Months before William Tecumseh Sherman’s “bummers” made “Georgia howl,” certain 5th Maine Infantry lads, including Corp. William Holmes Morse, expertly foraged — the correct term would be “pilfered” — foodstuffs from unhappy Virginia farmers.
In fact, a farmer or two lost a bunch of pigs in the vicinity of 5th Maine pickets in July 1862. Padding the bland Army diet with Virginia ham apparently bothered Morse not a wit, although he admitted not to participating in the pig poaching.
Their status as cavalry troopers betrayed by their knee-length boots, three Yankees heard a milk cow into camp after a successful foraging expedition. (Winslow Homer, Library of Congress)
Hailing from Massachusetts, where he was born in Plymouth on June 17, 1832, Morse lived in Minot (west of Auburn in Androscoggin County) with his wife, Lydia Verrill Morse, in the late 1850s. Morse called her “Maria,” a name that transitioned to daughter Mary Maria Morse upon her arrival in August 1858.
Employed as a mechanic, the 5-8 Morse joined Co. E, 5th Maine Infantry in December 1861. Maria was pregnant with son William Edward Holmes Morse, who would be born in late May 1862.
Morse had blue eyes, light hair (possibly blond), and a light complexion. On Saturday, December 21, “a very cold day … I bade goodbye to my home and friends in Minot” and “went to Lewiston, where with nine others, I enrolled my name as a volunteer recruit for the 5th Maine Regiment, Company E,” he wrote in his 1861 diary.
Morse became a color bearer and fought in many battles involving the 5th Maine. Thursday, July 17, 1862 found him “out on picket” duty with his comrades at Harrison’s Landing on the James River.
“There is no rebel force within six or eight miles, except once in a while a few scouts,” Morse noticed. He also noticed the hogs running loose in the woods around the landing, then occupied by the Army of the Potomac.
Other Co. E lads spotted the hogs, too. Comrades evidently talked, someone loaded a rifle, and the trouble began. “Tis contrary to orders to fire on the out post except at the enemy, but some of these boys are picking off the pigs and dressed off quite a lot, which they will smuggle into camp in someway,” said Morse.
Odds were very, very good that he partook of ham or chops or whatever item the gutted pigs became.
After foraging at Confederate farms, Union soldiers enjoy a pig roast sometime during the Civil War. (Alfred Waud, Library of Congress)
Fast forward to May 1864, when after the bloody debacle at Spotsylvania Courthouse the 5th Maine numbered “one hundred and twenty muskets,” Morse noted. As Ulysses S. Grant sideslipped the Army of the Potomac east by south, the 5th Maine crossed the North Anna River on Tuesday, May 24 and picketed the “nice country” on a plantation owned by Charles Fountain, who had vacated the premises a day earlier.
Other Union troops had ransacked the property. “There are plenty of books lying about the yard, mostly Latin, he had a valuable library,” said Morse, referring to Fountain.
The next day, the 5th Maine and its division “tore up a number of miles of the Virginia Central Railroad,” noted Morse, describing “how quickly a mile of railroad is turned over.” Wooden “sleepers [ties] and culverts are generally burned and [the] rails bent.”
More than the vandalistic 5th Mainers foraged that Wednesday. “The boys also ransacked the dwelling houses, regardless of occupants, bringing off poultry, clothing, jewelry, etc.,” Morse commented. Heavy losses at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse, plus the dribbling casualties caused as the soldiers skirmished almost daily with Confederates, left the Yankees unmerciful.
They did not want to be in Virginia, they had buried too many comrades these past three weeks, and now they stripped the countryside of foodstuffs and valuables without mercy.
Moving eastward on Thursday, the 5th Maine lads marched 22-23 miles without crossing “a brook or mill [with a dammed pond] and suffered for want of water,” Morse observed. The division bivouacked that night where “the water … is good and handy.”
Along the route, Morse noticed “the boys are ransacking the houses without mercy, leaving the women and children crying.” Onward the Yankees marched; by Sunday, May 29, “the rations are gone except what the boys get from the houses, and they are taking everything eatable.”
Such was total war in Virginia in spring 1864. Georgia’s turn would come that fall.
Sources: William Holmes Morse Soldier’s File, Maine State Archives; Without A Scratch: Diary of Corporal William Holmes Morse, Color Bearer of the 5th Maine Infantry, William L. Caynor Sr., editor, 2007
If you enjoy reading the adventures of Mainers caught up in the Civil War, be sure to like Maine at War on Facebook and get a copy of the new Maine at War Volume 1: Bladensburg to Sharpsburg, available online at Amazon and all major book retailers, including Books-A-Million and Barnes & Noble. —————————————————————————————————————–
Brian Swartz can be reached at visionsofmaine@tds.net. He enjoys hearing from Civil War buffs interested in Maine’s involvement in the war.
