The tragedy on the Potomac that claimed Peterborough’s Sophia Scott (top) and Katie Cummings (bottom), the wives of Lt. Col. Charles Scott and Capt. John Cummings, demonstrated how close to home the war had hit. (Photos courtesy of the Peterborough Historial Society)PETERBOROUGH – For Sophia Scott and Katie Cummings, the journey into the relentless swelter of the southern summer was to be one of reconciliation with their husbands – a show of support and, they hoped, a morale booster in difficult times.
It was July 1862, and as the nation plunged ever deeper into intractable conflict, Scott and Cummings, the wives of two decorated Union officers with the 6th NH Volunteers, sought little more than to provide comfort at a time when they felt their husbands needed them most.
Scott, 32, was already tending to her husband, Lt. Col. Charles Scott, deeply ill with fever at a Newport News, VA, military hospital, when Cummings arrived from Peterborough in search of her husband, John, who’d just made Captain within his division. Only 19 years old and newly married the previous December, Cummings missed her husband greatly and worried about him even more. She would write a letter to her John during her trip south telling of a premonition she’d had that something bad would happen. Cummings’ search for her husband, away with his regiment, was to sadly be in vain; her premonition, however, was another matter, and for both ladies, the visit to Virginia was to be their last.
Closely inspect the Civil War memorial in front of Peterborough’s old Grand Army of the Republic hall, and you’ll see the names of the nearly 50 local volunteers who gave their lives during the darkest chapter of our national story. At the very bottom of that bronze engraving, weather-beaten and tarnished over time, you’ll see the unlikely names of Sophia Scott and Katie Cummings – victims of a tragedy that demonstrated the depth and indiscriminate nature of the war’s grip on communities across the country.
With Lt. Colonel Scott’s health improved by early August and orders to oversee the transport of sick soldiers to a Washington, DC, hospital out of the war zone, Scott, his wife and Cummings – as well as the wife and 5-year-old son of a Nashua soldier, Maj. Obed Dort – boarded the steamer West Point and headed north up the Potomac. On the evening of August 13, the West Point, carrying 279 passengers, was accidentally struck by another steamer headed south, the George Peabody. Mortally wounded, the West Point reached the river bottom in less than 10 minutes, the three women, the boy and 70 others meeting their fate in the dark, rushing water.
Lt. Colonel Scott was found the following morning clinging to the West Point’s smokestack, the only part remaining above water. As he arrived in Washington to recuperate and testify in the investigation into the tragedy, he immediately requested permission from Secretary of War Stanton to return to Aquia Creek, VA, to find his wife’s remains. When Stanton turned him down, citing the ongoing war effort, Scott took it a step higher, visiting President Lincoln at Soldier’s Home to make a personal plea. A deeply fatigued Lincoln initially turned Scott down, as well, but the following morning had a change of heart. A few days later, Scott arrived back in Peterborough to properly lay his wife’s body to rest; Katie Cummings’ father, James, would return with his daughter’s remains a couple of weeks later – both drawing thronged funerals in the town’s old Village Cemetery on Concord Street. Both evidence of a conflict which spared no one.
“This event really crystallized the reach of this war,” says Mike Pride, former editor of The Concord Monitor and a Civil War historian and author. “It was not just about battles, but about the ubiquity of death and the various ways people died. The Civil War was an all-absorbing event for New Hampshire. Every family, every town was deeply affected by it. Every bit as much as WWII, it dominated society, with entire towns coming together to support families who’d lost loved ones.”
As the nation this year somberly marks a century-and-a-half since the opening salvos on Fort Sumter, SC, Granite State communities and historical societies are telling stories, unearthing artifacts, and hosting commemoratives of their own to remind residents that, in a war not often associated with New Hampshire, their state was indeed a pivotal player.
An estimated 34,000 New Hampshire volunteers enlisted for the conflict. Of those, about 5,000 never made it home. Shown here are the 3rd NH Volunteer Infantry and the 306 3rd NH Band (above), both in South Carolina. (Photos courtesy of the NH Historical Society)
New Hampshire’s Civil War landscape, to be sure, is not one of smoke-filled sunsets over battlefields, or villages rebuilt after the ravages of combat. There are no remnants of forts or swords handed over in surrender. The stops on the Underground Railroad are relatively few, and New Hampshire’s entry into the war wasn’t as cut-and-dry a matter as perhaps with other states. “I think it is safe to say that there were mixed feelings in this region about the war,” says Peterborough Historical Society Director Michelle Stahl. “There was a sort of ambivalence about fighting the South up here, because all of the textile mills, certainly throughout this [Monadnock] region, were relying on Southern cotton.”
But in the end, Stahl says, the importance of preserving the Union overrode those concerns. Today, it shows in the hundreds of memorials dotting town commons across the state – all paying homage to the volunteers who, as with every other conflict in our nation’s narrative, were among the first to step forward and give their lives in defense of American ideals and interests. Of the 34,000 men who served in NH regiments during the Civil War – in the cases of some small towns, all but the entire young adult male population – an estimated 5,000 didn’t make it back, either killed in action or succumbing to illness. Vast numbers more returned badly damaged for the remainder of their lives, chronically sick from exposure, trauma and harsh conditions, unable to work or keep a job.
Strawbery Banke’s Stephanie Seacoard, pictured in front of former Gov. Ichabod Goodwin’s mansion in Portsmouth, is among many NH historians putting together special Civil War exhibitions this year. (Photo: David Lazar)
The war had exacted a toll well beyond the battlefield. But just as it produced countless stories of loss and heartache, so too, it offered moments of unqualified heroism, victory, and redemption for Granite Staters. Chalk it up to the state’s tradition of service or its hallmark rugged resourcefulness in times of adversity, New Hampshire’s outsize impact on the conflict is difficult to ignore. As communities from the Seacoast to the Monadnocks and the North Country tell their own unique stories, there will always be certain names that come into focus:
Lancaster’s Col. Edward E. Cross, the fiery career newspaperman who after losing the paper he was editing in the Arizona Territory to a colleague in a duel, returned to the Granite State at the outset of war to command the 5th NH Volunteer Infantry – a unit long since known as the Fighting Fifth and whose story is chronicled by Pride in the book, “Our Brave Boys.” Known for his trademark red bandanna (in place of an officer’s hat so his soldiers could easily spot him), sharp tongue and uncompromising toughness, Cross earned distinction leading his regiment to unlikely success at Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, before ultimately falling alongside dozens of his men at Gettysburg. “If ever anyone was ready to lead a Civil War regiment, it was Cross,” says Pride. “He had a strong personality, and was very much conditioned for this conflict when he returned to New Hampshire. He would write in his diary that he lived through much of the war not knowing whether he was going to live or die at the end of each day. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I’d better arm myself and be ready for whatever comes.’”
The epic battle between the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama was captured by several noted artists, from New York’s famed Currier & Ives to the French impressionist Edouard Manet. Depictions arrived stateside within days and their publication in major newspapers is credited with boosting Union morale and shifting the momentum of the conflict. (Images courtesy of the U.S. Naval Historical Center).
Concord’s Harriet Patience Dame, a nurse for the 2nd NH Volunteer Infantry regiment, who became the state’s Florence Nightingale, marching with “her boys” throughout the entirety of the conflict (from 1861-1865) over 6,000 miles and providing vital care and comfort on the front lines to thousands of soldiers through more than 20 pitched battles including Bull Run. Dame repeatedly declined higher government office to stay with her unit. Following the war, she used a $500 gift the state had given her in appreciation for service to build a summer cottage for veterans of the Second at the Weirs on Lake Winnipesaukee.
Peterborough’s Sgt. Osgood Hadley, a member of the 6th NH Volunteer Infantry’s color guard who saw his entire unit of fellow flag-bearers wiped out at the Battle of Poplar Springs Church (VA) in September 1864. Despite being wounded himself seven times in the head, leg and arm, Hadley fought to keep the regimental colors flying so that Union commanders could determine where their own soldiers were on the field. One of 200 Peterborough men who enlisted, Hadley was among the first recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor and later presented the colors in person to the Governor of New Hampshire.
Portsmouth’s Gen. Fitz John Porter, whose fateful decision as a division commander for Maj. Gen. George McLellan’s Army of the Potomac ignited one of the war’s biggest controversies. Facing a Confederate contingent led by Stonewall Jackson that was six times the size of his own corps, Porter in August 1862 disobeyed his own commander and held his flank, refusing to order an immediate attack on the larger opponent. When the unit did attack several days later and suffered a defeat at Manassas, Porter was made the scapegoat, resulting in his dismissal and court martial for insubordination. It was a quarter century later that Porter’s decision was determined not to have been cowardice but to have actually saved lives, and in 1886 – all but broken – he received a full pardon.
“One of the reasons people don’t necessarily think of New Hampshire when they think of the Civil War is because it hasn’t been well understood,” says Portsmouth’s Richard Adams, a historian and curator of a Portsmouth Athenaeum exhibition on the city’s immense naval contribution to the Civil War. “There tends to be an emphasis on the Revolutionary War here and on heroes like John Stark, John Langdon and John Paul Jones. But New Hampshire’s and specifically Portsmouth’s role in the Civil War was quite significant.”
Recruitment flyer for the 8th NH Volunteer Regiment (Photo courtesy of the NH Historical Society)
Indeed, Portsmouth alone, with a population of roughly 10,000 in the 1861, sent more than 3,000 of its sons into battle with the full backing and commitment to the cause of then-governor Ichabod Goodwin. But it was the city’s maritime tradition and the construction of one very special boat that was to deal perhaps its greatest impact.
There are many historians who believe the U.S.S. Kearsarge, built at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in 1861, may well have turned the tide of the conflict. Commissioned by the U.S. Navy and christened for the famed New Hampshire peak, the Kearsarge launched in 1862 with one purpose: to take out the Confederacy’s most notorious commerce raider, the British-built C.S.S. Alabama, which over the duration of the war had knocked 65 Union trading ships out of commission, sending 55 to the bottom of the ocean. At just 201 feet long, what the Kearsarge may have lacked in size it made up in stealth and in the moxie of its crew. Over the course of three weeks in the spring of 1864, the Kearsarge, helmed by Capt. John A. Winslow, stalked the Alabama off the coast of France. “1864 was not a good year for the North,” Adams says. “Even though there had been victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, people were getting very tired of the war and the price it was exacting on families and communities.”
The events of June 19 would mark a dramatic shift. As the Alabama docked in the waters near Cherbourg – a presence that greatly displeased the French, who’d been backing the Union effort – the Kearsarge made her approach. Virtually every war story has its share of ironies and odd coincidences. In case of this battle, the captain of the Alabama, Raphael Semmes, had actually been Winslow’s cabin mate aboard the U.S.S. Cumberland during the Mexican War several years earlier, and the two had developed a friendship. On this particular afternoon, that friendship was shelved as the Kearsarge and Alabama engaged in one of the fiercest naval battles in U.S. history. Over the course of 90 minutes, as onlookers lined the seaside cliffs of Cherbourg to view history, the Kearsarge all but obliterated the Alabama, firing mortar after mortar and ramming its sides – while protecting itself by lining its own sides with chains – until the Confederate ship could float no longer. Images of the battle would be captured by renowned artists, from Currier & Ives to Edouard Manet, and published in Harper’s and major stateside newspapers within days. Adm. David Glasgow “Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut, the Civil War hero of Mobile Bay, later declared, “I had sooner have fought that fight than any ever fought upon the ocean!”
After weeks spent on the battlefield in the immediate aftermath of Gettysburg interviewing Union and Confederate soldiers, Gilmanton’s John Badger Bachelder spent the following 30 years chronicling every aspect of the battle through literature and art, becoming the nation’s official Gettysburg historian and a designer of the national park. (Images courtesy of the NH Historical Society).
“I don’t think there’s any question that the Kearsarge victory was a huge morale booster for the North’s war effort,” Adams says. Or perhaps a finer example of the Granite State’s recurring and often unlikely role helping to shape our national story. It is a story New Hampshire residents can see told in countless ways over the coming year, from the Portsmouth Athenaeum’s Kearsarge exhibition and the work of Strawbery Banke nearby to chronicle the Seacoast’s war effort, to the painstaking work and portraiture of Gilmanton’s John Badger Bachelder, America’s official historian of Gettysburg, credited with designing the national park and its breathtaking cyclorama more than a century ago – many of his efforts now on display at the NH Historical Society in Concord. There is the Peterborough Historical Society’s vivid portrayal of soldiers’ valor and the cruel sacrifice faced by families and communities throughout the Monadnock region. And there is, of course, the Civil War storyline as told through bronze and plaster at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, home to one of the 19th century’s foremost artists and the era’s official sculptor of our national memory.
“I think there’s something in our bloodlines here,” says historian and Strawbery Banke spokeswoman Stephanie Seacord. “Because New Hampshire is the state that made us a nation as the 9th colony to vote, in 1861 it was again the state that volunteered to keep us a nation… We tend to get engaged up here in these conflicts. It’s an old New England thing.” Something not likely to change anytime soon.
Special thanks to Mike Pride, the Peterborough Historical Society, the Portsmouth Athenaeum, Strawbery Banke, the NH Historical Society, and the NH State Library for their assistance and generosity with this story.
