Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [79]
They each got twenty-five dollars, which if combined would have equaled half the value of Sylvester’s farm. So maybe they joined for the money, or maybe for the Union cause, or maybe for the adventure, or maybe for all of those reasons. What sort of relationship these brothers had is impossible to know—they have left no discoverable letters or other personal records behind. But for sure they worked closely on the farm as brothers—the work would have taken more than one man, rooting up stumps, hauling rocks from the fields, twitching logs out of the woods. Were they confidants or rivals? Did they argue or cooperate? All I know from the scant records available is that they took the same path away from the farm—there was only one road out of the intervale, and it led past the hillside and the pond—and into the great chasm of civil war.
On the way to New Orleans, a barrel of beef that Albion was loading onto a transport boat rolled and smashed his leg. He was taken out of duty and eventually recovered, though with a cough that had developed while he was recuperating. It steadily worsened and produced blood. Disease took its toll on the Northern boys who came into the South and encountered new germs, and New Orleans—between the malarial mosquitoes and syphilis in the city’s numerous whorehouses—extracted a particularly heavy price. Another local boy, also in the 12th Maine, wrote in a letter to a friend:
I have been to as many as a dozen hoar houses and I hant seen but two good stile in the hole lot, but a dirtier damn set of cases you never see.... Portland or Boston is a better chance for a good clean time than New Orleans but if you want a Reckless nasty Damn drunken anything of that kind you can get it here.
He noted that seventy-five of his comrades in the regiment suffered the clap. Albion reenlisted but never fully recovered from his bloody cough and was discharged for disability in August 1865. He died at home, most likely Sylvester’s home, of a lung hemorrhage, in a bed not more than a quarter mile from the cabin. He would have been twenty-two years old.
Hosea had enlisted with four other young men from town, and fifteen from nearby Lovell. The regiment was drawn mostly from the farm and logging towns of western Maine. It is easy to imagine those men and boys flowing out of the hills onto the dusty winding roads in small but gathering groups until they formed a tattered parade of roughs in gallused trousers, blousy shirts and homemade shoes, shouting “Huzzah and hooray” for the Union. Without much training, the 16th Maine departed for Washington, D.C., and then to the Maryland campaign, which culminated at bloody Antietam (3,650 dead, 17,300 wounded). Then it was on to Burnside’s disaster at Fredericksburg, where the general’s dithering on the wrong side of the Rappahannock ultimately cost the Union Army a victory against General Lee. On the day of battle, December 13, the Union soldiers—with Hosea and the Stoneham boys of Company D—were lined up against Stonewall Jackson on the Rappahannock Plain just outside of the city. At midmorning, with the fog lifting, the 2nd Division and 16th Maine came under heavy fire and were ordered to charge the Confederate troops. Stonewall Jackson had been patiently waiting for the Union troops to come within range of his artillery. He opened fire. It was an awful, bloody mess, and the Union troops were routed. Hosea was wounded slightly in the battle, but soon returned to service.
Months later, in early May 1863, Hosea experienced another Union debacle, at Chancellorsville. Did Hosea think of the Saco River back home as he crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers in Virginia on the way to Hooker’s defeat in Spotsylvania County?