Sunday, April 17, 2011

The first of so many to fall Sun, The (Lowell, MA) ­ Author: David Pevear , dpevear@lowellsun.com

LOWELL ­­ More than 620,000 Americans died ­­ 360,000 Union, 260,000 Confederate ­­ in a nation torn asunder by the Founding Fathers' sanctimonious interpretation of "all men are created equal."

Two of the first half­dozen to die during the gravest four years in the life of the nation are buried beneath a 23­foot­high granite monument at the confluence of Arcand Drive and Merrimack Street. The angry shouts now come from impatient motorists, most unaware of the significance of who eternally lies nearby.

Last Tuesday, April 12, was the 150th anniversary of the Confederate's opening bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston (S.C.) Harbor that began the Civil War.

This Tuesday is the 150th anniversary of the first trickles of blood spilled in growing anger. Luther C. Ladd and Addison O. Whitney, Lowell mill workers who enlisted in the 6th Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, were among four soldiers killed by a secessionist mob in Baltimore on April 19, 1861, while answering President Abraham Lincoln's initial call for 75,000 troops.

Ladd, 17, born in Alexandria, N.H., and Whitney, 22, born in Waldo, Maine, were privates in Company D (the "Lowell Guards") in a regiment of three­month volunteers that, six days after the fall of Fort Sumter, was the first fully organized and armed regiment to reach Washington, D.C.

The two other soldiers killed during the 6th's passage through Baltimore on April 19, 1861 were Cpl. Sumner H. Needham of Lawrence (died of his wounds eight days later; buried in Lawrence) and Pvt. Charles A. Taylor, who joined Company D on the morning it left for Washington, and about whom little is known. The mystery includes whether Taylor's body was later found and is buried alongside Ladd and Whitney's across from City Hall.

Taylor, not yet in uniform when the Baltimore mob pounced on the 6th, was believed mistaken for a civilian and buried in an unmarked grave. No friends or family ever came forward. As the 50th anniversary of the Civil War approached in 1911, Col. Edward F. Jones, who commanded the 6th that day in Baltimore, placed newspaper ads appealing for help finding Taylor's body. Jones was 83 at the time, living in Binghamton, N.Y. There were newspaper stories suggesting Taylor's remains were located and would be brought to Lowell for burial.

"Colonel Jones seems to have made it his end­of­life quest to find the body," says local historian Richard Howe Jr., a tireless researcher of Lowell's role in the Civil War. "But the circumstantial evidence from looking through the newspaper articles convinces me (Taylor's body) was never found. There were two false alarms."

The Ladd and Whitney Monument was dedicated on June 17, 1865, a little more than two months after Appomattox. A plaque with Taylor's name was attached to the monument, "I think around 1908," says Howe. Neither Howe nor Lowell Historical Society librarian Martha Mayo has found a conclusive trail leading Taylor's body to the grassy traffic island in downtown Lowell.

"But I don't think they would have added the name (to the monument) unless they found something," suggests Mayo. " A belt buckle, some bones, something."

Taylor's plaque on the Ladd and Whitney Monument states he was "The First To Fall In Defence Of The Union."

The 6th Massachusetts certainly was ready first. Because Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew, a Republican abolitionist, and Lowell attorney Benjamin Butler, a militia officer and former Democratic state legislator who had run against Andrew in 1860, strongly sensed war was imminent, the 6th was prepared to answer Lincoln's urgent call of April 15, 1861. Butler's foresight transformed a social club marching in parades and singing in glee clubs into a trained militia, says Howe. It was the first of many Butler initiatives that would infuriate the South over the next four years.

The 6th regiment that set out by train for Washington, D.C., on April 17 consisted of four companies from Lowell, two from Lawrence, and one each from Groton, Worcester, Stoneham and Boston. There were about 700 men in all.

They were cheered through New York and Philadelphia.

Up ahead, though, Baltimore seethed with secessionism. Assassins had lurked in the shadows there when President­elect Lincoln's train secretly passed through the city enroute to his inauguration seven weeks before. Lincoln received only 2.5 percent of the Baltimore vote the previous November.

On April 18, Pennsylvania militia passing through Baltimore were peppered with insults and rocks. By the time the 6th Massachusetts arrived late the following morning, "the unlawful combinations of the misguided swung into action," wrote the great Civil War historian Bruce Catton. No train service was allowed through the city, so the 10 cars carrying the 6th had to be pulled separately by horses over trolley

tracks for the mile and a half from President Street Station to Camden Station to continue on to Washington.

An intensifying mob of nearly 10,000 piled sand and anchors on the track to block the final three cars. Those troops detrained into a maelstrom of rocks and shouts. Angry hands grabbed at their weapons. The isolated companies of the 6th marched on the double­quick down Pratt Street toward Camden Street Station. Shots were exchanged. Four soldiers were killed, 36 wounded.

Twelve civilians also were reported killed.

Six weeks after the Baltimore riot, Harper's Weekly called Ladd "the first victim of the war ... murdered by the rowdies of Baltimore."

In his 2006 book Dissonance: The Turbulent Days Between Fort Sumter and Bull Run, historian David Detzer also names Ladd as the first soldier to die in the Baltimore riot. The 17­year­old was struck in the head by a heavy object, crumbled to the ground, and was shot in the leg by a rioter who had seized his rifle, writes Detzer.

Ladd was carried to an infirmary, where he bled to death.

Howe therefore surmises that Whitney, not Ladd, died first. Whitney was shot in the chest. He died quickly, says Howe, who notes that a final­breath quote attributed to Ladd ­­ "All hail the stars and stripes" ­­ is evidence Ladd expired more slowly.

"There is (an account) that says (Ladd's) body was all battered and swollen, and that he was shot in the leg," Howe says. "I guess it's an inference that he bled to death."

The grim historical distinction of who died first is ultimately immaterial to dispensing honor to those who died answering Lincoln's call. Often overlooked in the "first to die" debate is Pvt. Daniel Hough, a native of Tipperary killed five days earlier when a pile of cartridges ignited during a cannon salute to the flag during the surrender ceremony at Fort Sumter. A second soldier was mortally wounded during the explosion.

Taylor County, W.V., also claims to be home to the first Union soldier killed in the Civil War. Pvt. T. Bailey Brown was killed May 22, 1861 by actual Confederate soldiers and buried in the Grafton National Cemetery.

Ladd and Whitney were just the beginning. More than 4,000 Lowell residents fought in the Civil War and 428 of them died, according to The American Civil War Research Database. Before long, the dead would be hastily interred in trenches dug into blood­drenched soil of killing grounds such as Shiloh, "the Peninsula" and Antietam.

When Ladd and Whitney's elaborate funeral was held at Huntington Hall on the corner of Merrimack and Dutton streets on May 6, 1861, the nation could not conceive of the killing to come.

The bodies of Ladd, Whitney and Needham reached Boston by train on May 1. Gov. Andrew was there to meet these "relics of our brave and patriotic soldiers." A large crowd gathered at the station. The bodies had not been identified for certain, though Ladd and Whitney had not been heard from since the riot in Baltimore 12 days earlier.

Their bodies were taken in flag­draped hearses to the King's Chapel on the corner of Tremont and School streets in

Boston. There, according to the May 3, 1861 Boston Traveler, Ladd's body was identified by his brother­in­law, Whitney's by three of his "intimate friends."

The funeral in Lowell on May 6 drew a crowd thousands too large to fit inside Huntington Hall. The Lowell Brigade band played a dirge, the St. Ann's choir sang. Ladd and Whitney's flag­draped caskets rested under a "magnificent canopy supported by four columns, surmounted by a gilt eagle," according to Richard Watson Musgrove's 1904 History of The Town of Bristol, Grafton County, New Hampshire.

"The city was literally in mourning, the streets and stores hung with black, and over all a solemn hush," Augustus D. Ayling of the 7th Massachusetts Light Artillery wrote in his diary, edited by Charles F. Herberger and published in 1999.

Ladd's remains were the next day transported to Alexandria, N.H. He was buried there in the village cemetery until his remains later were brought back to Lowell.

In April 1863, the state approved $2,000 to build a monument honoring Ladd and Whitney, on the condition Lowell also raised $2,000, according to Frederick William Coburn's History of Lowell and its people. Lowell Mayor Hocum Hosford in his inaugural address on Jan. 4, 1863 complained Ladd and Whitney's modest resting place in Lowell Cemetery went "unobserved by the passer­by."

The monument was dedicated on June 17, 1865. Ladd and Whitney's bodies had been disinterred from Lowell Cemetery. Gov. Andrew spoke. (The dedication had been scheduled for April 19, 1865, the fourth anniversary of their deaths, but, was postponed because of the assassination of Lincoln five days earlier.)

Yesterday, there was a parade in Baltimore along the same route where Ladd and Whitney fell 150 years ago. The Baltimore City Historical Society newsletter noted that city rules prohibited Confederate uniforms or flags in the parade.

But it was noted that rebel yells were expected.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

An abolitionist battleground Sun, The (Lowell, MA) ­ Author: David Pevear , dpevear@lowellsun.com

LOWELL ­­ Had there been no slavery, no Southern insistence to expand slavery westward, no Fugitive Slave Law, then today there would be no Gettysburg, no March to the Sea, no Civil War 150th anniversary to contemplate and celebrate.

It was always about slavery.

A mill city reliant on Southern cotton, Lowell's economic interests leading up to the Civil War conflicted with the moral certitude that slavery was a Constitutionally sanctioned sin that reduced the Declaration of Independence to flowery hypocrisy.

Anti­slavery sentiment seethed in Lowell during the national rumblings of 1830 to 1860. Even most power brokers in the textile industry deplored slavery while remaining firm that it was Constitutionally protected, "and that the federal government had no right to interfere," says Gray Fitzsimons, former historian for the Lowell National Historical Park. Many mill agents in Lowell forbade workers to circulate petitions calling for a 10­hour work day, but tolerated anti­slavery petitions.

Fitzsimons authored a 12­stop "anti­slavery" walking tour of downtown Lowell to celebrate those who fearlessly walked on the right side of humanity. There may be a parking lot where the John Street Congressional Church once stood, but sermons unleashed on that spot by Rev. Eden B. Foster in the 1850s still echo off the printed page. In his blistering The Rights of the Pulpit and Perils of Freedom, Foster in 1854 seemed to sense unavoidable carnage resulting from America enabling slavery's extension against God's design.

"The battle rages, and must rage until either Freedom or Slavery dies," Foster warned, four years before Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" speech.

In her 1889 autobiography A New England Girlhood, Lucy Larcom, a poet and mill worker who lived in Lowell from 1835 to 1845, reflected on how strange it seemed that the anti­slavery cause had not always been a "free" nation's cause.

In 1855 Larcom had written the influential poem, A Call to Kansas, which was set to a popular tune, and tugged anti­slavery settlers toward "bleeding" Kansas during the territory's battle whether to become a free or slave state. In her autobiography she wrote that anti­slavery sentiments before the war were regarded as "traitorous heresies."

"If the vote of the mill girls had been taken, it would have doubtless been unanimous on the anti­slavery side," Larcom wrote. "But those were the days when a woman was not expected to give, or even to have, an opinion on subjects of public interest."

(The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, gave black men the right to vote. Not until 1920 did the 19th Amendment give women the right to vote.)

Sensitivities to the Civil War's purpose have heightened in the 50 years since the centennial festivities commenced in 1961, with some Southern governors clinging to the Confederate flag during the civil­rights movement.

Many Southerners persisted in calling the Civil War a noble fight for states' rights against Northern aggression. Caryn Cosse Bell, a UMass Lowell history professor whose expertise is slavery and abolition, counters "states' rights" arguments with a question raised by Pulitzer Prize­winning historian Eric Foner: "Do you think the Civil War would have been fought had there not been slavery?"

"I think the question is a very powerful one," says Bell, a native of New Orleans. "I don't see how it can be answered any other way. No, it wouldn't have been fought."

Until Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a war aim, to take effect on Jan. 1, 1863, his unwavering policy had been restoration of the Union. The president had believed the Constitution prohibited him from interfering with slavery where it already existed.

New England states had abolished slavery before 1800. By 1860, Lowell, with a population of about 37,000, including 41 free blacks, was the second­largest city in Massachusetts. The city was a political hotbed, visited during the preceding 30 years by abolitionist firebrands Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and George Thompson. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier lived in Lowell from 1844 to 1845 while editor of Middlesex Standard, the anti­slavery newspaper.

"In populations between the ages of 18 and 35, it was probably number one in Massachusetts," says Martha Mayo, librarian for the Lowell Historical Society. "It was a city of

young, active, adventuresome women and men, all working. So if you were going to raise money (for a cause), this was where you were going to raise it."

In the 1830s and 1840s, the fear of disunion caused even many opposed to slavery's extension into the territories to demonize radical abolitionists. Garrison was once tied up by an angry mob and dragged through the streets of Boston.

In December 1834, during the second visit to Lowell by Garrison's English friend Thompson, a brickbat heaved through a window at Lowell's old Town Hall narrowly missed Thompson's head as he spoke. Thompson went right on speaking. Later, he grabbed the brickbat as a keepsake.

The following night an angry mob prevented Thompson from speaking. He did speak the following afternoon. Thompson had been invited to this city by the recently formed Lowell Anti­Slavery Society.

(The old Town Hall, now the Enterprise Bank building on Merrimack Street, was City Hall by 1848 when a Whig congressman from Illinois named Lincoln campaigned there for presidential candidate Zachary Taylor, a slave owner.)

Economic self­interest contributed to anti­abolitionist sentiment, says Fitzsimons, "but there was a very strong feeling that the union was sacred, and worries over breaking those sacred bonds ran very strong."

In August 1835, a public meeting was called in Lowell to consider a resolution to cool fiery abolitionist rhetoric in the city. The Lowell Times later congratulated Lowell's citizens for greeting the proposal with "hisses, scrapings, coughings and yells."

The Richmond (Va.) Compiler observed, "Lowell is not an obscure and insignificant village, but an extensive manufacturing town 25 miles from Boston ... and contains as many inhabitants as the white population of Richmond. Thus the startling fact appears, that the abolitionists have made such progress, that in such a town as Lowell, they have not only a society and a press to aid them in their seditious and traitorous agitating measures, but that they have acquired such influence, made so many converts, and infused into them such a fanatical and intolerant spirit, that an anti­abolition meeting is not permitted to be held there!"

The paper proposed that Southern markets boycott Lowell's manufacturers so that "Lowell will wither or be forced to expel the abolitionists."

Southern reactions to Lowell's anti­slavery societies were out of proportion to the societies' "very small" membership and similar unpopularity here at the time, says Fitzsimons.

But later, as war approached and the country careened from crisis to crisis over slavery, an increasing number of Northerners, including Lowellians, were drawn to the abolitionist cause, says Bell. "It was not all humanitarian," she says. "Northerners didn't want huge plantations to suck up all the land in the new territories. They wanted it preserved for small farmers. Economically, they didn't want slavery to spread."

Lowell's population growth slowed during an economic panic in the late 1850s. At the war's outbreak, the price of cotton soared. Mill owners cashed in their stores of raw cotton, believing the war would be short, says Fitzsimons. Mills shut down. The men went off to fight a war that lasted four years and killed 620,000.

This past semester, Bell took students from her class on slavery and abolition to the Boott Cotton Mills Museum on John Street. She asked if they felt the textile industry's tie to Southern cotton picked by slaves was well­presented there. "They didn't think it was addressed enough," she says.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Battle lines still form over Lowell's Gen. Ben 'Beast' Butler Sun, The (Lowell, MA) ­ Author: David Pevear , dpevear@lowellsun.com

LOWELL ­­ Several years ago, while John Pearson and his family toured old mansions in New Orleans, their guide brought up life in that city "during the occupation."

Pearson whispered diplomatic warnings to his teenage son and daughter: Ask no questions about "the occupation," make no mention of being descendants of Major Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler of Lowell.

"History is history, and it's sometimes long forgotten," says Pearson, 61, a Lowell lawyer, who recalls frequent visits to New Orleans with civil laughter. "But being military governor of an occupied city is a tough job. Those were tough times."

With the Civil War Sesquicentennial in full fury, now seems a good time to give some love to Abraham Lincoln's most notorious and physically unattractive political general, Ben "Beast" Butler, whose talent for stomping out civil unrest in the 1860s kept the "War Between the States" smoldering in the South.

Only William T. Sherman is hated there more.

Butler's Civil War stock is generally rising, though. That history was once ruled by Grant and Sherman, and Lee and Jackson, and great armies Blue and Gray bloodying tiny dots on the American map into the national consciousness ­­ Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Shiloh ...

Soldierly skills were not Butler's thing. But as the social and political history of the war has become more prevalent ­­ in particular, the war's freeing of 4 million black slaves ­­ so, too, has Butler, who early on began to shift the course of the conflict with three brilliant words: "Contraband of war."

A New York Times magazine story last month, "How Slavery Really Ended in America," traced the beginning of its end to Butler, who on May 24, 1861, designated three slaves who had escaped into his lines in Fort Monroe, Va., as "contraband of war." (The magazine piece was adapted from Adam Goodheart's book 1861: The Civil War Awakening.)

Butler, 42 at the time, was a Democrat ­­ a Democrat who 57 consecutive times voted to nominate Jefferson Davis for president in 1860 ­­ and no abolitionist. But when war came, no one doubted which side he was on. He was a talented lawyer and a calculating politician, maintaining a soft spot for the poor and oppressed while always following the patronage trail. He served in the Massachusetts Legislature before the war. He would serve in Congress, be elected governor of Massachusetts, and, in 1884, run for president.

And because treasonous Southerners insisted slaves were "property," and that the Confederacy was a new independent country, Butler reasoned U.S. laws protecting slavery no longer applied, and that seized "property" should not be returned to assist the enemy.

Having brushed up on military law, an amateur general from Lowell, in the war's second month, provided the first

meaningful nudge from fight for Union toward war for emancipation. The great Civil War historian Bruce Catton wrote Butler was seemingly appointed, "in the infinite Providence of God, to cast his own strange ray of revealing light on the way the war must go."

(On May 21 and 24 in Fort Monroe, the Contraband Historical Society will celebrate the sesquicentennial with parades, re­enactors and panel discussions, featuring contraband descendants.)

"What he should have done was retire and come back to Lowell right then," jokes Lowell historian Richard Howe Jr. "He didn't."

Butler continued on his course of enraging the South, and frequently his superiors in Washington, D.C.

Several years ago, Martha Mayo, librarian for the Lowell Historical Society and unabashed Butler fan, seethed during a Lowell National Historical Park junket to New Orleans, where Butler achieved infamy while the city's harsh military governor from May to December 1862. Catton once wrote that Butler "was exactly the sort of man the founding fathers had in mind when they stiffened the Constitution to prevent an abuse of military authority."

Mayo asked a female park ranger what was being said about Butler in New Orleans more than a century after "the occupation."

The woman responded: "That he hung a woman."

"Wait a minute. Time out," Mayo, feisty in all matters Butler, recalls saying. "He didn't hang any woman. He did hang a man. But he didn't hang a woman."

Marie Sweeney from the Lowell Historical Society diplomatically steered her agitated friend out the door. A second Civil War was averted.

The following morning in Lafayette Square, another park ranger "starts trashing Ben," Mayo recalls. She restrained herself, and smiled as several others in the Lowell contingent blistered the Butler basher.

"I didn't have to say a word," Mayo says, smiling.

"We love Ben Butler," Sweeney says, "even though he's ugly as sin."

Butler angered Southerners. His famous Order No. 28 assigned prostitute status to any New Orleans woman disrespectful toward Union troops. He had a local gambler, William Mumford, hanged for tearing down a U.S. flag. But Butler also infuriated Southerners for exposing divisions within white society, says Michael Pierson, a UMass Lowell history professor who has written about New Orleans during the Civil War.

"A lot of whites in New Orleans really sided with the United States; mostly immigrants, Northern­born merchants, and people who wanted to trade with a united country," Pierson says. "Butler helped this community, and protected them from Confederate violence."

And yes, Butler did hang a man.

After Mumford's body was cut down from the gallows, the crowd turned and saw at the other end of the public square a gigantic flag being raised by loyal white residents of New Orleans, Pierson says. "So you see the (symbolic) death of the Confederacy in the morning, and the rise of the United States in the afternoon," he says.

Butler hanged a man, that is true. And he took measures to improve the city's sanitation, saving countless other lives. But Pierson doubts Butler bothered much with stealing spoons and forks. Southerners nicknamed Butler "Spoons" because the general is said to have pilfered the silverware of New Orleans high society. Pierson suspects Butler was too occupied with more profitable enterprises, perhaps even enabling family members to illegally trade in salt and cotton.

"He's still a controversial figure in the city, 150 years later," says Patricia Ricci, curator of the Louisiana Civil War Museum in New Orleans, where two display cases are devoted to Butler. The Butler display includes one of the famous chamber pots with a carte de viste of Butler's image at the bottom. The chamber pots were popular during "the occupation." (The museum sells replicas for $52.50 as a fundraiser.) Ricci jokes that only re­enactors probably use the replicas for their intended purpose.

Butler also has Northern critics, who have ample documentation that he was a bad general. His amateurish command of troops in the field resulted in a defeat at Big Bethel on June 10, 1861, in an entire army being bottled up in the Bermuda Hundred in 1864 by a vastly inferior Confederate force. In January 1865, Butler was finally relieved from command for failing to carry out Ulysses S. Grant's orders to capture Fort Fisher, which guarded Wilmington, N.C., the last open Confederate port.

These soldierly shortcomings overshadowed periodic and significant competence, however. In April 1861 Butler was responsible for reopening the rail line to Washington, D.C., easing fears that Confederates would march into an isolated capital and seize Lincoln and his cabinet in the opening days of the war. On May 13, 1861, acting without orders, Butler seized Federal Hill in Baltimore, aimed Union cannons toward City Hall, and took advantage of Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus by arresting the secessionist­leaning mayor, police commissioner and city council. "(The Union) never had trouble with Baltimore again," Howe says.

In Generals in Blue, a respected biographical reference book published in 1964, Ezra J. Warner wrote that Butler's military exploits hardly "earn him a place beside Napoleon and Marlborough, (but) in other respects his contributions to the Union cause were little short of monumental."

Butler obviously did something right. Davis, president of the Confederacy whom Butler once supported, in December 1862 declared Butler an outlaw to be hanged if captured. On Jan. 1, 1863, the day Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect, a Charleston, S.C. resident offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of Butler, dead or alive.

Butler lived to be 74. He died in 1893 and is buried in the Hildreth family cemetery off Hildreth Street, 25 yards from where lies his son­in­law, Adelbert Ames, a more legitimate combat general who earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism at First Bull Run.

"When he was actually fielding an army, God help us," UMass Lowell's Pierson says with laughter about Butler. "But when given a political problem ­­ such as what to do with contrabands, or what to do with a large city with divided loyalties ­­ he did a very good job." Sunday, August 7, 2011

Sunday, August 7, 2011

A Virginia field covered in Lowell's blood Sun, The (Lowell, MA) ­ Author: David Pevear , dpevear@lowellsun.com

Of many themes probed during the Civil War sesquicentennial, the most benumbing to American sensibilities, even in a time of combating terror, is the staggering amount of death and mourning from the years 1861­65.

Tallying and identifying the dead overwhelmed a U.S. war machine that never envisioned any war producing so many corpses. Uncertainties and inaccuracies were excruciating and cruel. No reliable mechanism was in place to officially notify families that their fathers, sons, husbands and brothers had fallen in battle. Often unclear was where bodies were buried, disease­plagued armies having since marched on to more fights and hasty burials in a war that killed roughly 620,000, approximately 360,000 of those on the Union side.

One death in war is devastating to a community. But try to imagine if 14 Lowell men were today killed in one firefight in Afghanistan. That was the unimaginable pain of the Civil War.

Regiments organized in localized companies resulted in America's four­year bloodbath hitting home in grievous waves, like on Aug. 9, 1862. Of 56 soldiers in the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment killed or mortally wounded at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, near Culpeper, Va., 14 were from Lowell. Altogether, about 450 men from Lowell died in the Civil War, about half succumbing to disease.

Horrible news often arrived in letters written by comrades of the killed. There were dreadful casualty lists in newspapers: name after name in type as cold and routine as today's NFL

training­camp cuts. Mothers, fathers and wives fearfully pored through these lists compiled by army officers, newspaper correspondents or chaplains who were frequently inaccurate.

"WAS NOT KILLED" read a heading in the Lowell Daily Courier on Sept. 18, 1862, under which it reported that Cpl. Andrew J. Claffey "of this city," previously listed as killed during the Battle of Second Bull Run three weeks earlier, was still alive. His relatives, no doubt relieved, received a letter saying Claffey was severely wounded "and remained six days on the field of battle before he was removed to a hospital." (Claffey, born in Ireland, lived to be 83, and was a member of Grand Army of the Republic Post 139 in Somerville.)

A staggering toll

Cedar Mountain, angry prelude to Second Bull Run, was arguably Lowell's bloodiest day. This battle entangling 24,000 Confederates and 11,000 Union soldiers shifted the fight in the East away from Richmond into Northern Virginia on the gory road to Antietam five weeks later and Gettysburg the following summer.

Cedar Mountain was a nasty, mismanaged fight. Temperature­wise it was the hottest (98 degrees) of the major Civil War engagements in Northern Virginia. The gunfire from Cedar Mountain was so hot and heavy, it was heard more than 70 miles away in Richmond.

At Cedar Mountain, Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate's best general, outnumbered pompous John Pope's slowly assembling Union army more than two to one but was slow bringing his superior forces to bear. Union Gen. Nathaniel Banks, a former Massachusetts governor and speaker of the U.S. House, upon whose military inadequacies Jackson

preyed while establishing his legend in the Shenandoah Valley that spring, rushed recklessly after vengeance and nearly succeeded. A.P. Hill, feuding with Jackson over Stonewall's failure to properly communicate a marching order the previous day that stalled the army and had infuriated Jackson, finished off the overexposed Federal forces as darkness fell.

During the height of the battle, more than 3,000 men fell in 90 minutes. Federal casualties were 314 killed, 1,445 wounded and 622 captured. The Confederate losses were 223 killed, 1,060 wounded and 31 missing. The 2nd Massachusetts, commanded by Col. George L. Andrews of Bridgewater, became caught in a lethal crossfire as other Union troops withdrew. The 2nd was among the last Union regiments to leave a field that was strewn with bodies. Many of those bodies would be left to rot for two days.

The day after the battle, the first casualty lists arrived in Lowell, including news of the death of Capt. Edward G. "Ned" Abbott, 21, a Harvard graduate from a prominent political family, who had raised and commanded Company "A" of the 2nd Massachusetts.

A week after the battle, the Evening Advertiser published a more detailed accounting of Lowell's "Killed and Wounded at the Battle near Cedar Mountain." Those listed as wounded included Pvt. George W. Buxton, 28, ("flesh, left ankle"), whose left leg would be amputated; he died two weeks later. Pvt. Oscar Spaulding, 18, ("flesh, right leg, and right arm broken) died three days after listed in the paper as wounded. Newell G. Gilman, 35, ("right arm broken") died a month later.

The day the casualty list was published, the Lowell City Council's committee on recruitment called for a rally the following night to fill Lowell's quota of troops for a war growing insatiable. The paper reported also that the freshly assembled 33rd Massachusetts had departed from Camp

Stanton in Lynnfield, off to meet its fate at places such as Gettysburg, Pa., Wauhatchie, Tenn. and Resaca, Ga. The 33rd would lose 188 men out of 1,276 who served in the regiment during its three years' service. Fifty­six of those 188 were from this area, including 31 from Lowell.

A "noble life lost"

Maj. Henry Livermore Abbott was on a reconnaissance mission near Richmond with the 20th Massachusetts when his brother "Ned" was killed at Cedar Mountain. Henry Abbott's collected Civil War letters, edited by Roger Garth Scott and titled Fallen Leaves, include a letter to his mother Caroline in late August, after he first learned of his brother's fate.

"I thought Ned would surely come through all right," Henry wrote. "I wish to God I could have seen him on the battle field ... It is very hard to think that we will never see him again. If I could only have seen his body. Every time my company is drawn up it reminds me of Ned, for I have been thinking lately of getting it into fine shape to show to Ned when we got up there (to the front)."

In September 1863, the 2nd Corps, to which Henry Abbott and the 20th Mass. were assigned, was camped near Cedar Mountain. Henry had collected printed accounts of the battle fought there 13 months earlier. He walked the field with an officer who in August 1862 had arrived there shortly after the battle. Henry Abbott was directed to the spot where, in Abbott's words, his brother's regiment "was massacred."

"When I look at the place, I think he was murdered," Henry Abbott wrote to his mother. "How could an officer cross this open field rising towards the rebels & with his right entirely uncovered (?) ... offering the strongest temptation to the rebels to creep across through the bushes & entirely out flank

him. Think of that noble life lost by the heartless vanity of a politician (Banks) who wishes to have the newspapers say that he advanced ..."

Eight months after writing this letter, Henry Abbott was killed at the Wilderness. He is buried beside his brother "Ned" in Lowell Cemetery.