Tag Archives: John L. Hodsdon

Bath taxes the rich to recruit 90 soldiers

Known as the City of Ships, Bath on the lower Kennebec River already swarmed with soldiers when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issued General Order No. 94 on August 4, 1862. The order called for the loyal states to draft 300,000 militia for nine months’ service in the army. On Tuesday, July 8, Maine […]

Maine responds when Lincoln Administration threatens to draft the militia

The immediate and historical attention given the New York draft riots suggest that July 1863 was the first time the Lincoln Administration organized a national draft. That’s incorrect. Let’s rewind the draft clock 11 months to Monday, August 4, 1862, when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton issued General Order No. 94. It mandated “that […]

Israel Washburn Jr. steps down as Maine’s first war-time governor

Late on Monday, January 5, 1863, a weary Governor Israel Washburn Jr. walked from his office to the Executive Council Chamber located elsewhere in the Maine State House in Augusta. But Washburn likely gave little thought to such concerns tonight. As he approached the Executive Council Chamber’s rosewood doors, the bespectacled and diminutive Washburn exchanged […]

Politicians’ anti-war resolutions angered returning Port Hudson veterans, part 2

As a Boston & Maine Railroad train carried the 21st Maine Infantry Regiment toward home on Friday, August 7, 1863, Col. Elijah D. Johnson and his surviving officers read the resolutions passed two days earlier during the Democratic State Convention held in Portland. History does not record who read the resolutions aloud on that rattling […]

An army recruiter on every corner

Much like patent-medicine hucksters peddling liquid healing, Army recruiters occupying just about every street corner in downtown Bangor in autumn 1861 promised potential recruits the sun, the moon, and the stars — and a $100 bounty to boot. Across Maine, recruiters scrambled that fall to raise men for an artillery battery, a cavalry regiment, and […]

Typhoid fever sweeps away the 7th Maine Infantry’s top dog

“Mr. Editor: We have lost our colonel,” a 7th Maine Infantry Regiment private informed the Bangor-published Daily Whig & Courier’s William H. Wheeler on Saturday, October 26, 1861. The news shocked many people in the Pine Tree State — and opened the promotion door to an Army captain. Hailing from Belfast, Thomas H. Marshall had joined […]

Bugged by bureaucracy as the 4th Maine’s war winds down

He’d been shot and briefly captured at Gettysburg, had led his men into the maelstroms at First and Second Manassas, and had scurried as dawn approached on December 16, 1862 to find and save missing pickets at Fredericksburg. Now Elijah Walker was home, but bureaucracy followed him even there. With the Army of the Potomac […]

Cavalry trooper killed at Middleburg came home to a hero’s funeral

A telegram arriving in Gardiner on Monday, June 22, 1863 broke a mother’s heart and stunned people living in the Kennebec River port. George Stone Kimball, age 30, was dead, killed by hostile fire in Virginia’s Bull Run Mountains days earlier. “In the springtime of life … blessed with education and talents and all that […]

Selectmen deny help to a hero’s elderly parents

With one son killed and another son wounded while defending the United States, finances turned grim for Cherryfield farmer Nicholas Newenham and his wife, Bridget, during summer 1864. They asked the town’s selectmen to provide the family with financial assistance, as mandated by state law. When selectmen repeatedly sent the Newenhams packing, Nicholas appealed to […]

Sumter’s 9/11 aftermath: An editor visits the hometown recruits

On Sunday and Monday, April 28-29, Bridgton Reporter editor Enoch Knight visited “the various companies of the [1st Maine Infantry] Regiment now about leaving for the seat of war. “Our readers will remember that almost every town in this vicinity [western Cumberland County and adjacent Androscoggin and Oxford counties] has its sons there,” Knight wrote. […]