Fahrenheit 111
We’ve been following the 19th New York Volunteer Infantry. 150 years ago they were encamped with the rest of General Banks’ Union army north of the Potomac in Maryland. According to Henry Hall in Cayuga in the Field the 19th “pined for active service.” Captain Kennedy came up with a plan to take a small detachment across the river to Lovettsville, Virginia. His goal was to capture a Confederate cavalry squad that often passed through the town. Here’s how one of the Northern soldiers fleshed out the “telegraphic dispatches.”
From A Seneca County, New York newspaper August 15, 1861:
ARMY CORRESPONDENCE
From the 19th Regiment.
[our regular correspondence from the Nineteenth Regiment has this week again failed to reach us, but we are permitted to copy a letter from HENRY B. SEYMOUR, a member of Captain Ashcroft’s Company, addressed to one of his sisters, from which it will be seen that the writer and thirteen others of the same Company were engaged in the skirmish at Lovettsville, Va., a report of which appeared in the telegraphic dispatches of Tuesday, and which is described in a letter copied in another column from the Auburn Daily Advertiser. The following is young Seymour’s letter:]
CAMP CAYUGA, KNOXVILLE, MD.,
Aug. 10, 1861.
Dear Sister: – I just came off from sixty hours duty without a wink of sleep; you can imagine how I feel at present. Wednesday we received orders to go and guard the Village. I was on duty all night and nearly all the next day. Thursday night we received orders to cross the river into Virginia. We crossed about 9 o’clock and marched all night long; arrived at a small place called Lovettsville at 4 o’clock Friday morning, very tired and nearly exhausted. We expected to meet some of the Secession cavalry. They were not there when we arrived, but came in about 2 o’clock, P.M. We were on our return to the camp, within a mile of the river, when a man came running up and said there were about 125 cavalry at Lovettsville. We wheeled and ran about a mile and a half, right in the heat of the day. Some of the men were sun-struck, others nearly exhausted, – some crying for water. I never saw such a time.
When we arrived within a mile of Lovettsville, we crossed through some woods, and went within a few rods of the enemy without being detected, when a small boy saw us approaching the village, and ran and told them there were “some men with guns right over there,” and pointed toward us. We heard the word “mount,” and then they started. You never saw such running of horses in all the days of your life. The order was given for us to fire. I wish you could have been near and heard the report of our muskets. I had two good shots at them. We wounded six of them, the others escaped. We then marched down into the village, and for more than a mile up the road, carbines, cartridge-boxes, cartridges, coats, saddles, stirrups, and a little of everything, were scattered. The Captain lost his cap and our Surgeon picked it up. Not one of the privates was allowed to pick up anything; no one but the commissioned officers. They picked up a coat with a bullet-hole in the collar of it. The Rebels might have shot everyone of us if they had only known our forces. We numbered in all about one hundred, and some of them were left behind.
We left Lovettsville Friday night, marched all night and arrived at camp this morning. there were only fourteen men from our Company, commanded by Lieut. Clark Day. that was the toughest time I have seen.
The weather is very warm here. Yesterday the thermometer stood at 111°. What do you think of that? I never saw it so hot. ***
From your brother,
HENRY B. SEYMOUR
Writing twelve years later Henry Hall supports most of what Seymour wrote. Hall mentions that “This affair was celebrated in the papers, south and north, as a battle. It is a specimen of what war was to our inexperienced and unaccustomed people at the commencement of the rebellion”.
