Tag Archives: 3rd Maine Infantry Regiment

The 3rd Maine and Cadmus Wilcox’s Alabamians duel in Pitzer’s Woods, part 2

Ordered by Maj. Gen. David B. Birney to probe southern Seminary Ridge on Thursday, July 2, 1863, Col. Hiram Berdan and his green-clad sharpshooters crossed the Emmitsburg Road and advanced into Pitzer’s Woods. With Berdan came Col. Moses B. Lakeman and his 3rd Maine Infantry Regiment. You can read part 1 here. The sharpshooters took […]

The 3rd Maine and Cadmus Wilcox’s Alabamians duel in Pitzer’s Woods, part 1

Early on Thursday, July 2, 1863, Maj. Gen. Dan Sickles sent an aide to find Col. Elijah Walker and his 4th Maine Infantry Regiment, numbering “about 300 men and 18 officers” upon bivouacking near Cemetery Ridge the previous night. Sickles commanded III Corps, deployed by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade to hold the southern end […]

Sumter’s 9/11 aftermath: A shell explodes in central Maine

Few Confederates shelling Fort Sumter into submission probably thought about the war that their idiocy had started. As with Pearl Harbor and 9/11, there quickly came a military response to an attack on Americans and American property. “When the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, their shells traveled remarkable distances; one flew north and exploded under […]

Lakeman loses larking lieutenants

Moses B. Lakeman lost lieutenants on June 20, 1863. He had a pretty good idea what happened to them. Commanded respectively by colonels Lakeman and Elijah Walker, the 3rd and 4th Maine infantry regiments served in the 2nd Brigade led by Brig. Gen. John Henry Hobart Ward, a New York City native and Mexican War […]

Gettysburg shot them all out

Maine newspapers are excellent “original source” documents from the Civil War. The Daily Whig & Courier in Bangor, the Republican Journal out of Belfast, the Eastern Argus and Portland Daily Press of Portland, the Ellsworth American, and the Maine Farmer of Augusta are among the better Fourth Estate sources for letters and reports from Maine […]

A nurse goes to war, Part 4: “We finished our rounds in double quick time”

On Wednesday, June 25, 1862 Union troops fought their last offensive action of the Peninsula Campaign at the Battle of Oak Grove. Federal regiments racked up casualties and accomplished precious little in the swamps west and southwest of Seven Pines, Va. “We had heard firing all the morning and knew what must follow,” said Bath […]

A nurse goes to war, Part 3: “My mother and my sister … are in the next room”

After arriving at Savage Station on Friday, June 13, 1862, nurses Sarah Sampson of Bath and Ellen Orbison Harris of Philadelphia started caring for sick and wounded Union soldiers. Not all were found in Army hospitals set up near Savage Station. The warm and colorful Virginia spring passed into early summer as the nurses spread […]

A nurse goes to war, Part 1 — “such suffering and confusion I never before witnessed”

After receiving a telegram on Wednesday, May 7, 1862, Bath nurse Sarah Sampson hurried to the war zone, which in that far-away spring was Virginia’s so-called “Peninsula.” What she saw and did there launched her into history as a 3rd Maine Infantry Regiment legend. Sarah Sampson had traveled with her husband, Lt. Col. Charles A.L. […]

We fight “because one should love his country the best of all”

  He had survived the slaughter at Fredericksburg, the “Mud March,” and a winter so cold and deadly that at least one historian would describe it as the equivalent of Valley Forge for the miserably sullen Army of the Potomac. So why did he stay with the standards? Other Union soldiers had deserted during winter […]

A wild flower collected from a soldier’s grave

  Fifty-eight years before the first Armistice Day observance in the United States, a compassionate Bath nurse visited the grave of a young Maine soldier in Washington, D.C. Sarah Sampson also ensured that a brigadier general would not forget John W. Campbell, who had fought in one battle before losing his life. Hailing from Livermore, […]