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2. Founders’ Club: July–September 1861
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2 Founders’ Club J u l y – S e p t e mb e r 1 8 6 1 Acting in Concert On a raw day in late November 1861, Giddings made the short buggy ride out to the Ashtabula County fairgrounds to present his regiment with the flags it would carry in the war. He told the soldiers drawn up before him that a “few gentlemen,” residents of Ashtabula County, had determined on raising the regiment.1 He did not name names. The published history of the regiment, written two decades after the war by its one-time drummer boy J. Hampton SeCheverell, named J. R. Giddings as the founder, and two men who served as his principal assistants: U.S. senator Ben Wade and Jefferson resident Edward B. Woodbury. “Little Hamp” stated that other “well-known associates” of Giddings also contributed, but he did not identify them.2 Of the two men SeCheverell named, only Woodbury actually helped. Ben Wade had little or nothing to do with the birth of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio. Pairing the two men, Giddings and Wade, was natural enough since the two came from the same tiny Ohio place, and they marched under the banner of the same political party. As younger men, they had built a thriving law practice together, but by the time of the war, they had been bitter enemies for over twenty years. Wade had made a mean joke at Giddings’s expense during a trial at the courthouse in Jefferson, and the enmity it generated far outlasted the sting of the jury’s laughter.3 Wade had tried to wrest Giddings’s congressional seat from him in 1840, and failing in that he supported Giddings’s enemies in his future battles for office. In the Giddings home, Ben Wade, the man who lived just a few doors up the street, was held up to the children as the type of person they should avoid becoming. In Giddings’s mind, Wade was a man who was perfectly willing to sacrifice principle in his selfish drive for political power.4 Most important, Wade was presently raising a regiment of his own, the Second Ohio Cavalry. The competition over which man would be the first to put a regiment in the field would be the last skirmish in a feud that Giddings and Wade had fought for almost a quarter century. Less than a week following Bull Run the Jefferson newspaper reported that a three-man central committee had been formed and charged with the task of spreading the word through Giddings’s old congressional district that a new three-year regiment would be accepting companies of good men at their camp in Jefferson. The members of the committee were listed as Abner Kellogg, C. S. Simonds, and J. D. Ensign. It would be these three men who would attend to the myriad details of launching this complex project: making the first casts of the recruiting net, filling the top command slots, selecting a site for the camp, and arranging for all its equipment, right down to kettles and uniforms. All these efforts would have to be coordinated with the governor and the adjutant general of the state. Three of the Giddings clique— Kellogg, Ensign, and Woodbury—were already serving as members of the county’s military committee, 24 Founders’ Club and in a few weeks Woodbury would take over its leadership.5 That committee was obligated to advance the interest of every military outfit being formed in part or wholly within their county, including that of Ben Wade’s Second Ohio Cavalry. That this dual service might produce discord was not yet foreseen. The founding fathers of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio were as alike as peas in a pod. All were descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers. Each had made the Lincoln-like ascent from frontier poverty to small-town gentility. All were practicing lawyers.They had all taken a hand in building up the village of Jefferson and the county, following one another through a succession of elected offices, from school board member to county clerk to state congressman. Above everything else, they were unified by their hatred of slavery and had been pillars of Giddings’s local power base, and he had been their point man on the national political stage. Abner Kellogg was accounted to be one of the pioneers of the county’s antislavery movement.6 He had been expressing his conviction for years that slavery could...