Old… but still interesting to read…
"My grandfather never had a good word to say about the State of Virginia. I was there once, and found it not at all as he had described it to me. Grandfather enlisted in Company I of the 16th Regiment of Volunteers, and knew about the Rebel States as his battleground for the duration.
Leaving by steam train in 1861, his company, made up of boys from his area of Maine, rode to Fall River, Mass., and arrived by boat in New Jersey, after which they marched, hay-foot straw-foot, from battlefield to battlefield for the four years until mustering-out back in Maine. Without boot camp or any training whatever, he met the enemy at Fredericksburg and after that everything was worse.
He was 18 when he took part in the exercises at Gettysburg, and the book says at the end of the first day the 16th Maine was withdrawn from the field and adds, "if 27 men can be called a regiment." Most of the rest of Grampie's war he spent in Virginia…"
Main page
link
Amicalement
Armand
prepares to do some regimental-level ACW gaming.
