The 2nd Vermont brigade,
composed of the 12th, 13th, 14th,
15th, and 16th Vermont regiments, was made up
of soldiers who had signed up for a nine month enlistment in the
Civil War, answering Lincoln's call for troops of August, 1862.
There were men from the Upper Valley in the 12th regiment,
with companies from West Windsor, Woodstock, Tunbridge and Bradford,
with Roswell Farnham from Bradford as their Lieutenant Colonel. The
15th regiment had a company from West Fairlee, and the
16th Vermont had a company from Barnard and a company from
Bethel. Charles Aikens, from Bradford, was a member of the 16th
regiment, and Charles Cummings was the lieutenant colonel. The 2nd
Vermont headed south toward the battlefields in stages, with the 16th
being the last regiment to reach Washington, DC.
On Monday, November 3, 1862, the 16th
brigade was given an hour and a half to pack their gear in readiness
for a march south. After a 10 mile march, they arrived at the site
of what would be their winter camp in Alexandria, Virginia. They
marched through some beautiful country. Charles Cummings wrote home
to his wife, “We marched a somewhat circuitous route about ten
miles, passing Fairfax Seminary, naturally one of the lovelies places
I ever saw, now despoiled of much of its beauty by a year and a half
occupation by our troops..........The buildings are in good order and
consist of a large central edifice, finer than any building in
Vermont except the capital.”
Charles Cummings was the editor of a
Brattleboro newspaper, and would have had the opportunity to see
Vermont's capitol. We can be pretty sure that Charles Aikens had not
been to Montpelier, and at Fairfax Seminary he probably saw the most
impressive architecture that he had ever seen. Charles Aikens was
probably familiar with the courthouse in Woodstock, which was the
pride and joy of Windsor County, having been built in 1854-55.
Fairfax Seminary was an Episcopal
seminary. It was taken over by the Union Army, and was General
McClellan's headquarters at the beginning of the war. When the
Vermonters passed by the school, McClellan was no longer the
Commander of the Union forces. Six days after the Vermonters passed
Fairfax Seminary, Lincoln removed McClellan from his command of the
Army of the Potomac, and replaced him with General Ambrose Burnside.
After McClellan's exit, Fairfax Seminary became the site of a Union
hospital, which served 1700 soldiers during the course of the war.
Five hundred Union soldiers are buried on the grounds of the school.
Fairfax Seminary exists today, as the Virginia Theological Seminary.
The 2nd Vermont made its
winter camp in Alexandria, Virginia, on the property of George Mason.
George Mason was an avowed secessionist who nonetheless found his
home invaded by a thousand soldiers from Vermont. Mr. Mason kept a
white sheet hung out of an upstairs window to indicate surrender, but
Colonel Blunt, Brigade Commander, made it clear that the landowner
would not be treated well until he traded the white sheet for a Union
flag, and took an oath of allegiance to the United States Government.
Howard Coffin discusses George Mason at length in “Nine Months to
Gettysburg”, and Charles Cummings mentions him in one of his
letters home. Cummings says, “His barn is used for stabling
horses, his farm is despoiled, and he is prevented from communicating
to any considerable extent with the outer world, and yet some of our
officers think and say that even his family, women and children
should receive no protection because the head of their family is at
heart a rebel. The colonel and I fight such inhuman notion. We cannot
see why his larder should be robbed and defenseless women, children
and niggers be left to starve and beg on account of the notions the
head of the family may entertain.”
As the brigade went about constructing
huts to spend the winter in, there was a great deal of political
upheaval in the camp. Colonel Asa Blunt was the commander in charge
in November, but Charles Cummings mentions to his wife that there was
talk of Colonel (Wheelock) Veasey, commander of the 16th
regiment, taking command of the whole brigade. This would result in
a promotion for Cummings, as he would become regiment commander. All
of Cummings' speculation went for naught, however, because on
December 7, Brigadier General Edwin Stoughton arrived to assume
command of the 2nd Vermont .
George Mason was about 65 in 1862,
which was pretty elderly in the mid 19th century,
certainly really old to have your home invaded by a thousand enemy
soldiers. He had been married three times. His first wife was Ann
Louise Harrison, who died in 1822. She must have died in childbirth,
as they had a daughter, Ann Louise, who was born in 1822 and lived
less than a year. His next wife was his cousin, Virginia Mason. They
were married in 1827, and Virginia died in 1838, never having had any
children. George married his third wife, another cousin, Sally
Eilbeck Mason, who was 24 years younger than he was. She had two
children, Kora and George. Kora would have been 15 and George 14 in
1862. Kora married and lived until she was in her 40's but didn't
have any children. George lived with his mother until he died in
1888, his mother dying that same year. Kora died the next year.
This picture is a picture of George
Mason's home, called Spring Bank, just before it was demolished in
1972. The property changed hands many times over the years. The
house was originally a 25 room mansion, but over the years it was
gradually whittled away, with all of its window and door pediments
taken off, and the portico removed. In its very last years, the
house was an apartment house and the rest of the property was a
trailer park, before the property was sold one last time and the
house torn down to make way for a K-Mart.
