Maine’s Fighting 6th> Book recites history of Down East regiment during the Civil War

NO RICH MEN’S SONS: The Sixth Maine Volunteer Infantry, by James H. Mundy, Harp Publications, 276 pages, $39.95.

Robert Penn Warren asserted that our country’s Civil War was the great single event of our history. The somber split between the North and the South over the issue of slavery involved nearly 4 million troops and a heartbreakingly high number of casualties — “so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom,” wrote Lincoln in a letter of condolence to Mrs. Bixby whose five sons died in battle. The bloodshed began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, S.C., and continued with ferocious intensity until April 9, 1865, the day Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander in chief of the Confederate Army, surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox near Lynchburg, Va.

Among those who carried on the crusade of the North to free the slaves was the Sixth Maine Volunteer Infantry of Down East Maine, a regiment whose valor above and beyond won for it the appellation, The Fighting Sixth. One of its two battalions consisted of volunteers from Calais, Eastport, Pembroke, Machias and Cherryfield who received their initial training at Fort Sullivan in Eastport. The second battalion, whose recruits were drawn from the areas of Ellsworth, Bucksport, Old Town, Corinth and Brownville, reported for duty at Camp Washburn in Bangor. A month later both battalions, garbed in new uniforms, convened at Camp Preble in Portland where cheering crowds waving flags and the roll of drums awaited them.

Except for a smattering of students, most of them came from the working classes — blacksmiths, lumberjacks, laborers, farmers, brickmakers, seamen, carpenters, et al., all bent on serving as foot soldiers. In his chronicle of their performance, Mundy reveals that the Down East Maine regiment participated in three of the most effective bayonet charges of the war. Unfortunately, “They were also victimized in that their greatest successes occurred on the periphery of the war’s great battles,” posits the author. “Had the charge at Marye’s Heights taken place at Gettysburg instead of as a sideshow in one of the Union’s worst defeats, there is no doubt that many more people would have heard of the Sixth Maine. Rappahannaock Station was a brilliant feat of arms but its strategic importance was nonexistent. Upton’s charge at Spotsylvania is remembered as a brilliant tactical adaptation to entrenchments and the rifled musket, but Spotsyvlania is also remembered as a bloody tactical stalemate.”

Charles A. Clark of Sangerville, a student at Foxcroft Academy, who enlisted in the Sixth Maine (and later won the Medal of Honor for saving the regiment at Brooks Ford), believed that the reason why the Sixth Maine received so little credit for their wartime bravery was because, as he put it bluntly, “They had no rich men’s sons to cast their influence at home or in the field and no one to blow their horn for them.” Now, however, more than a century later, Mundy’s account of the young men of the Sixth who went off to fight in a bloody internecine war, gives them the spotlight they deserve. Neither saints nor sinners, they did what they felt they had to do under grim circumstances that far too often set brother against brother.

Historians are sorcerers in that they hold up a mirror to the past, and in “No Rich Men’s Sons” the reader sees in that mirror darkly young infantrymen stabbing with bayonetted rifles on battlefields littered with the dying; the crazed expressions and wild eyes of youths under orders to kill; and the hideous aftermath of war in such scenes as the small wooden shack near the Williamsburg battlefield where surgeons, bent over wounded soldiers, rapidly amputated shattered limbs and tossed them out the window on the growing heap outside.

Mundy, who holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Maine, has enriched his book with a wealth of archival photographs, prints and maps. In addition to a helpful index, he has also included a 45-page roster of the Sixth Maine Volunteer Infantry members. In the arduous task of bringing into being this valuable evocation of one segment of the state’s contribution to the cause of the Civil War, Mundy, a Maine native, has provided us all with a valuable resource for historically accurate information endemic to Down East Maine.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly feature in the Books & Music section.