It all started with a mention in Duane Shaffer’s book, Men of Granite: New Hampshire’s Soldiers in the Civil War.
The 11th New Hampshire Regiment, whose volunteers were called up in August 1862, included Pvt John D. Purington of Company A. Shafer noted the private’s complaints about the food (he wrote home, “your dog is used better than they use the poor soldiers”) and then commented that there weren’t any more complaints about camp life because Pvt. Purington died of wounds suffered at Fredericksburg on December 13th.
It was his burial site that stopped me: Locust Grove Cemetery in Newfields NH. A mile from my house.
On April 16, 1861, NH Governor Ichabod Goodwin put out the call to form the First New Hampshire Volunteers. On May 25, 1861 that regiment marched down Main Street in Concord to the railroad that would carry them South to fight. The Confederate forces had fired on Fort Sumter on April 12th. By August 29, 1862, another New Hampshire soldier -- Gen Fitz John Porter (born in Portsmouth and a hero of the Peninsula Campaign of 1861) – was facing a different choice. His story is the focus of a Strawbery Banke Museum exhibit May 1 – October 31, 2011.
Knowing that Gen. James Longstreet and 30,000 Confederate troops were massed with Stonewall Jackson on the ridge above, he held the Union flank and chose not to make an attack. Ordered in again on the 30th his 5,000 troops of the V Corps were part of the slaughter of Second Manassas that would shadow the record of Union General John Pope. Pope relieved Porter of command for his Aug 29th actions on September 5th. In November, after leading the corps in support of Maj. Gen George McClellan through the Maryland Campaign, Porter was arrested and court-martialed for insubordination at Second Manassas, Some, including Lincoln’s son, said he should have been shot.
Twenty-five years later, on August 6, 1886, Porter was finally pardoned based on a military tribunal’s conclusion that he had, indeed, faced 30,000 Confederate troops and not just Jackson’s forces (as Pope believed) on August 29th.
At the same time, September 2, 1862, New Hampshire was sending its Eleventh Regiment south from Concord. This story centers around members of the 11th and the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, fought on the icy, muddy banks of the Rappahannock, December 11-13, 1862 -- a singular monument to the chaos, confusion and mismanagement that made the Civil War, militarily, a four year long campaign.
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