Wayland A to Z:  Civil War

The Confederate firing on Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861 signaled the beginning of four long years of Civil War.  Like innumerable towns, north and south, Wayland rose up to meet the challenges of the years ahead.  Days after the news from Fort Sumter arrived, Wayland held the first of a series of large and enthusiastic meetings to consider the state of the country and support the war.  There were speeches and songs and militia and minuteman companies were organized.  As the war went on, some of the enthusiasm waned, but the resolve remained firm.

Wayland was a community of just under 1900 citizens in 1861, with farming being the main industry, although Cochituate was developing a lively shoe industry.  When President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers, Wayland responded quickly, and organized to fill quotas for soldiers and to provide support for the volunteers and their families.  Over the course of the war, about 130 men connected to Wayland served in nearly thirty different regiments, a couple of artillery batteries and cavalry units and the U.S. Navy.  They served in two and three year regiments and 100 day units.  They saw action throughout the South, or spent their service in Boston Harbor.  Their individual terms ranged from a few days to over four years.  Fathers and sons, brothers, cousins, co-workers, friends enlisted and fought together. The oldest soldier was over forty-five, the youngest was not yet sixteen.

Some seventy of these men were credited to Wayland, while others enlisted with friends and relatives from other towns, or at a time when Wayland’s quota was filled.  At other times, recruiting was slow, and the town privately raised about $4,000 as bonus money specifically to induce foreign recruits to fill Wayland’s ranks.  All together, the town was responsible for about $18,000 for recruiting purposes such as bonuses. They weren’t totally successful in their recruiting efforts; later in the war, three local men were drafted.  Two of them had not enlisted because they felt their health couldn’t stand war service, and one because he was supporting a large family and already had a son at the front.  He was wounded and discharged. One of his fellow draftees never made it to the front and, after several months in army hospitals, was discharged.  The third draftee was unable to keep up on the march and was captured.  At war’s end his family learned he had died in the Andersonville, Georgia prison camp.

A total of twelve soldiers died–six of disease, one of a combination of disease and wounds, the one at Andersonville, and four were killed in battle.  Many others suffered for the rest of their lives  from wounds and disease acquired during the war.  Wayland had no famous generals. Several men were commissioned officers, rising to company command or staff positions, several served in military hospitals, and one commanded gunboats in the Navy.

Mostly the Wayland Warriors were the men in the ranks with the guns.  Why did they go?  For the same reasons soldiers have gone to war through the ages:  because their friends were going, for adventure,

for the money, to get away from their ordinary lives.  But most of them went because their country needed them, and they felt an obligation to help preserve the Union.  Later on, many of them expressed satisfaction that the war became one to end slavery, but they went because their country called.  When their words are read, “duty” is the one that stands out.  As one of them put it, “he had been raised with the idea that patriotism is a virtue of no secondary consideration.”

In the summer of 1862, President Lincoln called for 300,000 more soldiers, and Wayland held yet another rally with patriotic songs and speeches, and prominent citizens offering extra bonus money out of their own pockets.  In later years soldiers remembered it as a most important moment in their lives.  Of the twenty or so men who stepped forward that night, about a dozen joined Company D of the 35th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.  Their Second Lieutenant was John Hudson from Lexington who a few years earlier had taught school in Wayland.  Some of these soldiers had been his students.  This was a common practice in the Civil War–whole groups of men joining together.  While this made camp life more pleasant, it could mean devastating loss to a community.  Wayland was lucky, they all came home alive. Five of them served in Company D to the end of the war, one of those was absent, wounded and sick for a year, and another, though on the rolls, was home recovering from six months captivity in Salisbury Prison.  Two men were promoted to officers in others regiments, one deserted, and the rest were discharged for wounds or illness, including one who rose from private to company commander before receiving a near fatal wound in August 1864.

After the young men went to war, civilians formed aid and relief societies for the soldiers.  Ladies’ groups held regular work meetings and made blankets and quilts and items of clothing.  The U.S. Sanitary Commission was the largest national civilian relief agency and most of the local supplies went through them. These groups also provided wines, jellies, preserves, bandages, and other items for the sick.  Another group of citizens formed a committee to specifically meet the needs of local soldiers, and to promote the comfort and well being of their families.  Wayland sent agents south after the battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg to bring supplies and to look after the welfare of the wounded.  Families left behind received a stipend, and as the war progressed, aid was given to widows and children of fallen soldiers.

When the war ended in the spring of 1865, the citizen soldiers resumed their civilian ways and returned to the farms and the shoe factories and the schools of their former lives. They were changed men.  They had been places and seen things that their civilian compatriots had not.  For some of them, their war service always had a prominent place in their lives through their veterans organizations.  Others preferred to move on and not dwell on the past.

Wayland held a general reception for the returning soldiers on July 4, 1865.  A service of thanks was given for freedom and peace, and the joy of seeing the returning veterans was mingled with sad remembrances of the fallen.

Shortly after the war, Wayland, like most towns around, considered erecting a statue to honor those who served in the war.  Somehow, the idea didn’t get off the ground, but a group of citizens wanted to find an appropriate way to recognize the soldiers.  Under the guidance of James S. Draper, prominent citizen and father of two soldiers, a memorial book was published in 1871, “Wayland in the Civil War.”  It contains biographical and military sketches of each soldier, quoting letters home.  Because it was completed so soon after the war, it is relatively free of the hind-sight and mythology that developed as time passed.

Wayland’s last Civil War veteran was George B. Howe.  He had enlisted in 1864 at age 19 in a 100 day unit from Millbury and been stationed at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.  After the war he moved to Wayland where he was for years a fixture at veterans’ observances and in the Memorial Day parade.  He died in September 1940, as the country was once again edging towards war.

In twentieth century Wayland, names such as Campbell, Dean, Damon, Draper, Gleason, Heard, Moore, Parmenter and Rice are usually associated with streets.  In the mid nineteenth century, men bearing these names (and others) marched off to the Civil War in the name of Wayland.