CONDITIONAL LOVE

As an unattached young man, John Wilmot was clearly stirred by the extraordinary patriotic fervor circulating in the summer of 1861. A little time would show that he had also been stirred by something more common.

News of the Union disaster at the First Battle of Bull Run reached Vermont’s Connecticut River Valley in the midst of haying season. Barely a week after the battle, Governor Erastus Fairbanks decided to raise two new regiments of volunteers, although most conceded that recruiting would lag while the crucial hay crop was being cut. The customary pay for farm hands in the area seldom exceeded $1 a day, but they could demand $1.50 or more per day from the middle of July until mid-August, when the last load had been collected. Army pay of $13 a month paled by comparison, even after considering the $7 monthly bonus the state had authorized for all the enlisted men in Vermont regiments.

Nineteen-year-old John Wilmot would have taken full advantage of that premium pay. He had been supporting himself for at least a couple of years, boarding and working at a farm near his childhood home in the village of Post Mills. Good weather continued through the second week of August 1861, but by then most farmers had their hay collected, and Wilmot had to choose between resuming life as a regular hand or indulging the exciting prospect of going to war. Army pay and the Vermont supplement would give him the same $20 a month he might earn at farm labor, but the federal government also promised a $100 bounty at the end of a three-year enlistment.

There was nothing to keep him in Vermont’s Orange County. His mother was long dead, his father had just remarried twice in merely four years, and there was no family farm