five regi- ments were out on the railroad on a similar errand to the one we had recently been. They had obtained very marked ad- vantages in breaking up a picket-post. Stung by repeated assaults of this sort, the rebels rallied in large numbers from Kinston, and followed the column, on its return, up to the Newbern forts; our force being considerably demoralized, its commander, the brave Col. Jones of the Fifty-eighth Penn- sylvania Infantry, being killed.
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CHAPTER X.
NEWBERN.
T HE following extracts from letters written during May and June outline the experiences of the company and regiment during that time : -
CAMP ROGERS, May 9, 1863.
If the Forty-third were all Catholics, I should say that this was carnival week ; for, with the exception of guard-duty and dress- parade, we have had nothing to do (but fatigue-work) since we arrived in camp a week ago yesterday, making it more than a month since we had any drilling. We had two days of intensely hot weather the first of the week ; but the rest of the time has been quite comfortable.
Lieut. Bradbury has been busy erecting shelters on each guard- beat ; and during the heat of the day we loop up the bottom of our tent, and lay back.
One feature of our experience is not so agreeable. The flies are as numerous and annoying as we have them in August. In the course of the forenoons, the different forts, apparently com- mencing over across the Neuse, and coming to those nearest to us, begin practice in firing. This is facilitated by the fact that the fields are not occupied by infantry.
BRIGADE HEADQUARTERS, NEWBERN, May 19, 1863.
Sabbath before last, in company with three comrades, I walked about four miles, to the battlefield of Newbern. When we reached the place, we followed the earthworks down to the fort on the bank of the Neuse. It was an exceedingly interesting trip to me. I was able to understand all the prominent features of the engage- ment, even to ascertaining, within a few feet, of where Adjutant Stearns of the Twenty-first fell. The field is covered now with the decaying remains of equipments which the rebels abandoned, so sudden was their flight.
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, BRIGADE HEADQUARTERS, NEWBERN, May 23, 1863.
Matters seem to be working very favorably in the formation of the colored brigade. It was only on Monday that the officers, under Col. Wild, reached here ; and they have one regiment already. There seems to be a rush on the part of the blacks to join. I have no doubt of their ability to make at -least fair soldiers, and, in many cases, after drill and experience, superior ones. We are not without mean, and, I may almost say, half-witted efforts to defeat this noble movement. But they will prove abortive, for the exigencies of our position, by an irresistible logic, are working out the kind designs of Providence : in fact, opposition is being silenced.
CAMP ROGERS, May 30, 1863.
The fields about us, so sterile last November, are yielding black- berries in profusion. Great quantities are picked by the men. The latest excitement in camp is the recruiting and obtaining commis- sions in the new heavy artillery regiment (Second), which it is pro- posed to raise out of the nine-months men here, to garrison forts in North Carolina. Gen. Foster has been round to each regiment, offering a hundred and fifty dollars bounty, thirty days furlough, and three months in camp in Massachusetts. They are making a fair start in our camp, though most of the activity is in getting commissions. Many of the men who have a fair disposition to re-enlist prefer to make up their minds in Massachusetts.
CAMP ROGERS, June 14, 1863.
I am seated outside of my tent, under a canopy of leaves, which, although somewhat dry, still answer their intended purpose of ex- cluding the sun while they admit the air. The day is cloudy, though still hot. We feel the mitigation of the temperature very sensibly, as until yesterday, which was rainy, there has been no intermission, for long wecks, of clear skies and burning suns. We have been, however, favored with light breezes, which have set up the valley of the Neuse with sufficient force to afford partial relief.
The dates of two of the preceding letters indicate a detail which came to me for a ten-days' course of guard-duty at Gen. Amory's house in Newbern, thus bringing me slightly in contact with the corporate life of the place ; for more than
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this could not be said of a town deserted by its inhabitants, and under such strict military control, that a pass must be shown to sentries at every corner.
I noted in this connection, however, the remarkable in- congruity of the transfer, by immigration, to North Carolina, of the hardy mountaineers of Switzerland. Holland itself would hardly appear to be in greater danger of submergence than a large part of eastern North Carolina is; yet to these swampy precincts came the men and women who were born and reared under the awful shadow of Mont Blanc. The universal local spelling of the name of the town is New Berne. They must have had vigorous health and stout hearts to resist the combined forces of malaria and home- sickness.
The moral character of the influences to which they and their descendants were subjected were even more strangely unfortunate than the material ; for, if my memory does not much deceive me, they were Huguenot refugees, the last persons in the world who would have looked forward with approval to the complicity of their descendants with slavery.
I had always understood that the relation between master and slave was much ameliorated in North Carolina by the fact that the manufacture of the various descriptions of naval stores, tar, pitch, etc., was carried on by small employers, many of whom labored with their slaves on terms of greater intimacy than prevailed in the cotton States. It is quite likely that this was to some extent the case; but, if it was, then I say that I do not wonder that the divine patience with the South was exhausted, and that he launched the fear- ful retribution of war against the oppressors of his children; for even in North Carolina the public conscience had become imbruted. There was a revolting deliberateness of wicked- ness in which the colored people were universally alluded to. When we asked any of the whites about the wealth of the owner of a plantation, the answer generally came, " He had so many head of black cattle before the war!" I make the following extract from one of my letters, in order that those who come after us will have a directly realizing sense, as
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they read this account, of the fearful curse which brought ::- from our homes into scenes of violence and bloodshed.
" As I was strolling around yesterday (in my second visit :) Newbern). I found a colored man, a little rising fifty years of az ... engaged upon a wharf in siding an oak-knee. I entered into col .- versation with him, and found that he had been a slave until the battle of Newbern. (He was nearly white.) He was doing !: . work excellently ; and in a quiet and prepossessing manner. in ::... swer to a question of mine, said that he was thoroughly acquainte : with his trade, and had worked at it all his days in Newbern. Beaufort, and other North-Carolina ports, paying his owner abo ::: three hundred dollars a year, retaining only enough for the bares: necessaries of life for himself and family. I asked about his chal- dren, to which he replied, that, when the secesh went off, they took three of them away. It was quite an experience to me to see a man evidently as intelligent, respectable, and skilled as any of our Northern mechanics, handling the familiar tools of my own calling. and yet so recently delivered from so abject a condition. I felt more than ever, that, if the South rules, it will ruin."
Whenever I was in Newbern, I found myself drawn irre- sistibly to the contemplation of one of the most interesting natural objects upon which my eyes ever rested. This was the palm-tree, growing in the open air, on the southerly of border street of the town, near the point of the peninsula. It was in the front-yard of a fair-sized, two-story house. wit !. which it compared well in height; so that it must, I judge. have been as tall, at least, as thirty feet. Its exquisite syis- metry formed its chief attraction to the outward sense. There were no angles about it, as in ordinary trees. I have no doubt but that an expert in the use of compasses in the delineation :: of curves could construet a palm, on paper. which should very nearly approximate the living tree. The manner in which the trunk passes by imperceptible gradations into t !. ยป branches, and from them into the leaves, is wonderful. T! trunk is massive at the base, giving the impression of the so - lidity of the oak in its hold upon the earth ; but, as the cyr followed the lines of the tree upward, its perception inse :.. sibly alters, as it finds itself viewing curves as delicate al .! graceful as those of the weeping-willow.
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But my chief pleasure in looking at it came from a higher source. In my youth I had made a visit to the remote group,_ called the Magdalen Islands, lying in the central portion of the Bay of St. Lawrence. While there, I was told that nothing but potatoes would grow, so bleak were the climatic exposures of the sea-girt isles. The location was about seven hundred miles north of Boston, and, when I stood before the palm in Newbern, I was nearly the same distance south of my home. I was impressed, as I gazed upon the tree, with the thought that the narrow belt of fourteen hundred miles, as it sweeps around the globe in the northern hemisphere, includes the homes of nearly all the people who have as yet risen out of barbarism. The potato and the palm are in some sense the sentinels of civilization. As I recalled my youthful visit northward, my mind was repelled by recollections of the chilly atmosphere of the arctic region; and the equally de- pressing warmth of the tropics was brought sensibly before me by the association of the palm with the intense heat which forced itself upon us in the early spring months of North Carolina.
The visit to the battlefield of Newbern quickened a latent faculty of the existence of which I had hitherto had no realizing sense. I refer to the power to enter appreciatively into those military combinations which lie mostly outside of tactics, which are understood to be confined to the actual movements upon the field of battle, without any reference to the theories upon which a general of an army decides upon the plan of a campaign.
In entering North Carolina through the Sound and Slo- cum's Creek, instead of the harbor of Beaufort, or by the Neuse, Burnside really got into the house through the un- guarded back door, which was comparatively open, instead of the front one, which, in either case, was strongly fortified by Fort Macon at Beaufort, and the obstacles of various kinds which were placed in the river to hinder a direct attack on Newbern by the way of the Neuse.
The astonishment and alarm of the Confederates must have been as great as that of the French at the Nile when Nelson
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sailed around their fleet, which lay at anchor, and engaged them on the side of the ships toward the shore : most of their guns had been removed from this side to an island in their front. The surrender of the whole coast-line of North Caro- lina was a matter almost of necessity the moment that New- bern was captured, and it did, in fact, follow with but lit !! bloodshed in a few weeks. The victory at Roanoke Island uncovered Norfolk, and compelled its evacuation.
I had a very peculiar experience in another respect, as I strolled over the battlefield, with every sense open to the heroic and elevated impressions which naturally affect a !! thoughful visitors to such scenes, and above all those who have themselves experienced the strong emotions which swell the breast where every thing is hazarded against a chance shot or shell.
Our dead were buried together upon the field of action, a graveyard being improvised ; but most of them had not been permitted to remain. Lying as they did in immediate prox- imity to water transportation to the North, the affection of friends overcame all obstacles in the way of their removal. The locality was unfrequented, and there was therefore 10 occasion to incur extra expense or labor in refilling the graves. The effect, as matters were at my visit, must have been rather sensational to all believers in the literal resurrec- tion of the body ; for it looked very much as though Gabriel had made a beginning of his work in a manner very encour- aging to their phase of faith. I was not open to that class of influences ; but I rather revolted, in spite of myself, at a certain air of ghastliness which so many yawning graves presented.
A retrospective view of the history of the regiment calls for a notice of the universal exposure of soldiers to the acri- dental discharges of fire-arms. Immediately after our arriva! at Newbern, the casualty on board of " The Merrimac," by which we were deprived for a time of the services of our quartermaster, was duplicated by a similar one to private John W. Fracker, who had the misfortune to mutilate his hand by the accidental discharge of his piece while engaged
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in foraging a few miles from camp. He was sent to the hos- pital at Newbern, and on his recovery accepted a permanent detail ; so that we saw but little of him afterwards.
On the morning of the 1st of February, as I came off duty as guard, about sunrise, I sat down on a pile of wood between two of the guard-tents. I had been there about fifteen minutes, when I was startled by the report of a musket and the whiz of a ball, from some quarter close by me, though I could not for the moment tell where. For an instant or two I was petrified with astonishment. As soon as I could collect my faculties, I was drawn by a deep groan of distress into the middle tent, the entrance to which was but a few feet from me, and there lay one of the guards, private Calvin Williamson of Company F, with a ball through his foot, the sole of his boot being blown apart, and the flesh and bones protruding. He was rheumatic, and in the effort to recap his gun while lying upon his back, through some stiffness of the joints, or sudden twinge of pain, he managed to discharge his piece in this disastrous manner. The day before, I had sat on the wood, when I came off duty, twice, in a spot that would have brought me directly in range, but was led this morning, by inward experiences which afterwards recurred at once to me, to a place which just cleared me front the range of the shot, which could be traced quite directly by the hole it made in the tent, and other tests ; as follows, the bullet passed over the camp, so close to the lieads of the men who were flocking to the sink as to cause them to dodge, and struck in the Trent. It brought a large part of the regiment out to the parade-ground, and I received many congratulations on my narrow escape. Certainly it was so; for one step only was needed to place me just where I should have been hit in the body.
On Tuesday, March 31, as we were going on dress-parade, we noticed our chaplain hurrying out of camp with a musket in his hand. This was an unusual proceeding on his part ; but it did not excite special remark, until, as we stood in line, as motionless as so many statues, we were startled by the report of a gun, and the passage, over the heads of the
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right-flank companies of the regiment, of a ball : it was suffi- ciently close to the men to cause an involuntary shrinking- The colonel immediately detailed a corporal and two men, who proceded to arrest the chaplain. He was brought into camp, and conducted up the street of Company H, just as we " broke ranks; " the members of the adjacent companies . crowding in upon us to witness the novel sight of a staff- officer under arrest. There was much suppressed mirthful- ness, sympathetic and respectful, however, in its character. The profound regret of the chaplain was very significantly shown in his concealment of his face by drawing his visor down. He was conducted to the colonel's tent, reprimanded, and dismissed. He had a very narrow escape from the sad reminiscences which would have harassed him in case of injury to any one of us. He was supposed to have fired into the water, from which the ball glanced in a manner which he did not anticipate.
As we are about taking our leave of North Carolina, I will here insert some climatic and personal exposures, beginning with a tropical storm.
Some time in the early spring, a large body of conscripts passed by our camp, and took the road to Trenton, presuma- bly on a march of the same character as our own in the preceding January. They had been gone a day or two, when, just at nightfall, we were visited with one of the most impos- ing thunder-storms of this locality. The coast of North Carolina thrusts itself abruptly into the ocean, and seems to be the focus of atmospheric disturbance. A sailor's ditty to this effect has become almost a proverb : -
"If the Bermudas let you pass, You must beware of Hatteras."
On this occasion, darkness came on prematurely, the clouds hung so low and so heavy. The forests across the plantation cast the blackest of shadows; and although we were for the moment free from wind or rain, yet it was evident that the elemental war was being waged with fearful fury a few miles inland. The peals of thunder were so frequent and so well
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defined, that, in spite of our better judgment, we could hardly help believing that a deadly action was going on at no great distance from us. We knew better ; yet really our sympa- thies, for a time, were excited in behalf of our friends who were "out."
I was on guard that night, and, as the hours moved on, I noted the passage of the storm-cloud northward, along the inner coast-line, until it appeared to have reached Plymouth or Suffolk. There it lingered for a while, the sound being deadened by distance. Then it began a retrograde course southward, following the Sounds and the Hatteras banks. Somewhere in the small hours of the night it was upon us, at Newbern, in all its fury ; and we walked our stations, with our guns under our coat-capes and blankets, enveloped alter- nately in the blazing light of noonday, and at the next instant in pitchy darkness, in drenching torrents also of rain, and thunder so loud and so incessant as to mock the heaviest artillery.
It was a night long to be remembered by those who were exposed to its violence. When at Hill's Point, in April, we had another of these characteristic storms. The flashes of lightning were so brilliant, it seemed as though we were wrapped in flames. Men who would have resented the slightest charge of cowardice were appalled at the awful dis- play of Almighty Power which we witnessed on these occa- sions.
We had a brigade picket-post across the Trent, on a road running through a thick forest. I had a personal fight with an army of mosquitoes here one night, just before we left for home. Their size and ferocity was something fearful. They attacked in massed columns, with an energy that was surprising. While off duty, I wrapped my head and face in my coat-cape, and lay down, thinking that I had got the better of them, surely ; but, to my horror I found, after it was too late, that they had bored through the knees of my stout army pants, and had drank their fill of blood, to my intense discomfort. I was driven to desperation by them, and was obliged to walk back and forth on a sultry night, swinging
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