When Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, “we were all young. The most of us had seen nothing of the world,” said 20-year-old Charles Amory Clark, whom no one in April 1861 would mistake for a warrior.
Twenty years old when he joined the 6th Maine Infantry Regiment, Charles A. Clark of Sangerville struck a jaunty pose for his official military portrait.
Born in Sangerville on Jan. 26, 1841 and raised in that rural Piscataquis County town, Clark stood 5-7½ and had blue eyes, light hair, and a light complexion. His roots ran deep in New England.
“My people came to Massachusetts in 1640,” he explained. My paternal grandfather was a calvinist baptist minister; my maternal grandfather was a physician; my father [William Goding Clark] was a lawyer” who died unexpectedly, “leaving a family of nine children to be watched over by a devout mother [Elizabeth W. Clark] of the deepest religious convictions.”
In winter 1860-61, Clark attended the privately run “Foxcroft Academy, one of the many admirable educational institutions of the Pine Tree State.” The college-prep school stood in Foxcroft, bordering Dover along the Piscataquis River.
Today Foxcroft Academy’s modern campus spreads along West Main Street in Dover-Foxcroft; the towns merged in 1922.
“I was fairly well fitted for college, and would have entered that summer,” Clark said. “I did not do so. Recently I was asked from what institution I graduated,” and he replied, “From the Army of the Potomac.”
The Fort Sumter news reached Foxcroft. “We went to Captain Paul’s woods by night and felled two of his tallest [white] pines,” Clark recalled. Dragging the logs “by hand to the academy grounds … all night long we wrought to splice and raise them.
“They made the liberty pole of that town for the war, and with the first gleam of dawn in the east, we ran up the stars and stripes with hurrahs which waked the sober citizens,” he said.
Standing in front of the parking lot once occupied by the original Foxcroft Academy (where Charles Clark attended school), the Dover-Foxcroft Civil War monument overlooks the heart of Piscataquis County’s shiretown. (BFS)
The Sumter news discombobulated academy life. “The classes … were broken up” and “for ten days our recitations” became “a farce,” Clark recalled. On Wednesday, April 24 “I piled up my Greek and Latin books and enlisted” after winning a coin toss to determine who should be the first volunteer to sign “the first enlistment roll of Piscataquis County in that mighty war.”
His soldier’s file indicates that Clark enlisted on Saturday, April 27, but no matter the date, he joined what became Co. A, 6th Maine Infantry Regiment. Its captain, 42-year-old Brownville resident Moses W. Brown, soon resigned his commissio, and 1st Lt. Charles H. Chandler, a 5-10 blue-eyed and black-haired engineer from Foxcroft, took over the company.
“We did not become soldiers at one jump,” Clark admitted. The Co. A lads initially enlisted for three months, but went nowhere. “We then enlisted for one year, with no better success,” he said. “Finally, we enrolled for three years” or the war’s duration.
Recruits “dropped out” with each re-enlistment, Clark recalled. “They could not stand camp fare, their stomachs were uniformly weak, and all agreed that they had no stomachs for what might be in store for us.”
Despite their military uncertainty, the Co. A boys “devoted nearly three months to faithful drill and camp duty, and when we got our muskets, old flint-locks” that were “changed over for percussion caps, we fondly imagined ourselves soldiers.
“And indeed the regiment was of admirable stuff. The men were of the sturdy old New England breed,” Clark noticed. “If called upon to furnish anything from a blacksmith to a brigadier-general, it could fill the bill at a moment’s notice.”
Mustered in Portland on July 15, the 6th Maine Infantry Regiment shipped out two days later. Upon reaching Boston, the Mainers marched through the city; Clark’s “enormous knapsack became a mountain, in which each testament given him by dear friends became a granite boulder in weight.”
Clark “blesses to this day, Boston Common, where we marched for a cold collation, and where several keepsakes were accidentally rattled out of his knapsack, and were never seen more by him.”
Ultimately promoted to first lieutenant and named the 6th Maine’s adjutant, Charles A. Clark would receive the Medal of Honor for heroism during the Chancellorsville campaign.
Sources: Charles A. Clark, Campaigning with the Sixth Maine: A Paper Read Before the Iowa Commandery, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Kenyon Press, Des Moines, Iowa, 1897, pp. 3-6; Annual Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Maine, 1861, Stevens & Sayward, Augusta, Maine, 1862, p. 311; Charles A. Clark and Charles H. Chandler, soldiers’ files, Maine State Archives
“Swartz delves into the personal stories of sacrifice and loss…” — Civil War News
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. —————————————————————————————————————–
Available now: Passing Through the Fire: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Civil War, released by Savas Beatie.
This new book chronicles the swift transition of Joshua L. Chamberlain from college professor and family man to regimental and brigade commander and follows him into combat at Shepherdstown, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and the Petersburg and Appomattox campaigns.
Drawing on Chamberlain’s extensive memoirs and writings and multiple period sources, historian Brian F. Swartz follows Chamberlain across Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia while examining the determined warrior who let nothing prevent him from helping save the United States.
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Brian Swartz can be reached at visionsofmaine@tds.net. He enjoys hearing from Civil War buffs interested in Maine’s involvement in the war.
