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Introduction As the end neared for Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, a colonel from Maine encamped in Goldsboro, North Carolina, wrote to his mother and reflected on almost four years of service in the Union Army. “It is a beautiful moonlight night—all our doors & windows open—sitting out on the verandah a good deal. Shrubbery in the front garden all in leaf, bright & thrifty. The trees rapidly clothing themselves in their Spring attire. Peach trees all decked in luxuriant pink blossoms . They remind me of the first part of April 1862 when we first landed upon the Virginia peninsula. I used to notice the Peach trees there because they were the first I had seen in bloom. We landed at Ship Point April 4th 1862. War has had a good deal more of romance lately or is it a change in my feelings! It may be a calousing of my heart towards the disagreeable. But kind Providence has given me many changes for the better since then.”1 Such words were not uncommon for Charles Henry Howard, a man whose providential approach to all facets of life sustained and motivated him through the course of the Civil War. Yet it was not the war itself that rapidly transformed Howard into a pious and religious man. His religious beliefs predate the war by almost a decade and were a product of his modest spiritual upbringing and education. This spiritual upbringing and education dictated all of Charles’s actions in life, in that he viewed all things and people through a providential lens. Charles Henry Howard was born on August 28, 1838, in the small town of Leeds, Maine. The Howard family had long been a part of Maine history with Charles’s grandfather having served as a soldier in the American Revolution.2 Howard grew up on a small family farm in Leeds. Charles’s widowed mother, Eliza, remarried by the time Charles was three to a local soldier, Colonel John Gilmore. The marriage followed the death of Charles’s father, Rowland Bailey Introduction xviii Howard.3 Although Leeds would forever be home, Charles would actually spend only a small portion of his youth there as he made his way to Kents Hill School in nearby Kents Hill, Maine, to undertake full-time studies at the age of nine. Following his time at Kents Hill, Charles continued his education at North Yarmouth Academy and Topsham Academy. Charles ultimately matriculated at Bowdoin College in September 1855.4 Charles followed in the footsteps of his brother Oliver Otis Howard, always referred to as “Otis,” who graduated from the institution in 1850 before entering the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Additionally , Charles’s brother Rowland was a graduate of Bowdoin with the Class of 1856.5 Charles’s time at Bowdoin—which saw him miss a semester of school because of ill health—was stressful and challenging for the Maine native. The sickness, however, did not preclude Charles from coming back to complete his studies and graduate on time with the rest of the Class of 1859.6 Yet, despite Charles’s ability to graduate on time, the overall strain proved too much for him, as he fell severely ill upon his graduation from Bowdoin. Charles took this opportunity to visit a “water cure” in Keene, New Hampshire, before taking up the offer of his brother Otis in the fall of 1859 to join him at West Point, where Otis served as an instructor of mathematics.7 Charles quickly jumped at the offer to join Otis and took the year to recuperate from the strains of his Bowdoin education. However, it was during this year at West Point that Charles truly began to see increasing sectional tensions surrounding the “peculiar institution” of slavery . Charles expressed as early as 1857 his sincere belief that disunion and secession were distinct possibilities.8 However, it was his time at West Point that greatly affected Charles as he witnessed the tension present between cadets of the North and South who continually quarreled in the run-up to the election of 1860. With all eyes focused on the presidential election of 1860, Charles returned to his native state of Maine to continue his education at Bangor Theological Seminary with prospects of entering the ministry. Since Charles’s official conversion in 1853 while at Kents Hill and baptism in 1857 while at Bowdoin, he often believed in a call to service as a member...

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