Mundy’s `Second to None’ examines overlooked regiment

SECOND TO NONE: The Story of the 2d Maine Volunteers, “The Bangor Regiment,” by James H. Mundy, Harp Publications, 280 pages, $34.95.

Finally, someone has spent the time and the energy necessary to put into perspective the monument to the 2nd Maine Regiment of Volunteers which stands watch over the first State Street entrance to Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor.

Oh, there have certainly been newspaper articles and other less enduring efforts to commemorate and immortalize the “the blue-blooded wasps and Irish laborers and lumberjacks” of the Civil War regiment from Bangor to whom that monument is dedicated.

James H. Mundy has taken the process many steps further in his book “Second To None: The Story of the 2d Maine Volunteers `The Bangor Regiment.”‘

Other historians and Civil War enthusiasts may disagree with some of Mundy’s observations about the battles and the places where these men fought.

He states, for example, that “there was a sharp but inconclusive fight at Williamsburg.” It will be interesting to see how Mundy treats that fight in the work he is preparing about the 6th Maine. Those men did not consider that fight inconclusive.

Overall, “Second to None” is a good read about the men who made up a regiment that has been largely overlooked and who fought their best in the early battles of the war that we Yankees would just as soon forget.

Mundy is a 1961 graduate of Brewer High School and has been executive director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission. His account of George W. Brown, who became a first sergeant and then a lieutenant in the 2nd Maine, indicates Mundy’s strong ties to his historical roots.

Brown was one of the regiment’s most colorful rogues, Mundy writes. “By the time the war broke out (Brown) had quarrelled with most of the city fathers, including the mayor and city physician, who he accused of kidnapping his family and taking them to the pest house.”

I was particularly intrigued with Andrew Tozier who signed up for three years and who was transferred into the 20th Maine when the majority of the 2nd Maine men, who had signed up for two years, returned to Bangor in May 1863. Col. Joshua Chamberlain made Tozier the color sergeant for the 20th Maine. Tozier held his ground and protected the colors at Gettysburg, during the fight for Little Round Top, so well that he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

Andy Tozier strikes my fancy because he comes from the Carmel-Plymouth area which is my old stomping ground.

It can certainly be argued that Mundy has hitched his book to the coattails of the 20th Maine to create an identity for the 2nd Maine. But his work is important for two reasons.

He documents how hard Union regiments fought and how badly the volunteer soldiers were treated during the Peninsula Campaign and other early battles when the South could have been defeated but wasn’t.

“In two instances, the 2d fought well enough to win and had come away defeated,” writes Mundy of how Gen. George McClellan failed to use the vastly superior assets of his Army of the Potomac to crush the Confederacy and shorten the war by two years.

Mundy also takes us beyond the long shadow of Chamberlain and the 20th Maine that still influences the way that many Maine people think about the Civil War, 127 years after the fact.

Most regiments, with 200 or 300 men under arms, were not put into the position of having to stand or die on their own as Chamberlain and his men were ordered to do at the end of the Union line at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Those kinds of decisive actions ordinarily fell to considerably larger brigades or divisions.

Instead, “Second to None” is a good account of a two-fisted, hard-fighting regiment that made the best of some bad situations. Those included retreating in order under a murderous crossfire at Groveton Heights, Va., in August 1862; and winning a “whiskey riot,” hands down, against two other Union regiments which erupted during the Union army’s infamous “mud march” of January 1863.

Rarely published photos of 2nd Maine soldiers and illustrations of battles and army life from “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” certainly add to the book’s appeal.

But the combination of written information about the regiment’s formation and fights, James Mundy’s big picture of the first two years of the war, and the vignettes about the corporals and colonels substantiate the idea that this book about “The Bangor Regiment” is long overdue.

Bob Haskell is the NEWS Midweek editor.