I haven’t posted here in a while, even though I read the SDMB almost every day. I thought this would be a good way to de-lurk.
In this thread, I will be posting a chronology of Private John Davis, a relative of mine, who enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. After this initial post containing background information, I will post various events in his life, 150 years to the day after they occurred. (Hopefully, the mods will not mind me bumping my own thread.) The thread will follow his travels and experiences in the war. I’ll be posting whatever information I can find until the story comes to an end next summer.
So, here goes:
One hundred and fifty years ago, in the fall of 1862, John Davis, of the town of Melrose, Massachusetts, was 25 years of age, and single. He was the second of nine children of Edmund and Mary Davis. In his youth he had worked as a teamster, but he later found work as a shoemaker, like his father. The war, though distant, was having its impact on John’s family. His younger brother Edmund, 23, had enlisted in the Army the previous year. In June of 1862 Edmund had been promoted to Corporal, and soon thereafter was captured in battle in the Peninsula campaign in Virginia. On August 5 he had been exchanged, but his family in Melrose may not yet have been aware of any of this. Edmund had not been a healthy man even before going off to war, so his condition was no doubt a source of worry for the family. John’s brother Charles, 20, was serving a three-year enlistment as a private in the 8th Maine Regiment. His brother Loami, who may have been only 15 that summer (the 1855 census lists him as 8 years old), had joined the 33rd Massachusetts Regiment and left the state on August 14.
**The nine months’ men. **
On August 4, 1862, President Lincoln called for 300,000 additional troops to serve in suppressing the Rebellion. The quota was apportioned by state, with 19,080 to come from Massachusetts. Of those, 79 were to be drawn from the town of Melrose. At a town meeting, Melrose citizens voted to pay a bounty of $150 to each Melrose man who enlisted for nine months’ service. With the help of a series of rallies complete with speeches and musical entertainment, the quota was met. John Davis and his brother James, 17, were among the enlistees. This made the Davis family the only one in town to send five of its sons to war.
As these events were unfolding in Melrose, the Army was gathering a new regiment in Readville, twenty miles to the south. Colonel Isaac Burrell organized the Forty-Second Regiment using a few companies of soldiers from an older regiment, and adding to them the quotas from several towns, including Melrose. By September, John and his brother James were both encamped under canvas tents as privates in Company G. The men of the Forty-Second passed their time with the usual camp duties and were blessed with fine weather and opportunities to take leave in nearby Boston. Rations provided to the troops were described as adequate, but this did not stop them from occasionally foraging for chickens and other delicacies from nearby farmhouses. Day in and day out, the soldiers of the Forty-Second Regiment drilled, paraded, and whiled away their time as best they could. As October 1862 drew to a close, they awaited orders to move.