Bernard A. Olsen: Beyond the Tented Field. Red Bank: Historic Projects, Inc., 1993.
Originally published in The Daily, July 14, 2011.
“You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about,” General William Tecumseh Sherman warned a gathering of Southerners in 1860. He spent the next four years illustrating his point, to their regret. Years later, at a graduation ceremony at the Michigan Military Academy, he told Northerners the same thing. “There may be a boy here today who looks upon war as all glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all Hell.”
But from to time a marvel appears, a boy who goes soldiering and prospers from then on. A boy like Albert C. Harrison of Red Bank, New Jersey.
In August 1862 the 14th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry mustered in Freehold, where Washington and his men had fought the Battle of Monmouth on a broiling June day some eight-four years before. The new regiment formed part of the Army of the Potomac, led by George B. McClellan, who had spent much of the war so far training his men and hoping for a compromise peace that never came.
Albert Harrison was born in Rumson Neck, a village just east of Red Bank. Eighteen years old, working as a grocery clerk, he lied about his age (soldiers were supposed to be at least 21) and signed up for the duration.
Of the many Civil War soldiers whose letters have come down to us, Harrison must number among the most likeable, if you can stand him. A painfully naïve, absurdly optimistic, sincerely religious and enthusiastic youth, glad to be out of that boring grocery store, he “rejoic[ed] to think I am not only a soldier in this glorious union army, but in the army of God, where there will be no fighting.” “You must not worry about me, Mother”—whose only son he was—”for let us remember that all things work together for good to them that love God.” His only complaints during his first year of soldiering were that the chaplain’s sermons weren’t long enough and that his fellow-soldiers swore and gambled much too often. He undertook to reform the regiment’s habits, with results he neglected to report.
Assuring Mother that he wasn’t homesick—indeed, “without a joke, mother, I have gained 4 lbs. since I enlisted”—he mimicked the manhood to which he aspired: “I didn’t come down here to play. I came to save the Union, and it shall be saved.” Nothing shook his patriotism. “I would enlist again,” he wrote in the ink he made out of roadside pokeberries in October 1863. “Remember our Forefathers, how they suffered for the cause of Freedom. Must we not fight manfully with help of the most High God to maintain it.” That last sentence has an interrogative structure, but he left the question mark off. It was the old American republicanism, as conceived by a lad.
“If we have a good chance the boys of the 14th will show the Rebs what our forefathers showed to the Redcoats at the Battle of Bunker Hill and Old Monmouth for instance.” That chance took a long time coming. The 14th didn’t get into serious fighting until November 1862. For the most part they had been engaged in defending the Monocacy River Bridge at Frederick Junction, Maryland—a key chokepoint along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line. When a force of some 30,000 Confederates, commanded by none other than Stonewall Jackson, advanced toward the outpost, the men of the 14th were wisely withdrawn. Christmas 1862 saw Harrison enjoying dinner with an elderly couple who fed him turkey, lamb, tomatoes, potatoes, bread, “sour kraut,” quince jelly, blackberry pie, and apple pie. They also had a daughter. “If there are any girls around I am bound to find them, but [he assured Mother] I get on the right side of the old folks first.” I do wish that some of Mother’s letters had survived.
Later in the war, the fighting got very serious, indeed. The 14th fought in the ruinous Battle of Cold Harbor, where 7,000 Union soldiers fell in 45 minutes, including many in Harrison’s regiment. They fought in the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Monocacy, and the Battle of Opequon. By December the regiment of 900 men, commanded by West Pointer and Mexican War veteran William S. Truex, was down to 600.
But Harrison hadn’t participated in any of the fighting. In December 1863, the Providence in which he so fervently believed caused his transfer to an ambulance corps. The U. S. Ambulance Corps had been formed within the Army of the Potomac and first worked in the Battle of Antietam, doing the indispensable work of rescuing wounded soldiers, usually under conditions of temporary, post-battle truces. “I have not seen to tell the truth as much hardship as I expected when I left home.” Tending the maimed, he never became one of them. “There is no hard duty to perform,” and “no danger of my getting into battle.” He seldom failed to adjure Mother to have more faith and not to worry so much. He missed one event he would have cherished, a regiment-wide religious revival, but he also missed a hellacious number of bullets.
A comic leitmotif throughout is his insistence that the war will soon be over. “The Southern confederacy is nearly played out, mother”—this, in September 1862. He kept on predicting Confederate defeat until, eventually, he proved a prophet. But nothing great or small could discourage Albert. “We have had a happy snowstorm, Mother,” he exclaims in one November epistle.
He returned to his regiment in time for the mop-up operations of winter-spring 1864-65. This time he actually got shot a couple of times. In the foot. With spent bullets. Not a scratch.
He dreamed of returning to Monmouth County and of living along the Navesink River, fishing and clamming. He did return, but instead of the envisioned Thoreauvian nature-idyll he married Eliza Chadwick, with whom he had six children, settling comfortably into the carpet business in Red Bank, where he also served as town clerk until his retirement in 1919. He died in 1925, aged 81, weighed down with honors. If you ever get to Red Bank, stroll along Harrison Avenue and lift a canteen to his memory.
“I have thought over the matter several times today,” he wrote, after the 14th was mustered out in Trenton, “and have come to the conclusion that I wasn’t born to be shot.”
Recent Comments