Faces of the Civil War: An Album of Union Soldiers and Their Stories

Silent Homage

39 Silent Homage Five miles south and west of Culpeper, Virginia, Cedar Mountain rises above a hilly landscape checkered with farms. On August 9, 1862, Union and Confederate armies tore into each other in the fields and woods just beyond the base of the mountain in the first engagement of the Second Bull Run campaign. The next day, Union Gen. George Gordon66 surveyed the battlefield where he had lost 466 of the 1,500 men in his brigade. “On our left the corn- field was only sprinkled with dead, but on the wheat-field, and in the woods into which our regiments charged and by the fence where my brigade fought in line of battle, there were ghastly piles of dead.”67 Gordon came upon the grisly scene where his old regiment , the Second Massachusetts Infantry, had been overwhelmed on the front, flank, and rear. The corpses of five officers, including one of the regiment’s most popular captains, thirty-one-year-old Blackstone Williams,68 were surrounded by many of their fifty-two troops killed in action. Williams opposed the Republican Party. His minister described him as “staunch in the conviction that the success of that party, following the long agitation at the North of the disrupting question of slavery, had precipitated the Rebellion.”69 But after the war began, the Boston bachelor put politics aside, left his father’s home in Jamaica Plain, and raised recruits for the Second Infantry . He brought a wealth of experience—and privilege—to his command. Born into a family of means, he studied drawing and mathematics under private teachers and became an engineer. In 1850, he accompanied a team of engineers to Mexico to survey a rail route across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.70 The venture was abandoned a year later, but Williams continued working in the booming railroad business and prospered from lucrative construc- 40 Capt. William Blackstone Williams, Company E, Second Massachusetts Infantry Carte de visite by John Adams Whipple (1822–1891) of Boston, Massachusetts, about 1861 41 tion contracts in the Midwest. In 1858, he toured Europe, returning just before the war started. Williams’s accomplishments sat with an easy grace upon him and, combined with a gentle and easy manner of speaking, earned him the respect of the enlisted men and his fellow officers. Friends remembered him as “generous and upright, cool, reflective, sagacious, resolute in purpose, courageous .”71 His body was sent home, and a memorial service held at the Unitarian Church in Jamaica Plain was attended by a large group of mourners. The pastor said of Williams, “My friends, his best eulogy cannot be spoken. It is the silent homage to his worth, of which this immense concourse of friends is the expression; it is the unbounded confidence, respect, and love of his companions in arms. . . . it is the eternal debt which the American Nation owes to his memory, and the enrolment of his name in the grand historical obituary of the peerless defenders of her institutions, her liberties, and her life.”72 ...