Boys From Rockville : Civil War Narratives

The 14th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry was formed in August 1862, and less than a month later its men were engaged in the fierce fighting at Bloody Lane during the battle of Antietam. Over the next two and a half years, they participated in all the other battles involving the Army of the Potomac, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. They captured more enemy flags and suffered more casualties than any other Connecticut regiment in the Civil War. This book presents an articulate, firsthand view of camp life and combat in the 14th, as told by Sgt. Benjamin Hirst of Company D, a unit composed largely of men from the mill town of Rockville.Hirst's wartime narratives consist of letters and journal entries written during his actual service. As such, they have a special freshness and immediacy lacking in most postwar memoirs and creative reconstructions of the war. Filled with details about the common soldier's experiences of army life, Hirst's writings also offer his views on the singular importance of personal courage in combat and of a marriage weathering the difficult separation brought on by war. Hirst's straggle to meet his obligations as both soldier and absentee husband make for richly compelling reading.Interspersed with Hirst's narrative is extensive commentary by Robert L. Bee that seeks to capture Hirst's worldview and the impact of his earlier life experiences upon his wartime portrayals. Why, Bee asks, did Hirst write as he did? What did he emphasize, and what did he ignore? How were his narratives influenced by his previous years of labor in the textile mills? As Bee argues, Hirst carried with him into war an ideal of manly responsibility thatinfluenced virtually all his writing. It was an ideal that was abruptly and severely tested at Antietam -- and then even more harshly at Fredericksburg, as Hirst and his comrades grappled with the demands of courage under fire.In the book's epilogue, Bee considers a series of war narratives that Hirst published in his local newspaper some twenty-five years after the war. He compares them to Hirst's originals to determine how much of his wartime perspective remained intact and to gauge the effects of a quarter-century's worth of reflection and energetic discussion with other veterans.