Wilbraham in the Shadow of Two Wars: A Re-telling

When Rev. Dr. Stebbins spoke to the people of Wilbraham during the Civil War, he reminded them that America had lived through great trials before. The Revolutionary War, he said, had been the epic of its age, a time when “the continent trembled under the tread of contending armies.” If that struggle was an epic, then the years 1861 to 1865 were surely a national tragedy. His words, spoken at the town’s centennial celebration, carried both warning and resolve. Just as the fathers of Wilbraham had once risen against British tyranny, the sons of Wilbraham, he declared, must now rise to defend freedom once more.

He spoke of familiar Wilbraham names: Warriner, Warner, Merrick, Bliss, Brewer, Chapin, Langdon, Stebbins, Morris, men who had marched off to fight in the Revolution. Their descendants, he said, had shown equal courage. They had left behind homes, wives, and children “to preserve the sacred ark of liberty.” The cost in blood had been enormous, but the cause was just. In his vivid language, the nation stood beneath the “flaming sword of the avenging angel,” and slavery, so long a stain on the land, was being cut away at last.

Today, more than a century and a half later, it is difficult to grasp the weight those words carried. When Dr. Stebbins addressed the town, the Civil War hung in the balance. Gettysburg was still months away. Vicksburg remained in Confederate hands. Victory and defeat swung back and forth across the continent like a pendulum of fire. And from Wilbraham alone, roughly 150 men already stood in the Union ranks, forming, quite literally, a human bulwark against national collapse.

Long before the first shots at Fort Sumter, the country had been torn by the question of slavery’s expansion into the West. Kansas, especially, had become a battleground. A Wilbraham man, Edmund Jones, had cast his vote in the turbulent election of March 1855 in Lawrence, a moment later detailed in the lengthy congressional report on the “Troubles in Kansas.”

When Jones returned home that same year, his neighbors crowded into the old First Church, then standing in the village center, to hear him recount the violence and chaos of “Bleeding Kansas.” Through his presence on that frontier, Wilbraham had carried a small but meaningful voice into one of the great national conflicts of the age.

By April 1861, the compromise had collapsed. The cannons that opened fire on Fort Sumter jolted the North awake, Wilbraham included. Within days, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers. On April 20, 1861, Charles E. Buell became the first man from Wilbraham to answer the call. After his initial term, he reenlisted, this time in the 10th Massachusetts Infantry, being formed at Hampden Park in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Bombardment of Fort Sumter, as depicted in a lithograph by Currier and Ives. Library of Congress

In the months that followed, “war meetings” filled the churches of Wilbraham. Local speakers urged young men to uphold the Union “established by the fathers.” And the young men responded. Before the war ended, Wilbraham had sent 228 soldiers and sailors into service, far more than its required quota. Town records later showed that Wilbraham had provided not only manpower but substantial financial support, including bounties after 1862 and thousands of dollars in state aid for soldiers’ families. The women of the town contributed as well; one woman famously turned two feather beds into dozens of pillows for hospitalized soldiers.

When the war finally ended in 1865, Massachusetts welcomed home its battle-worn regimental flags in a ceremony so moving that observers believed it could never be repeated. The colors, torn, smoke-stained, and blood-marked, were carried back to the State House by the men who had survived to return them. Governor John A. Andrew’s acceptance speech captured the moment: these flags, he said, carried “proud memories,” “sad memories,” and “immortal honors.” They would forever stand as reminders of sacrifice and victory.

For one Wilbraham veteran who later recounted his experiences, those flags stirred memories of comrades lost, three of his closest friends dying during service, one shot while carrying dispatches near Warrenton. He remembered their nightly routines on campaign: searching fields for water, frying salt pork over scraps of wood, and eating hardtack by firelight before laying their blankets on the ground. There was little comfort and even less variety in their meals. Yet they endured.

He remembered, too, smaller human moments. On one advance into Culpeper, Virginia, he halted before a cottage where a young Southern woman, curious yet unafraid, stepped out to speak with him and his comrade. She believed passionately in her cause, “as bright as the sun,” she said. For him, her presence lingered in memory for half a century, a symbol of the tragedy of a divided nation and the hope that one day the bitter divisions might fade.

And fade they did.

But not before the hardship of the most severe kind. At Aldie, Virginia, exactly fifty years before the veteran told his story, the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry endured one of its worst days of the war. Ordered to seize a line of hills, they charged forward only to meet three Confederate regiments. Reinforcements failed to arrive, and the regiment was scattered. A small group, fifty or sixty men, took shelter behind a stone wall and held fast under intense fire. General Kilpatrick rode up and asked them for fifteen more minutes. They gave him that, and more. Relief arrived only when their ammunition was almost gone.

Those were the kinds of moments that shaped the war and the men who fought it.

Today, when visitors walk through Doric Hall at the Massachusetts State House and see those tattered colors, massive silk flags once carried into battle, their history becomes real again. For Wilbraham, those banners represent not only the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry and the other regiments in which the town’s sons served; they represent the enormous courage shown by a small New England community in a time of national crisis.

Because of them, and the hundreds of thousands who marched beside them, the United States emerged from the Civil War reunited and renewed.