Tragedies of the Civil War were sharply felt in Woodstock.
This piece first appeared in The Vermont Standard.
There are powerful and poignant Civil War stories all around the Woodstock area, and most are not commemorated by monuments or plaques. “We all know about Lincoln, Lee, and Grant,” says Woodstock Historical Society Director Jack Anderson, “but I think the ordinary soldiers, who never rose above the rank of private, are just as important.” The Norman Williams Public Library and the Historical Society’s Research Library both have resources to help history enthusiasts root out and piece together pictures of the lives and war experiences of everyday soldiers. There are regiment histories and rosters available that are well over 100 years old; some soldiers left behind diaries or other ephemera. Thirty-eight letters written by Private Payson Pierce to his wife Frances, for example, came to the Woodstock Historical Society as the gift of an anonymous donor.
Private Pierce was 28 when he first signed on, in September of 1864, with Company C of Vermont’s Sixth Regiment. None of the surviving letters to “Frank,” as he often addressed his wife, mention why he chose to join the military so late in the war. Clues about his motivation, perhaps, lie in the histories of his younger brothers.
Genealogy records show Pierce as a middle child in a Woodstock family of fifteen children, eleven of them boys. Younger brother Charles joined the First Cavalry in Vermont during early calls for volunteers, in the fall of 1861. After wintering and training near Annapolis, Maryland, the regiment, according to historian George Benedict in his 19th century book, Vermont in the Civil War, fell in with the forces of General Nathaniel Banks in the Shenandoah Valley. When unexpected offenses by Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson forced Banks to a hasty retreat, Charles Pierce was presumably among the stragglers picked up by the Confederates. The Vermont Standard reported that he had been ill “for some time;” military records indicate that he was discharged on May 22, during the thick of the retreat. His mother’s family genealogy simply notes that he died in September of 1862 in Libby Prison, a cruel and notorious Confederate jail in Richmond, Virginia.
The youngest child of the Pierce family, Worthington, joined the Twelfth Vermont Regiment, when he was just 19. While he likely didn’t know it, the August 30 date of his enlistment was just days before his missing brother died. “Worthy” was promoted to Corporal months later, and “mustered out” in July of 1863. According to an article in the Vermont Standard, he opened a recruiting office in Woodstock a few months later. In the spring of 1864, he reenlisted, this time with the Seventeenth Vermont Regiment, and as a Second Lieutenant. His unit saw action in several engagements that spring and early summer, then languished outside of Petersburg in the oppressive Virginia heat of July. Until the end of that month, “nothing of especial note occurred,” wrote Benedict in his history, “then the arduous routine of picket duty and service in the trenches was broken by the ill-fated affair of the Mine.”
In a plan hatched by the commander of a group of Pennsylvania miners, Union forces spent a month digging a 500-foot tunnel that terminated directly beneath a Confederate gun battery. When four tons of explosives were detonated in the early hours of July 30, the battery, and several hundred Confederates, flew high into the air. Poorly led Union soldiers, however, did not take advantage of their enemy’s surprise; they charged into the crater left by the explosion, but would not or could not continue out. “The crater became an amphitheater of slaughter,” wrote Benedict. In a later statement, Worthington Pierce himself described the scene. “Our advance was checked by a murderous fire from the enemy on each flank,” he said “and from a battery in our front…a gun throwing grape and canister raked the crest of the crater and trenches in front.”
Lieutenant Pierce was among the prisoners of war taken as Union soldiers ultimately retreated. “Some did not start quick enough” at the order to withdraw, wrote Benedict.
When Payson Pierce left his wife and toddler daughter for the war front only a few weeks later, he must have felt the anguish of losing one young brother to the ravages of a Confederate prison, and of knowing that another might suffer a similar end, from neglect, starvation, or abuse.
His letters to wife “Frank” describe the quirks and challenges of living in tents and standing ready, at a moment’s notice, to pack up and march. Pierce and his fellow soldiers, he writes, eat mostly meat and hard tack, and must cook for themselves, as coffee “is all that the cook cooks unless it is when we draw beans and that is not very often.” He asks Frank to send applesauce and pickles, a bottle of mustard, and some ginger. “I should like a cup of ginger tea once in a while,” he says. The army uniform has too few pockets, he complains; he pays a dollar to have the front pockets altered because “every time I laid down everything would fall out.”
Pierce’s Sergeant tells him to look out for his personal goods, otherwise, they’ll likely be stolen, he warns. And among the men, “there is gambling of every description.” Even Pierce’s friends from home indulge; “I found them playing cards,” he writes, “and I am sorry to say that most of them were boys from Woodstock.”
Days when the regiment is not on the march are filled with roll call, inspection, drills, dress parade, and picket duty. Private Pierce’s first engagement with Confederate troops comes on October 19 at Cedar Creek, near Strasburg, Virginia. “As for the excitement I was just as cool all that day as I should have been if I had been at home digging potatoes,” he writes, “I was perfectly astonished at myself. I loaded and fired just as coolly as I should if I had been at home firing at a mark.”
In the late winter and early spring of 1865, Pierce begins to see evidence that the war is drawing to a close. Confederate deserters cross Union lines almost daily, usually at night so that they won’t be shot by compatriots. “They all have pretty hard stories about the way they fair,” he writes in one letter, and in another says, “they say that most they have to eat is cornmeal and meal made from the seed of sugarcane and this in small quantities.”
By the time Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to his Union counterpart Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, Private Pierce had also learned the good news that brother Worthington had been released from a South Carolina prisoner-of-war camp. But Pierce still mourned for brother Charles. “I have thought many times how lonesome I should be if I was a prisoner,” he writes to Frank, “I can but think that there will be a just retribution meted out to the leaders of the Rebellion for the cruelty to prisoners that have fallen into their hands.” He hopes, he says, to have a few days in Richmond while en route for home, to “see if I could find anything where Dear Brother Charles was buried…I should be very glad if his body could be moved to Woodstock…”
Payson Pierce returned to his wife in July 1865, they added a second child to their family a few years later. According to the Gazetteer of Windsor County, Pierce in 1883 was a milkman and farmer in Woodstock with twelve cows and 102 acres. He died in 1911.
Worthington Pierce also went home to Woodstock; he was reportedly plagued by intense headaches for the rest of his life. He later moved to Ludlow, then to Iowa, where he married, had three children, and worked as a mailing clerk. The local paper’s notice of his death in 1913 described him as a man “of powerful physique and commanding appearance…a familiar figure on the streets of Des Moines and widely known by all.”
Would-be or veteran historians who may be interested in discovering the Civil War story of an ancestor, or another of the hundreds of local boys who served, can get their feet on the ground with a popular Woodstock walking tour. The nine-stop, two-mile Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park’s Causes and Consequences: The Civil War Home Front in Woodstock, Vermont uses the voices of townspeople to illuminate the context of the war, and to describe life back home. Jacob Collamer’s yellow brick, gable-front residence on Elm Street is one stop. The noted lawyer and United States Senator was reputedly confidante to President Abraham Lincoln. Tourists hear bits of newsy letters matron Mary Mellish sent to cheer her son George, a private in the army; they also hear from George Hart, a former slave who was eventually permitted to enlist.
Among the tour’s attractions is the Mountain Avenue home of one the most prominent figures in Vermont’s Civil War generation, Peter T. Washburn. A popular sketch depicts the long-time Woodstock resident as full-bearded and unruly-haired, with quiet lips and weary eyes. The accounts of his career tick off many achievements: Dartmouth College graduate, prominent and accomplished lawyer, State Representative, commander of the pre-war Woodstock Light Militia, editor of numerous government publications, President of the Woodstock Railroad Company. When the Civil War began, Washburn was 46 years old with a wife and three children, but set aside his other duties to recruit enlistees, and to briefly command a regiment in the field. His obligations as a soldier were superseded when he was elected Adjutant and Inspector General for Vermont, a demanding job that, for the duration of the war, had him keeping tabs on 34,000 Vermont soldiers. “All war activity that involved Vermont came through his office,” says the Historical Society’s Anderson.
Peers often called Washburn exacting, scrupulously honest, an executive of rare ability. His biographies seldom mention, though, that the formal and hard-working Washburn lost his first wife at age 34, that he endured the tragedies, years later, of losing both the young children she’d left him, or that the planting and pruning of a flower garden was his favorite summer pastime.
When Washburn died in 1870, just months after being elected Governor, the funeral procession at the First Congregational Church in Woodstock included soldiers and school children, dignitaries, and citizens from all over the state.
He’s buried down the block from his home, in the River Street Cemetery, where distinguished and ordinary citizens from all eras of Woodstock history lie. Near the burial ground’s center, a simple but dignified memorial, a column snapped unnaturally short of its expected height, marks his grave. And not far away, in a corner near the front, there’s a modest, unembellished slab. Records don’t indicate if Payson Pierce found and brought his lost brother’s body home, but the aged white tombstone reads, “Charles Pierce, died at Richmond Va, Sept 7, 1862. Age 22 y’rs. Member of Co. E 1st Vt Cavalry.”