napoleon 12 pounder
Sergeant
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2011
- Location
- huntington beach, ca
I was born and raised 20 miles south of Boston in the small town (5000 people) of Avon, Massachusetts. My Grandparents both arrived well after the war from Galway, Ireland. 1895 and 1896 though many of the family had emigrated during the famine. My families surname of Lally/McDonough is listed over 150 times on the roles of both north and south from teamsters to artillerymen.
I've been doing some research on the town and found this from the war era when the town was known as East Stoughton. It had 600 residents then. Most of these were Irish immigrants. East Stoughton sent 95 men into the service of the North, 16 of whom died. Men from there fought in all the major battles and even one who lost his life on the USS Cumberland when it was engaged with the CSS Virginia. I found some really interesting facts including the fact that wives and children were voted a monthly income ($12.00 for wives and $2.00 per child)while the war lasted and their husbands and fathers were at war. This is the first time I had heard of this. Also the raid or vandalism on the Baptist church(which is still there) and the torching of a black families buildings on the same night. I wonder if the conscription riots in New York were at the same time? I thought I would post in 2 parts the entire chapter.
Respectfully,
Napoleon 12 Pounder
CHAPTER VII
"We will fight side by side"
IN THE AVON Historical Society collection at the Blanchard House Museum, there is a picture of a group of men in uniform, standing ramrod straight in the light of the afternoon sun. The occasion of the photograph was a 1915 reunion of local Civil War veterans. The fading image is all that is left of them now, and it brings a little sadness to think of them as they must have looked as young men marching off to war.
The great issue of the middle third of the nineteenth century was slavery - or rather the extension of slavery into the vast territory won from Mexico in the war of 1846-1848. Southerners claimed the right to bring their "peculiar institution" into these new lands. Northerners, infused with the notion of "Free soil, free labor, free men," resisted. Extremists on both sides created many of the problems which led to the Civil War. No one, whether he lived in Boston or Charleston or even East Stoughton could have foreseen the bloodbath this contest produced.
There was never any doubt about where the people of East Stoughton stood on the matter. Friendly to the Republican party since its inception in 1854, they gave Abraham Lincoln a victory of more than two-to-one in the election of 1860.1 They stood ready to defend the Union when the call to arms was broadcast.
Expired Image Removed
There was a good deal of excitement in the village even before the outbreak of war. The temperance movement had gained new momentum throughout that final summer and fall of peace. Economic times weren't good, and the boot and shoe industry was suffering. On March 18, 1861, which was just two weeks after President Lincoln had taken office, a meeting described as "pretty full" was called to organize a strike among the bootmakers. "We have been making boots for five dollars a case that we had ten and twelve for in 1859-60." Complained their correspondent to a local newspaper. "We think we have paid the bosses for the privilege of breathing long enough, and now we think of tacking and go[ing] to the poorhouse, or raise our wages."
Three weeks later, and just three days before the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter, the unhappy workers announced the formatiion of the Boot and Shoemakers' Loan and Fund Association. Membership dues of $10 were payable in installments.2 This agitation would fade quickly enough, however, for the workers would not have to complain about the lack of work for very long.
On April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was bombarded by the shore batteries that rimmed the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. Under-supplied and badly out-gunned, the garrison surrendered the next day. Lincoln's call for 75,000 men to put down the rebellion was answered quickly as volunteers, young and old, pledged themselves to the defense of the Union. In East Stoughton, as elsewhere, feeling ran high. "War, war, war is the constant cry," reported the village correspondent to the North Bridgewater Gazette.3
Approximately ninety-five of the 530 soldiers sent by Stoughton for service in the Union army came from East Stoughton, and that was a remarkable turnout for a village whose total population was only about 600.4 These local men served in more than twenty different regiments, as well as in the U.S. Navy. When the war was over the toll in dead and wounded was found to be a heavy one: eighteen villagers had been discharged on account of sickness or injury. Some returned home to die soon after, suffering from the diseases they had contracted in the swamps of Virginia or Louisiana. Others were permanently disfigured by the loss of their sight or limbs. Sixteen of East Stoughton's finest young men never returned at all. Ten had fallen in battle, while the rest had succumbed to accident or illness.
In that tumultuous spring and summer of 1861, East Stoughton men enlisted for service in several regiments about to leave for the seat of the war. This was the last conflict in which village men could march together, knowing that their groups would remain intact until their discharge.
The largest contingent of villagers joined Company K of the 9th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteer Infantry. This was one of the two Bay State regiments consisting almost entirely of men of Irish birth. Twelve East Stoughton men left Boston on June 25, 1861 for Virginia. Carrying not only the national and state colors, the 9th Mass. also carried an Irish flag into battle.
The men of the 9th saw no combat for almost a year after leaving home, but they more than made up for it during General George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign in the summer of 1862, The East Stoughton boys saw heavy fighting at Hanover Court House, Mechanicsville, Gaines' Mill and Malvern Hill. In the final two battles the regiment saw 111 of its members killed, including its organizer, Colonel Thomas Cass, of Boston. At the end of the campaign, Richmond remained in Confederate hands thanks to McClellan's retreat.
So severely did the 9th Mass. suffer on the Peninsula that it was held in reserve at Second Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg. It spent the winter of 1862-1863 in camp at Falmouth, Virginia, and was present at both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, but suffered no serious losses. Winter, 1863-1864, was spent at Bealton Station, Virginia.
The 9th Mass. was back in action in the spring of 1864 and suffered heavy losses at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. Seventy-eight men were killed in these two engagements, which were fought in the Virginia countryside amidst the beauty of May flowers. Later the men of the 9th Mass. fought at the North Anna River and at Cold Harbor, and on June 10, 1864 the regiment was withdrawn from the front lines and sent home, its period of enlistment having expired.
The troopship which sailed into Boston Harbor on June 15 carried a very happy contingent of East Stoughton men. Remarkably, none of them had been killed, though at least four had received disability discharges and two others had deserted.5
East Stoughton had two representatives in the state's other Irish regiment, the 28th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Daniel Connery enlisted as a sergeant in Company C on December 13, 1861. He was wounded in action on June 16, 1862, but recovered in time to rejoin his regiment in front of Fredericksburg, Virginia. In one of the worst slaughters in American military history, Sergeant Connery was shot dead on the slopes of Marye's Heights. He died on the first anniversary of his muster into the service.
Another member of the 28th Mass. Regiment was William Currivan, a 30 year-old East Stoughton bootmaker who enlisted in Company C with his friend Connery. Severely wounded at Second Bull Run in August 1862, he was given a disability discharge in January 1863. In February 1864, Currivan re-enlisted in Company I of the 56th Mass. Regiment and was killed in action at the Wilderness on May 5, 1864.6
In June 1861, another group of villagers enlisted in Company K of the 11th Massachusetts Regiment, and these men saw almost continuous fighting throughout the war. The 11th Mass. was one of the three Bay State regiments present at First Bull Run in July 1861, and it fought the following year at Williamsburg and Fair Oaks on the Peninsula, as well as at Second Bull Run, where it sustained heavy casualties. These men were in the thick of the fight at Chancellorsville, and at Gettysburg they lost heavily trying to defend the Union III Corps' line along the Emmitsburg Road on the afternoon of July 2, 1863.
In 1864 the regiment continued its bloody record, sacrificing many soldiers at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness, and later at Cold Harbor and Petersburg. In 1865 the 11th Mass., with the East Stoughton men still in the ranks, joined with other Union forces in closing off Lee's escape route to the west. The regiment was near Appomattox on that fateful April day in 1865 when the hopes of the Confederacy faded forever.7
When the 11th Mass. Regiment returned home in the summer of 1865, two of its members were absent from the celebration. John Decoster had died of disease in 1862, and William B. Foster, a member of Company D, had drowned when his transport ship sank in the Potomac River. Poor Foster, a bootmaker by trade, had been a prisoner of war and had just been exchanged and sent on his way home. He died on April 23, 1865, two weeks after Lee's surrender.8
In June and July 1861, five East Stoughton men enlisted in Company F of the 12th Masssachusetts Regiment, known as the "Webster Regiment" because it had been recruited by Fletcher Webster, son of statesman Daniel Webster. Five companies were raised in Boston, and one each from Abington, Stoughton, North Bridgewater, Weymouth and Gloucester. The regiment fought first at Cedar Mountain and then at Second Bull Run, where Colonel Webster and twenty-four of his men were killed. At Antietam on September 17, 1862 the regiment fought in the famous Bloody Cornfield, where it suffered a staggering 224 casualties, including seventy-four killed.
At the Battle of Fredericksburg, on December 13, 1862, the 12th Mass. took part in the assault on the right end of the Confederate line, where it lost heavily. Among the dead was Jerome K. Hodge of East Stoughton.
The regiment was present at Chancellorsville in May 1863, and also at Gettysburg, where it took many casualties on the right of the Union line. In 1864 the 12th Mass. was engaged at the Wilderness, where it lost Sergeant Frank M. Stoddard, an East Stoughton man who had answered his country's call when he was only 19 years-old.
The Webster Regiment finished its service in action at the North Anna, Cold Harbor, and in front of Petersburg. On June 25, 1864 its members finally left the battlefields of Virginia, having fulfilled their three-year commitment. They arrived home on July 1, 1864.9
Other East Stoughton men also enlisted in the Union Army during the spring and summer of 1861. Caught up in the great surge of patriotism which swept the North after the fall of Sumter, two village men were mustered into the service with the 20th Mass. Regiment, and four others joined the ranks of the 29th Mass. Regiment. Most of these men were out of the service before the end of the war.
Back on the homefront, that summer saw a great deal of activity as the people of Stoughton and its village to the east made ready to support the war effort. At that point no one expected a long war, but citizens were ready to do what needed to be done in any case. On April 22, 1861 a town meeting was held at which it was resolved: That it is the sense of this meeting that we pledge ourselves as a town to see that all families of such persons as shall be accepted as volunteers in the present struggle to execute our National laws shall receive all proper support, and that a committee of two from each school district be appointed to see that all such families shall be supplied previous to Saturday next, and that they report at that time what measures are necessary to be taken for the future.
Two weeks later the town voted to pay $12 a month to the wife of each married volunteer, and an additional $2 for each dependent child under age fifteen. If the volunteer died while in the service his wife and children would continue to receive these benefits until the end of the war.
The town appointed a committee to distribute this money, and an additional $1,000 was set aside for cases not provided for under the foregoing arrangements. From 1861 to 1865 the town of Stoughton spent almost $40,000 for aid to soldiers' families.10
I've been doing some research on the town and found this from the war era when the town was known as East Stoughton. It had 600 residents then. Most of these were Irish immigrants. East Stoughton sent 95 men into the service of the North, 16 of whom died. Men from there fought in all the major battles and even one who lost his life on the USS Cumberland when it was engaged with the CSS Virginia. I found some really interesting facts including the fact that wives and children were voted a monthly income ($12.00 for wives and $2.00 per child)while the war lasted and their husbands and fathers were at war. This is the first time I had heard of this. Also the raid or vandalism on the Baptist church(which is still there) and the torching of a black families buildings on the same night. I wonder if the conscription riots in New York were at the same time? I thought I would post in 2 parts the entire chapter.
Respectfully,
Napoleon 12 Pounder
CHAPTER VII
"We will fight side by side"
IN THE AVON Historical Society collection at the Blanchard House Museum, there is a picture of a group of men in uniform, standing ramrod straight in the light of the afternoon sun. The occasion of the photograph was a 1915 reunion of local Civil War veterans. The fading image is all that is left of them now, and it brings a little sadness to think of them as they must have looked as young men marching off to war.
The great issue of the middle third of the nineteenth century was slavery - or rather the extension of slavery into the vast territory won from Mexico in the war of 1846-1848. Southerners claimed the right to bring their "peculiar institution" into these new lands. Northerners, infused with the notion of "Free soil, free labor, free men," resisted. Extremists on both sides created many of the problems which led to the Civil War. No one, whether he lived in Boston or Charleston or even East Stoughton could have foreseen the bloodbath this contest produced.
There was never any doubt about where the people of East Stoughton stood on the matter. Friendly to the Republican party since its inception in 1854, they gave Abraham Lincoln a victory of more than two-to-one in the election of 1860.1 They stood ready to defend the Union when the call to arms was broadcast.
Expired Image Removed
There was a good deal of excitement in the village even before the outbreak of war. The temperance movement had gained new momentum throughout that final summer and fall of peace. Economic times weren't good, and the boot and shoe industry was suffering. On March 18, 1861, which was just two weeks after President Lincoln had taken office, a meeting described as "pretty full" was called to organize a strike among the bootmakers. "We have been making boots for five dollars a case that we had ten and twelve for in 1859-60." Complained their correspondent to a local newspaper. "We think we have paid the bosses for the privilege of breathing long enough, and now we think of tacking and go[ing] to the poorhouse, or raise our wages."
Three weeks later, and just three days before the Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter, the unhappy workers announced the formatiion of the Boot and Shoemakers' Loan and Fund Association. Membership dues of $10 were payable in installments.2 This agitation would fade quickly enough, however, for the workers would not have to complain about the lack of work for very long.
On April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was bombarded by the shore batteries that rimmed the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina. Under-supplied and badly out-gunned, the garrison surrendered the next day. Lincoln's call for 75,000 men to put down the rebellion was answered quickly as volunteers, young and old, pledged themselves to the defense of the Union. In East Stoughton, as elsewhere, feeling ran high. "War, war, war is the constant cry," reported the village correspondent to the North Bridgewater Gazette.3
Approximately ninety-five of the 530 soldiers sent by Stoughton for service in the Union army came from East Stoughton, and that was a remarkable turnout for a village whose total population was only about 600.4 These local men served in more than twenty different regiments, as well as in the U.S. Navy. When the war was over the toll in dead and wounded was found to be a heavy one: eighteen villagers had been discharged on account of sickness or injury. Some returned home to die soon after, suffering from the diseases they had contracted in the swamps of Virginia or Louisiana. Others were permanently disfigured by the loss of their sight or limbs. Sixteen of East Stoughton's finest young men never returned at all. Ten had fallen in battle, while the rest had succumbed to accident or illness.
In that tumultuous spring and summer of 1861, East Stoughton men enlisted for service in several regiments about to leave for the seat of the war. This was the last conflict in which village men could march together, knowing that their groups would remain intact until their discharge.
The largest contingent of villagers joined Company K of the 9th Massachusetts Regiment of Volunteer Infantry. This was one of the two Bay State regiments consisting almost entirely of men of Irish birth. Twelve East Stoughton men left Boston on June 25, 1861 for Virginia. Carrying not only the national and state colors, the 9th Mass. also carried an Irish flag into battle.
The men of the 9th saw no combat for almost a year after leaving home, but they more than made up for it during General George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign in the summer of 1862, The East Stoughton boys saw heavy fighting at Hanover Court House, Mechanicsville, Gaines' Mill and Malvern Hill. In the final two battles the regiment saw 111 of its members killed, including its organizer, Colonel Thomas Cass, of Boston. At the end of the campaign, Richmond remained in Confederate hands thanks to McClellan's retreat.
So severely did the 9th Mass. suffer on the Peninsula that it was held in reserve at Second Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg. It spent the winter of 1862-1863 in camp at Falmouth, Virginia, and was present at both Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, but suffered no serious losses. Winter, 1863-1864, was spent at Bealton Station, Virginia.
The 9th Mass. was back in action in the spring of 1864 and suffered heavy losses at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. Seventy-eight men were killed in these two engagements, which were fought in the Virginia countryside amidst the beauty of May flowers. Later the men of the 9th Mass. fought at the North Anna River and at Cold Harbor, and on June 10, 1864 the regiment was withdrawn from the front lines and sent home, its period of enlistment having expired.
The troopship which sailed into Boston Harbor on June 15 carried a very happy contingent of East Stoughton men. Remarkably, none of them had been killed, though at least four had received disability discharges and two others had deserted.5
East Stoughton had two representatives in the state's other Irish regiment, the 28th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Daniel Connery enlisted as a sergeant in Company C on December 13, 1861. He was wounded in action on June 16, 1862, but recovered in time to rejoin his regiment in front of Fredericksburg, Virginia. In one of the worst slaughters in American military history, Sergeant Connery was shot dead on the slopes of Marye's Heights. He died on the first anniversary of his muster into the service.
Another member of the 28th Mass. Regiment was William Currivan, a 30 year-old East Stoughton bootmaker who enlisted in Company C with his friend Connery. Severely wounded at Second Bull Run in August 1862, he was given a disability discharge in January 1863. In February 1864, Currivan re-enlisted in Company I of the 56th Mass. Regiment and was killed in action at the Wilderness on May 5, 1864.6
In June 1861, another group of villagers enlisted in Company K of the 11th Massachusetts Regiment, and these men saw almost continuous fighting throughout the war. The 11th Mass. was one of the three Bay State regiments present at First Bull Run in July 1861, and it fought the following year at Williamsburg and Fair Oaks on the Peninsula, as well as at Second Bull Run, where it sustained heavy casualties. These men were in the thick of the fight at Chancellorsville, and at Gettysburg they lost heavily trying to defend the Union III Corps' line along the Emmitsburg Road on the afternoon of July 2, 1863.
In 1864 the regiment continued its bloody record, sacrificing many soldiers at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness, and later at Cold Harbor and Petersburg. In 1865 the 11th Mass., with the East Stoughton men still in the ranks, joined with other Union forces in closing off Lee's escape route to the west. The regiment was near Appomattox on that fateful April day in 1865 when the hopes of the Confederacy faded forever.7
When the 11th Mass. Regiment returned home in the summer of 1865, two of its members were absent from the celebration. John Decoster had died of disease in 1862, and William B. Foster, a member of Company D, had drowned when his transport ship sank in the Potomac River. Poor Foster, a bootmaker by trade, had been a prisoner of war and had just been exchanged and sent on his way home. He died on April 23, 1865, two weeks after Lee's surrender.8
In June and July 1861, five East Stoughton men enlisted in Company F of the 12th Masssachusetts Regiment, known as the "Webster Regiment" because it had been recruited by Fletcher Webster, son of statesman Daniel Webster. Five companies were raised in Boston, and one each from Abington, Stoughton, North Bridgewater, Weymouth and Gloucester. The regiment fought first at Cedar Mountain and then at Second Bull Run, where Colonel Webster and twenty-four of his men were killed. At Antietam on September 17, 1862 the regiment fought in the famous Bloody Cornfield, where it suffered a staggering 224 casualties, including seventy-four killed.
At the Battle of Fredericksburg, on December 13, 1862, the 12th Mass. took part in the assault on the right end of the Confederate line, where it lost heavily. Among the dead was Jerome K. Hodge of East Stoughton.
The regiment was present at Chancellorsville in May 1863, and also at Gettysburg, where it took many casualties on the right of the Union line. In 1864 the 12th Mass. was engaged at the Wilderness, where it lost Sergeant Frank M. Stoddard, an East Stoughton man who had answered his country's call when he was only 19 years-old.
The Webster Regiment finished its service in action at the North Anna, Cold Harbor, and in front of Petersburg. On June 25, 1864 its members finally left the battlefields of Virginia, having fulfilled their three-year commitment. They arrived home on July 1, 1864.9
Other East Stoughton men also enlisted in the Union Army during the spring and summer of 1861. Caught up in the great surge of patriotism which swept the North after the fall of Sumter, two village men were mustered into the service with the 20th Mass. Regiment, and four others joined the ranks of the 29th Mass. Regiment. Most of these men were out of the service before the end of the war.
Back on the homefront, that summer saw a great deal of activity as the people of Stoughton and its village to the east made ready to support the war effort. At that point no one expected a long war, but citizens were ready to do what needed to be done in any case. On April 22, 1861 a town meeting was held at which it was resolved: That it is the sense of this meeting that we pledge ourselves as a town to see that all families of such persons as shall be accepted as volunteers in the present struggle to execute our National laws shall receive all proper support, and that a committee of two from each school district be appointed to see that all such families shall be supplied previous to Saturday next, and that they report at that time what measures are necessary to be taken for the future.
Two weeks later the town voted to pay $12 a month to the wife of each married volunteer, and an additional $2 for each dependent child under age fifteen. If the volunteer died while in the service his wife and children would continue to receive these benefits until the end of the war.
The town appointed a committee to distribute this money, and an additional $1,000 was set aside for cases not provided for under the foregoing arrangements. From 1861 to 1865 the town of Stoughton spent almost $40,000 for aid to soldiers' families.10
Bringing the