The Untried Life: The Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War

Prologue

 Prologue T h e Won d e r o f t h e A g e Its soldiers came from many places in northeastern Ohio, but Jefferson, seat of Ashtabula County, was the hometown of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry. The men who came up with the idea of founding the regiment lived in Jefferson, as did J. R. Giddings, the famous politician who led them in their quest to have a regiment whose membership reflected their fervent antislavery beliefs. The camp where the regiment organized, and where young men took their first clumsy soldier steps, sat on the edge of the village, and its first company, Capt. William Fitch’s Company A, was of this place. A few decades earlier Jefferson, Ohio, had been a muddy stopover in the middle of a lightless primeval forest. By 1860, the year before the war, Jefferson had become a fair facsimile of a New England village. It had an avenue of pretty churches, a fine courthouse, and shaded streets of white clapboard houses set back on neat lawns. Jefferson’s population of 658 was only half that of the largest place in the county, the city of Ashtabula, and smaller by a third than the village of Conneaut, both of which, unlike Jefferson , enjoyed the advantages of fine natural harbors on Lake Erie and a place on the railroad.1 The only real business of the village revolved around the battalion of lawyers who worked from a row of squatty cottages lining an alley next door to the courthouse. In the only surviving photograph taken before the Civil War, Jefferson looks about the same as any other village of the time: a dusty main street, a plank walk running along the front of a common-walled row of businesses, and a few men in linen dusters and stovepipe hats leaning against hitching rails and lounging in doorways. The Howells family moved to Jefferson from southern Ohio in the 1850s, knowing it to be a place more in step with their own antislavery beliefs. The elder Howells, William Cooper Howells, took over the editorial responsibilities at Joshua R. Giddings’s pulpit-newspaper, the Ashtabula Sentinel. His son William Dean Howells spent most of his adolescence there. Had he stayed in Jefferson he might have enlisted in the Twenty-Ninth Ohio and written the great American novel about it and the Civil War. But Howells grew bored with village life and left for better and larger opportunities in Columbus. Howells would become the best-known man of American letters of his day. As an old man, he looked back at the Jefferson of his boyhood and concluded that it had been “simply the high-water mark of American civilization, a place so charming and warm that only fiction could portray it faithfully.”2 It was worthy of a book, and Howells wrote one, which he titled Years of My Youth. He remembered the people of Jefferson as affable but blunt in disposition, hard working, and hard thinking, and he described everyone in the village as amazingly literary. The people were universally poor, but their entertainments cost them nothing. There were organized excursions into the country to pick blackberries or gather chestnuts in their seasons, barn-raisings, and riotous Fourths of July. Young people slipped along the village streets, stopping to serenade at the homes of friends. The annual countywide rendezvous that was the Ashtabula County Fair marked the summer’s end. Christmas celebrations were something out of Charles Dickens. Antislavery zealots came to lecture, which in Jefferson was like 2 Prologue preaching to the choir. From what can be seen in the photograph of the main street—and imagined through the recollections of Howells—Jefferson, Ohio, appears too fixed in its homely, charming customs for anything revolutionary to have occurred here, but thinking that would be a mistake. There was another side to Jefferson beyond the field of view of the photograph, and apparently forgotten by Howells. Jefferson as it turns out is noteworthy for more than its sponsorship of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and its notoriety explains in a very direct way why the regiment came into existence. Jefferson could rightly be considered one of the birthplaces of the Civil War. It was this particular neighborhood’s harsh, insistent voice, and its defiant actions on the issue of slavery, that led in no small way to the calamity of civil war. The people that Howells remembered as open minded...