Few people alive today can say their grandfather fought in the Civil War, but a Toledo man can. Don Buswell, who still lives in the house where he was born more than a century ago, is proud of his grandpa Brigham Buswell’s service on behalf of the Union.
Brigham Buswell, who was born Sept. 12, 1842, in Grantham, New Hampshire, worked in a clothing store for two years until Sept. 7, 1861, when he enlisted in the 1st Regiment United States Sharpshooters, serving with Vermont’s Company F. Only months earlier, Confederate troops had fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor, sparking the Civil War.
When he was 73, at the urging of a daughter, he wrote about his military exploits and incarceration in a makeshift Confederate hospital, a personal history passed on to generations of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
At 19, he joined the Union Army and rode a train with rambunctious recruits, including drunken New York soldiers who smashed the train car windows while traveling to Washington, the nation’s capital. Brigham expected to see splendid buildings and clean streets but said only the U.S. Capitol “must exceed anything upon the continent for grandeur.”
“I have seen droves of hogs within 40 rods of the White House wallowing in the mire of the streets,” he wrote.
They drilled in camps for six months as rain turned red chalk-like soil into mud, giving streets the appearance of pudding. Five slept side by side in tiny “cotton houses” or 6- by 7-foot tents.
“When one turned, we all about faced,” he wrote.
When his uncle Edwin died while serving in a New Hampshire regiment, after having contracted measles, Brigham traveled to Annapolis, Maryland, obtained a metallic case and exhumed his uncle’s body. He attributed his uncle’s death to “a large blister of spirits of turpentine” placed by a surgeon on his breast.
He wrote about the men causing a ruckus with the sutler, who sold provisions to the soldiers, by loosening tent pegs on windy nights and absconding with cheeses, tubs of butter, boxes of figs and a bit of whiskey.
Soldiers camped in graveyards and muddy fields, entertained by regimental bands playing patriotic songs as they rode barges down the Potomac River. Brigham recalled hankering for fresh pork and chasing a wild hog in the woods with bayonets attached to their rifles.
“I threw my lance (rifle and bayonet) with terrific force and unerring aim, struck the animal just above the backbone and under the hide, carrying the bayonet to the hilt, thus the rifle was fastened to the hog,” Brigham wrote. “Away went the pig, dragging my rifle with him. I thought my rifle was gone. The boys managed to surround him and put about a dozen bayonets through him at once. We soon had the hog cut up and roasting over a fire.”
In April 1862, gunshots and shells resounded as General George B. McClellan and his Army of the Potomac arrived at Yorktown, Virginia. The first night, during a lull at sundown, Confederate bands played “Dixie” and other Southern airs on parapets of the fortifications, while the Union bands responded with “Yankee Doodle,” “Hail Columbia” and the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
After hunkering in rifle pits in frigid drizzling rain for two or three days, Brigham said, the men were “so thoroughly benumbed with cold and lack of exercise that we were compelled to drag our bodies along for quite a distance before being able to raise even to our knees. Our fingers were so numb we could not even pull a trigger let alone load our rifles.”
Brigham’s regiment marched to Gaines Hill near the Chickahominy River in early May and remained there for two months, engaging in the Seven Days Battles near Richmond, Virginia, from late June to July 1. They received one-man tents, which he described as “a dandy little rig when it did not rain too hard. We could sleep as snug as a bug in a rug. But when we had one of those thunder showers for which this country is famous, we would wake up in them with a small river running under us.”
They did picket duty every other day for eight weeks, often standing in waist-high swamp water in the Chickahominy Bottoms. Many fell ill, but Brigham said he never answered the sick call. As company clerk, he kept the books and papers, which spared him from guard duty, but he fought in every battle with his company, Hiram C. Berdan’s Sharpshooters. Gen. McClellan ordered whiskey rations morning and night along with strong black coffee to keep the poor fellows warm and on their feet.
“Many of us had never tasted liquor up to this time and this, or similar circumstances, was the cause of the formation of the liquor habit among the younger class of soldiers of the Civil War,” Brigham wrote.
During a thunderstorm, lightning struck a caisson and tent filled with ammunition, killing several men and horses.
He wrote about a man in his company dying near Hanover Courthouse in late May when a canister shot struck a tree, glanced off and pierced his neck at the end of the vertebrae or spinal column.
“He lived three days but was unconscious from the moment the ball struck him until he died,” he said.
They captured 2,000 Confederate troops, mostly from North Carolina, who fought like “devils” because, he said, their superior officers had told them they would be shot by the Yankees if captured.
The soldiers buried the dead side by side in long trenches. Brigham witnessed harrowing scenes, such as a Union captain sitting on the ground, back against a stump, his bowels protruding from his body. He’d been struck by a shell or part of one and left to die. He begged for water, but their canteens were empty.
“There being no streams nearby, he was undoubtedly compelled to suffer the agonies of thirst until death ended his misery,” Brigham wrote.
During the Seven Days Battles, professor Thaddeus Lowe rode in a balloon 1,000 feet above McClellan’s headquarters each day, using field glasses to see trains moving into Richmond, which McClellan reported to U.S. Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton. When Confederate artillery targeted the balloon, soldiers pulled ropes to lower it.
In June 1862, Brigham fought in the Seven Days Battles near the Chickahominy River, where 75,000 Confederate soldiers far outnumbered the 25,000 commanded by General Fitz John Porter at Mechanicsville, Virginia.
“We took an active part in this engagement, being exposed to artillery, rifle and musketry fire, returning fire at intervals, until nearly 10 p.m., when night drew its curtain over the scene of slaughter and stopped the day’s work only to commence again at daylight the next morning of the third day,” Brigham wrote.
They retreated, the enemy at their heels, to their old camping spot where the company stores burned.
Brigham said sharpshooters were under orders to avoid wasting any shots on common soldiers but to pick off the officers and first sergeants carrying the colors.
They fired from the trees onto the Confederate lines on the open plains and dodged from one tree to the next as the enemy advanced with fixed bayonets. By the time they reached the brow of a shallow ravine, he said, the Confederates had lost half of their commissioned officers.
“We dropped their colors several times while falling back through the forest.”
But his squad had failed to hear the bugle signaling retreat.
“As we continued firing, and as we stood in a kind of clearing between the enemy and our lines … it looked to our little squad as though our time had come, and some or all of us would go down in the finish,” he wrote.
Brigham and fewer than a dozen squad members huddled close together to face the angry Confederates. The enemy troops howled, cursed, fired and ran forward, bayonets aiming at them.
“When the points of their bayonets almost pricked our backs, an event occurred that stopped their further progress,” Brigham wrote.
A bullet grazed a comrade’s forehead, deluged his face with blood, and crazed, he sprang four or five feet into the air. Brigham grasped his shoulder and dragged him to the ground, where the two lay low among stump roots as bullets flew over their heads from all directions.
“How we escaped being riddled with bullets from both sides and almost instant death is more than I can understand,” Brigham wrote.
A Union officer ordered a charge, and soldiers jumped over their bodies and drove the enemy soldiers down the hill, where they were captured. A new batch of fresh Confederate troops forced the Union to yield its position.
Brigham’s regiment retreated to the James River, enduring sleepless nights as they burned bridges and blocked roads. Then Gen. Porter ordered Brigham’s squad to the front. Exhausted, they marched between lines of soldiers sleeping on their arms.
“We felt as though we would like to sleep also for we were nearly exhausted for lack of food and sleep and marching and countermarching,” Brigham wrote.
At Gen. Porter’s headquarters, the squad was selected as his bodyguards for the night, but they were so exhausted, they fell asleep. Finally, about 4 a.m., they were ordered to break ranks and, he said, “we sank to the ground and were in a dead sleep instantly.”
“It took a number of hard kicks and considerable loud talk hardly fit for anyone to repeat to get us on our feet again, but it was surely accomplished,” he wrote.
They spent more than three hot, dry days and nights without food, drinking coffee, sometimes hot but often cold, washed down with murky water in canteens. Hungry, weak and exhausted, they foraged for food, discovering a granary with several tons of corn meal. They filled their haversacks and ate it from their hands, lapping it with their tongues like cows and horses.
They demolished 50 beehives with their rifle butts, tearing out the honey.
“With our faces and hands covered with bee stings and honey dripping all over us from head to foot, we must have presented a comical appearance as we returned to our comrades among whom we divided the luxury we had obtained,” Brigham wrote.
Next week I’ll share Brigham’s account of life as a prisoner of war during the Civil War.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com
