After the battle of Gettysburg, the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry remained in camp until the 16th of August, when it was sent to a very different scene of action. The violence of the Draft Riots in July had been quelled, but the situation there seemed ever ready to boil over. It seemed inconceivable that such carnage had taken place so far from the war front, or that the father of the fallen hero and former Second Col. Robert Gould Shaw had been compelled to sit in his darkened Staten Island home, gun in hand, ready to defend it against arsonists.
And so, the battered survivors of Cahncellorsville and Gettysburg--the 2nd MA, 3rd WS, 27th IN and eight other regiments, all under the command of General Thomas Ruger, were dispatched to keep order in the city.
"Of all the strange vicissitudes of the Second," wrote Chaplain Alonzo Quint, "it seems the queerest to find ourselves suddenly taken from the Rappahannock, and placed in the middle of New York town."
From Alexandria, VA, the regiment commenced its first ocean voyage since taking the steamer from Boston in April of 1861. Some of them fared well, but others Quint witnessed "intently looking over the sides into the sea." And at breakfast, he noticed that there were "fewer at the officers' breakfast than one would have imagined." and someof those who did show, "left the table rather suddenly."
After landing in NY harbor, the regiment marched down Broadway into City Hall Park. There they stacked arms on the same spot, and in the same line as they had two years earlier. But what a difference! said Quint. "Then a thousand and one strong; now a very few hundred. But they are the men of Winchester, of Cedar Mountain, of Antietam, of Chancellorsville, and of Gettysburg." These brave men were now in New York, said Quint, and were "willing to fight their country's enemies North as South," and warned that they fire "bullets, not blank cartridges."
To impress upon the public that real combat troops were enforcing the law, drills and evening parades were a daily occurance before large crowds. Quint was pleased to hear comments placing the 2nd MA even above the fabled NY Seventh, but had to chuckle at one sulky observer's comments that the regiment obviously had spent all its time in drill practice. "Correct--except for a few little episodes like Gettysburg."
Although they were in "camp," the officers were offered the free hospitality of the Astor House, whose proprietor had known the recently deceased Charles Mudge, and was eager to do anything for the regiment the young officer had gone to his death leading.
Families of the soldiers took advantage of their close proximity to visit them. Quint focused on the joy of one of the soldiers who was told that his wife and child had arrived, "As soon as he was in sight, his little boy, who had not seen his father since the war opened, rushed past the guard and over the tent ropes, and climbed up to his father's neck and hung there, while his father could not help the tears of delight." The reunion prompted more than one soldier to wipe his eyes. Quint did not see this as being un-soldierly. "They are no worse soldiers for the memory of the little boys and girls at home, and much better men for it."
The regiment's return to civilization was brief. On September 9, Ruger's detail was on its way back to Virginia. The sudden recall left Quint, whose own wife and daughter had arrived only the day before, feeling more than a little blue. "But such is life in war."
The 2nd MA sailed from New York and landed at Alexandria only to find the promised rail trasportation nowhere in sight. Ruger set off on foot. They found themselves moving along the same road as a long train of horses under a cavalry escort. Despite all efforts at peace, Quint reported, "the cavalry managers tried to interfere with us continually. If we halted, they halted. When we started, they would make every effort to break our line. At one place they succeeded in driving a wagon of our detachment into a ditch, and breaking some part. As more trouble was likely to ensue, our commander wheeled a guard across the road. Thereupon a young lieutenant drew his pistol on the guard; but a dozen Indiana bayonets pointing instantly at his breast, he quickly concluded to post-pone his funeral."
All things considered, they were glad to be back at the front. City life now seemed as alien to them as open-air living once did. A "humbug" was how Quint summed up New York City.
"It is tatoo as I write. What music it is, compared with the nuisance noises of those city streets! Our candles are not brilliant; but the sight of the lights of the camps all around is more pleasant than the glare of the city gas. The air is the pure air of heaven, not the choky stuff of the metropolis. The men are doing something noble, not diddling away these glorious days in selling tape and ribbons. The soldier lives to some purpose, and if he dies, it is a hero's death. The silks of that wealthy mart may be coveted by some; but what are the whole, to our bullet-riddled old flag, which passed from the stiffening hands of one color-bearer to another in the days of many a battle?"
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