Through Blood and Fire: The Civil War Letters of Major Charles J. Mills, 1862-1865, Revised and Expanded Edition

By J. Gregory Acken

The insightful letters of a Harvard-educated staff officer’s experience in the Army of the Potomac

Charles J. Mills, the scion of a wealthy, prominent Boston family, experienced a privileged upbringing and was educated at Harvard University. When the Civil War began, Mills, like many of his college classmates, sought to secure a commission in the army. After a year of unsuccessful attempts, Mills was appointed second lieutenant in the Second Massachusetts Infantry in August 1862; however, he was seriously wounded at Antietam a month later. Following a nearly yearlong recovery, Mills eventually reentered the service as a staff officer, although he remained physically disabled for the rest of his life. He was initially with the Ninth Corps during the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns and later at the Second Corps headquarters.

During his time in the army, Mills served under seven different generals and witnessed some of the most intense fighting of the war. Mills’s letters to his family offer enlightening insights about the Civil War in the East as seen from the perspective of an educated, impressionable, and opinionated Bostonian Brahmin.

Compiled, edited, and privately published in a limited edition in 1982 by the late Gregory A. Coco, Through Blood and Fire did not achieve widespread attention and has been out of print for decades. This new edition of the Mills letters, extensively revised and edited by J. Gregory Acken, incorporates additional letters and source material and provides exhaustive annotations and analysis, revitalizing this important primary source for understanding a crucial era of our history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781631015052

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Introduction

In August 1861, in an occurrence that was not uncommon in the North during the Civil War’s early months, a father sought to use his influence to help his son gain a commission in the Union army. In this instance, Charles H. Mills, an affluent Bostonian, sent a letter on behalf of his oldest child, Charles J. Mills, a recent Harvard University graduate, to Col. George H. Gordon, a West Pointer and veteran of the Mexican War (1846–48).¹ Gordon, also a Boston native, had recently raised a regiment in the city for service with Union forces, and the elder Mills hoped the colonel would have a place for Charles (referred to by his friends and family as Charlie or Charley in their letters) in his regiment, the Second Massachusetts Infantry. His son, explained the young man’s father,

has been very desirous for some time of procuring a commission as Lieutenant in one of our Regiments, but has never fully obtained my consent until I saw your Card in the journals of last evening, and has therefore never made any attempt to do so. I have now given him my permission, provided he can procure a commission under your command. He is just 20 years of age, in good health and of a vigorous constitution and of good habits and character…. If you will kindly take his case under consideration and view it with as much favor as it merits, and if you think favorably, lend him your influence in obtaining the object of his wishes you will confer a favor on me and on him. If you desire any other evidences of his character and qualifications, he is well-known to Col. Lee of the Staff of his Excellency the Governor.²

Although his father made no mention of it in his letter to Colonel Gordon, one of young Charley’s maternal cousins, Wilder Dwight, had already been commissioned as major of the Second Massachusetts. The elder Mills also provided some of the only extant insight into what drove his son to military service, informing Gordon that the young man was filled with a desire to do his part in the great struggle that is upon us. Another aspirant for a commission in the Second Massachusetts, Mills’s Harvard classmate Henry Livermore Abbott, had predicted during its formation that the regiment would be officered by gentlemen, a great many of whom I know & by sober respectable fellows who more do suit a staid graduate like myself than harum scarum young fellows who haven’t yet sowed their wild oats.³

Certainly to Charley Mills’s disappointment, his father’s intervention was not enough to help him secure a commission in the Second Massachusetts. By the time the elder Mills sent his inquiry to Gordon, the regiment had been gone from Boston for almost two months and was then serving in western Maryland.⁴ The officer corps of the Second Massachusetts had been filled, as Henry Abbott had foreseen, by young men like he and Mills—men of means, education, and social standing, many of them graduates of Harvard. Over the next year, Mills would endure several more unsuccessful attempts to obtain a commission in the army before finally obtaining his prize.

Charles J. Mills had been born in Boston on January 8, 1841, to a family with deep roots in colonial America and whose wealth most Americans at the time could only dream of. He was the oldest of two sons of Charles Henry Mills (1815–72), a dry goods merchant, and Anna Cabot Lowell Dwight Mills (1818–80). Though they were among the early settlers of Connecticut, Mills’s paternal ancestors established themselves in western Massachusetts. His great-grandfather the Rev. Benjamin Mills (1739–85) graduated from Yale University and led a congregation in Chesterfield, Massachusetts; his grandfather Elijah Hunt Mills (1776–1829) was an attorney in Northampton and served the Bay State for four years in the US House of Representatives and for seven years as a US senator.

Charley’s mother was the daughter of Edmund Dwight (1780–1849), famous as an education reformer and industrial pioneer who was instrumental in the establishment of cotton-based textile manufacturing in Massachusetts. Dwight was also one of the founders of the Western Rail Road, connecting western Massachusetts and Albany, New York. Edmund’s father, Jonathan Dwight (1743– 1831), was a leading merchant of western Massachusetts; among his cousins was Timothy Dwight, a theologian who served as president of Yale for almost twenty-five years.⁵ Anna’s grandfather on her mother’s side, Samuel Eliot (1739– 1820), was a fabulously wealthy Boston merchant and banker.

Charles J. Mills. This image comes from the album of the Harvard Class of 1860. (Courtesy HUD 260.704 Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA)

Regrettably for the Mills family, Charles H. Mills & Co., the dry goods firm owned by the elder Charles Mills, had gone under during the Panic of 1857. Still, the financial underpinnings of the family appear to have remained strong.⁶

Mills’s preparation for college took place at the exclusive Private Latin School in Cambridge, in the company of the sons of other well-off New Englanders, under the tutelage of Epes Sargent Dixwell. He entered Harvard College in July 1856, at the age of fifteen, as a member of its Class of 1860.⁷ In the mid-nineteenth century, it was the premier academic institution in the United States and had established itself as the school for Boston’s upper-class community. The cost of attending Harvard during the four years Mills was there approached $2,000 per year, a significant amount of money at the time, but to many, the benefits outweighed the costs; a Harvard diploma during that era was like a passport, a declaration of man’s residence in Boston’s ‘upper stratum.’⁸

While at Harvard, Mills joined heartily in the sports common among students, remembered a classmate, and was in no wise behind in study. At his commencement ceremony, Mills was among those selected to deliver an oration; he read an essay on Domestic Architecture.⁹ After graduating, he was uncertain about what profession to choose but decided to enroll in Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. The young man was studying engineering there when war broke out.¹⁰

Details of Mills’s activities between August 1861, when his father wrote to Colonel Gordon, and May 1862, when his first available letter was written, are sparse. At some point during the nine-month span, he learned of a vacancy in the officer ranks of the Twenty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry and pursued the position. But upon discovering that a close friend—a Harvard classmate who had fought at First Bull Run—had also applied for the opening, he withdrew his request. In February 1862, he traveled to Washington, DC, seeking a commission, but was again unsuccessful.¹¹

In late May 1862, with his prospects of entering the war as an officer nearly nonexistent, Mills enlisted as a private in the Fourth Battalion of Infantry, Massachusetts Militia. This iteration of the Fourth Battalion had been raised to replace the garrison at Fort Warren in Boston harbor, which had been dispatched to protect the nation’s capital following the defeat of Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks in the Shenandoah Valley. I was sorry to take such a decided step in your absence, he wrote to his mother shortly after his enlistment, but it could not be helped…. I can’t say that the prospect of a private’s career seems particularly inviting, tho’ I expect to like it on the whole well enough, but I think men are wanted, and when that is the case, of course I wish to go.¹²

Mills also expressed the first of many attempts over the course of his time in the service to alleviate any apprehension his family might experience regarding his safety. There is no occasion to be at all anxious about us, he assured them, as our destination will probably be some very safe garrison. As we may not go after all, I won’t undertake to be sentimental or brave. He continued, If we do have any fighting, you will find out how I behave under fire, which I feel a tolerable confidence will not be badly.¹³ It was soon clear that there was little threat to Washington resulting from Banks’s defeat, and undoubtedly to the young man’s displeasure, the Fourth Battalion was disbanded only four days after its members mustered in.

Mills was once again left searching for a place in the army. Reflecting on Mills’s efforts during this period, a friend believed that his slight stature and youthful features contributed to his continued inability to procure a commission, asserting that the Bostonian’s almost feminine delicacy of appearance inspired distrust and deterred one commander after another from accepting one whose slender frame seemed so unfitted for the hardships of a campaign.¹⁴

Late July 1862 found Mills at Camp Stanton, situated in the town of Lynnfield, twelve miles north of Boston, at the headquarters of the Thirty-Third Massachusetts Volunteers. That regiment’s colonel had appointed him as a recruiting officer with the promise of a second lieutenancy if he were able to raise enough men to organize a company. But finding citizens willing to enlist, Mills informed his mother, was difficult. I am getting broken in here pretty well, and if I only felt any hope of getting my commission, and felt that either I cared a six pence for any one else in the Regt., or that they valued me at an equal amount …, I should enjoy it exceedingly. His interactions with the dozen or so enlistees he was able to coax into signing up were pleasant enough: I find that my difficulty, contrary to my expectations, is that I am apt to be too easy with them—many of them I like very much, indeed there are some in my Co. whose society I should infinitely prefer to that of some of the Officers. I have already obtained a feeling of considerable self-confidence, which increases daily, and I frequently rather astonish myself at the fierce manner in which I yell at my Company.¹⁵

Mills’s chances of attracting enough men to enable him to secure a commission lessened daily—We have only 13 men and no prospects of more—but he continued to believe that he might yet have the opportunity to serve with the Second Massachusetts. News from that quarter, unfortunately, was also discouraging. A Harvard classmate serving in the Second had written to him regarding his prospects: I got a letter from Ned Abbott tonight which pretty much cuts off all hope there, he wrote to his mother on July 22. I have still hopes, however, from Wilder’s influence. Mills closed this letter with a comment that provides insight into both his determination to serve and his state of mind: If I don’t get my Commission at all, I shall go off somewhere, perhaps enlist. I won’t be seen at home.¹⁶ His perseverance would soon be rewarded, however, as less than three weeks after writing this letter, attrition occasioned by battle casualties in the Second Massachusetts Infantry provided him with the opportunity he had sought.

Mills would experience the Civil War while serving in several capacities. He joined the service as a line officer in the Second Massachusetts, then less than three weeks later was promoted to regimental adjutant. Severely wounded at Antietam only a month after joining the Second, he reentered the service in the fall of 1863 as adjutant of a newly organizing regiment, the Fifty-Sixth Massachusetts Infantry. After six months with the unit, either in camp near Boston or later at Annapolis, Maryland, he was appointed as assistant adjutant general on the staff of Brig. Gen. Thomas G. Stevenson, a division commander in the Ninth Corps.

His posting under Stevenson, a fellow Boston blueblood, pleased Mills. Staff is a vastly better and pleasanter position in every way than being in a Reg’t, he explained after only a few weeks. I have forty times the knowledge of what is going on, am thrown in contact, as a rule, with gentlemen instead of roughs, and see a good deal of all the Generals.¹⁷ In a later letter, Mills elaborated on the advantages of serving as a staff officer: This is a position where one learns a great deal of the hidden motives, the orders that are never published to the world at large, and perhaps never carried out, to say nothing of being brought into contact with all the celebrities of the Army, more or less, which makes it vastly [more] interesting than serving in the line, to say nothing of its other advantages, which are numerous. Mills would spend the next year as an assistant adjutant general, initially with a division and later at the headquarters of the Ninth and then the Second Corps.

Much like the adjutant of a regiment, assistant adjutant generals on the staffs of brigade, division, and corps commanders acted as the administrator of the organization, issuing orders and announcements on behalf of its commander, copying and disseminating orders from higher-ups, maintaining personnel records, and interacting with anyone who had business with the commanding officer. When marching and fighting, however, the routine was quite different than when in camp, as Mills recorded in late 1864: Of course on active campaigns, such as the first six weeks [of the Overland Campaign] and a good many shorter periods since, all this is completely upset; one’s hours are perfectly uncertain, office work ceases & writing of despatches, carrying orders, getting troops into position, from 3 A.M. till midnight, it may be takes its place, all of it varied by every degree of bullets, shell, schrapnel, and other disagreeables, with little to eat & nothing to lie on or under.

Being on the division staff, Mills would periodically try to reassure his family, was less dangerous than a regimental adjutant’s role. I will mention for your consolation that in my opinion, he wrote on April 26, 1864, my present position is a good deal safer than my former one. Ultimately, and with tragic consequences, this would prove to be untrue.

To Mills’s great regret, Thomas Stevenson would be killed less than a month after he joined the division commander’s staff. But Mills would go on to serve under six more general officers during his final ten months in the army.

That the young staff officer was opinionated (and guilty on occasion of passing judgment—both praiseworthy and critical—on his superiors before he became fully acquainted with them) is never more apparent than when he relates his impressions of the generals he served. He idolized Stevenson and was despondent after the Bostonian’s death by a sharpshooter’s bullet at Spotsylvania Court House.¹⁸ Following Stevenson’s passing, Mills served successively on the First Division, Ninth Corps staffs of Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Crittenden, (an excellent officer and a very genial, pleasant, kindly man, whom I am becoming attached to) and his successor, Brig. Gen. James H. Ledlie. Despite an initially favorable opinion of Ledlie, Mills would, after an eventful month under his command, experience a radical change of heart: I never met anyone a more thorough black-guard, in a responsible place, or one who had less sense of his duty.

When Ledlie was ushered out of the army in August 1864 for his complicity and cowardice in the Crater disaster, Mills served for a short time under Illinoisan Brig. Gen. Julius White, who he pronounced a very kindly, pleasant person, rather Western, but gentlemanly. He later joined the staff at Ninth Corps headquarters under Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s successor, Maj. Gen. John Grubb Parke. Mills thought Parke was too modest and has not quite enough self-assertion or ambition but could overlook these perceived shortcomings because the Pennsylvanian was a perfect gentleman and an excellent soldier in every respect.

Mills would be transferred to duty at the headquarters of the Second Corps in mid-October 1864, serving for several weeks on the staff of Gettysburg hero Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, who he described as polite, but distant, and finally on the staff of Hancock’s successor, Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys, who he admired and respected. The fact that he served under as many commanders as he did during his time in the army was not lost on Mills: My being assigned to a General seems to be fatal to his permanency in position, he remarked wryly not long after joining Hancock’s staff.

His role on a Ninth Corps divisional staff during the Overland and the initial stages of the Petersburg Campaigns would bring Mills into contact with the man who led the corps until August 1864, Major General Burnside. On one of the few occasions in his correspondence in which Mills gave voice to his patrician prejudices, he related, after his first meeting with Burnside in May 1864, finding the general weak and unbusinesslike. He concluded, I am in every way except in mere rank vastly higher up and better off.¹⁹

In a familiar pattern, however, Mills’s shortsighted first impression of Burnside evolved and softened, especially after the Rhode Islander went to lengths to ensure that the young man secured promotion: I certainly have a good friend in Gen. Burnside, whom I have always liked extremely, as a man. When it became clear in the weeks following the setback at the Crater that Burnside would not return to the army, Mills expressed regret: They say he will resign, for which I am extremely sorry, as I feel much attached to him. This power of attracting people is one of his strong points and makes his men fight splendidly.

The majority of the time Mills spent in the service, from March to October 1864, was as a member of the Ninth Corps. Yet he was initially disappointed to be assigned to what he considered an inferior organization. The genesis of the wandering corps, as one early chronicler styled the Ninth, traced back to Burnside’s actions along the Atlantic coast beginning in February 1862. Many of the regiments that served under him during his successful actions at Roanoke Island, New Berne, and Beaufort formed the nucleus of the Ninth Corps, which was officially established in July 1862.

Once formally organized, the Ninth Corps fought under Pope at Second Manassas and was then assigned to Maj. Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. During the Antietam Campaign, it was engaged at Fox’s Gap during the Battle of South Mountain (September 14, 1862), and pushing over Antietam Creek on the bridge that ever after bore Burnside’s name, it assaulted Gen. Robert E. Lee’s right on September 17 but was repulsed. Losses for the corps during the Antietam Campaign amounted to more than 3,200 men. With the rest of the Army of the Potomac (now commanded by Burnside, who had replaced McClellan in early November), the Ninth Corps moved to Fredericksburg, where it was comparatively lightly engaged in the Federal defeat of December 13, losing 1,300 men.

Burnside was relieved from army command in January 1863, and in February the Ninth Corps was detached from the Army of the Potomac. The next month, two of its divisions embarked on a ten-month odyssey that saw them perform occupation duty in Kentucky, assist Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in besieging Vicksburg (fighting at Jackson, Mississippi, a week after Vicksburg’s surrender), and march back to Kentucky. As part of Burnside’s Army of the Ohio, the Ninth Corps moved into East Tennessee in September, fighting later that fall at Campbell’s Station and in the December defense of Knoxville. Burnside was placed in charge of the corps again in early 1864, in April assembling it in Annapolis preparatory to joining the Army of the Potomac for the Overland Campaign against Richmond.

Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade had commanded the Army of the Potomac since mid-1863, but Burnside outranked him since his major general’s commission predated Meade’s. Lieutenant General Grant, who as Union general in chief had decided to accompany Meade and his army in the spring 1864 campaign, directed that the Ninth Corps would act independently and take orders directly from him. Whether by virtue of Burnside’s disastrous stint in command of the army, the Ninth Corps having been previously attached to it for just six months (during which time the army had been soundly defeated at Fredericksburg), or of Burnside reporting directly to the general in chief, many in the Army of the Potomac considered the Ninth Corps a group of outsiders. This perception was evident to Burnside’s men: we have been bullyragged so, wrote one of the general’s staffers in early June, & the Corps is spoken of as a superfluity—and no end to the insults & taunts we have received.²⁰

The initial dissatisfaction Mills expressed upon being assigned to serve in the Ninth Corps would diminish over time. His early complaints centered around what he perceived as a lack of attention to detail among its leaders and, as he termed it, a want of organization. The lieutenant colonel of the Fifth-Sixth Massachusetts, a Harvard classmate and veteran of nearly three years’ service, agreed, commenting about his initial experiences as part of the Ninth Corps in late April 1864, Every one has to move on his own hook and things seem very loosely conducted.²¹ In June, having spent nearly three months serving in it, Mills remained disillusioned, writing that he would rather be in any Corps than the 9th. The young officer found no fault, however, with the fighting qualities of its soldiers. No men ever fought better, he wrote two weeks after the defeat at the Battle of the Crater on July 30. When consolidation ultimately forced him out of the corps in October 1864, Mills expressed regret: I shall be very sorry…. to leave the 9th Corps, he wrote. I like the Genl. [John G. Parke] and staff here very much, … and then there are my dear old friends in the 56th [Massachusetts].

Despite his father’s aforementioned comment to Colonel Gordon about the young man wanting to do his part, Charley Mills himself provides little insight about what motivated him to serve. His racially charged comments denigrating African American soldiers, though not uncommon for that era, are difficult to read.²² This, coupled with the fact that his surviving letters are devoid of any mention of slavery, emancipation, or any of the humanitarian ideals often associated with the conflict, point to the conclusion that Mills, like many Northern soldiers, was actuated to fight not out of any compulsion to see slavery ended or improve the plight of African Americans, but to save the Union and perpetuate the democratic principles upon which the nation was founded. In point of fact, he wanted to see the rebellion put down in the most expeditious way possible. I want to have [the war] over, Mills wrote in November 1864, doing my duty as best I can and getting what distinction or advancement I may while it lasts, but thoroughly disliking the profession in most requests.

In the first years of the war, Mills had believed that McClellan’s leadership provided the surest path to victory. Upon learning of McClellan’s relief from command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, he was disgusted, particularly with those he deemed responsible for the change:

No one who was with the Army as I was, when Mac took command after Pope’s brilliant performances, & saw how order was brought out of chaos, hope out of despair, & utter distrust & hatred of the commanding General turned to enthusiastic admiration & confidence can doubt that McClellan is the man, & I think the only man who can lead us to certain victory.

As far as I can see, the charges brought against him are utterly frivolous, & the whole affair is, I fear, a political machination. It does not add to my cheerfulness on the subject to have to lie here inactive while Stanton & C[harles] Sumner are fiddling on the ruins of their country. This last act of the Administration finally confirms me in the opinion to which I have been reluctantly coming for the last six months, that A. Lincoln is a weak fool.²³

Two years later, however, when McClellan ran for president against Lincoln and linked his candidacy to the peace platform set forth by the Democrats at their Chicago convention, Mills would find his loyalties shift, putting him at odds, as is evidenced by his words, with the views of his parents and other relatives. You don’t seem to like my political sentiments very well, he chided his father in a September 1864 letter.²⁴

Had Charles J. Mills experienced the Civil War solely as a staff officer and served only during the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns of 1864–65, the observations he conveyed in his letters would be compelling enough. But there is another important aspect to his story. Just a month after entering the service with the Second Massachusetts Infantry, Mills advanced with his regiment as part of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac to fight at Antietam during Lee’s first invasion of the North. While engaged there in a position opposite the West Woods on September 17, 1862, Mills was shot through the upper part of the backs of both legs, just below his hips. Though it was a relatively bloodless wound, it immobilized him at the time and resulted in a lengthy, physically challenging recovery that ultimately left him lame for life. When fully recovered (or nearly so), he could only move his left leg with difficulty, requiring the use of a cane when walking.

Mills could have honorably, and without reproof, sat out the rest of the war following his wounding, but his single-minded focus during his nearly yearlong recovery was to get back to the army. Based on the accounts of several soldiers and acquaintances who knew him, Mills returned to duty well before he had fully healed. His struggle to regain his mobility and overcome the limitations his condition imposed upon him lends a dimension to his story that is relatively rare in Civil War reminiscences. It bears witness to the strength of spirit Mills displayed in learning to function with his disability.

In the weeks leading up to the Overland Campaign, Mills was unsure, because of his lameness, if he would be able to withstand the physical demands active service would require despite the fact that, as a staff officer, he would be on horseback. Though he complained of pain, soreness, and stiffness in his leg during the initial fighting in early May (and later in the month developed saddle sores that forced him, to his great disgust, to ride in an ambulance for a time), experiencing discomfort would eventually become the exception rather than the rule. You ask about my leg, he replied in answer to a letter in September 1864. It gives me little or no trouble in riding and I rarely have any pain in it at all. I doubt, however, if I have gained much in walking. One never walks a step in the Army, at least a staff officer. Noting in November that his leg only bothered him occasionally, Mills remarked, I don’t walk much and expect to find walking at home rather fatiguing. He lamented, It is a pity one cannot ride through life on horseback.

Despite being mostly free from discomfort, his condition was cumbersome. A fellow staff officer recalled that whenever Mills was about to ride, he climbed with great exertion in the saddle. Charley related to his mother in May 1864, It’s a dreadful bore to have only my awkward way of mounting. The strong-willed soldier refused to let his disability deter him, however, and he performed his duty, despite his hardship, with resolute perseverance during the last year of the war.

Contemporaries described Mills as reserved and businesslike, although in the company of friends, companions, and fellow Harvard graduates (who he would seek out when circumstances permitted) he felt more at ease, and dropped his veneer of formality. He was rather grave in his manner, but was ready to join in any sport, recalled an officer who came to know him well. Sincerity was the conspicuous feature of his daily intercourse with others, and perfect courage, a duly appreciative mind as to the merits of others who thought differently from himself, and a liking for conversation made him a very good companion.²⁵

Mills was not given to introspection, but on one of the infrequent occasions he indulged in it, he remarked on the bond that shared experience had developed between himself and his fellow soldiers while expressing disdain for men who chose to remain civilians. "Perhaps I have not made in the Army any very intimate friends, he mused in a letter written in October 1864, but the attachment I feel for those of my former friends who have gone through this campaign with me is something quite unequalled by what I can feel for any of those who have preferred [Boston’s] Somerset Club to Petersburg. This contempt for able-bodied men who avoided military service bubbled to the surface on occasion. I have made up my mind that about everyone who has any decency and is of the proper age is in the Army, he wrote in September 1864; they seem to be such a correlated set of poltroons and traitors at home."²⁶

Mills was very close with his mother, father, and brother. During boyhood, recalled a friend, he was never long separated from his parents.²⁷ Although Mills makes an allusion to not having been appreciative enough of his family while in college, his absence from them while in the army strengthened his regard for them. There’s nothing like campaigning to teach me the beauties of domestic life, he observed. If we lose, for the time, in society of our families, we surely gain in warmth of attachment.²⁸

It is difficult, across the span of more than a century and a half and using only clues from surviving letters, to accurately gauge the depth of feeling that Mills had for his mother, Anna, but his affection for her clearly was boundless. The young man was acutely aware that the hazards posed by his service would naturally cause his family to worry, yet he was especially concerned that the mental burden it engendered might affect his mother physically. Upon receiving several letters from her after only a few weeks in the army, Charley hastened to reply: I realized more than ever how much you must have suffered from needless anxiety…. Dear Mother, try not to worry about me, and don’t let it affect your health, above all.

The act of physically parting from his family—especially his mother—was also never easy for Mills. While encamped at Annapolis in the spring of 1864, he had been anticipating a visit from her, but the trip had to be canceled when the Ninth Corps was summoned to support the Army of the Potomac. While sorry not to see her, Mills was, he confided, almost equally glad not to have bid you goodbye again. I came too near breaking down last time to want to go through it again, in spite of thinking up to the last moment I was perfectly stony-hearted. He was eventually able to master his emotions more completely.²⁹ Returning to Virginia from an extended leave in December 1864, Mills reveled in the memory of the time he had spent at home, observing in a letter to his mother soon after, We got through our parting splendidly, and I am confirmed in my opinion that practice has made it much easier, as even after I left you, I did not feel badly a bit. But he confessed: You can hardly attribute that to want of affection, I trust. I never loved you more, or left you more easily."

Letters were a lifeline for Mills, and like most Civil War soldiers, he eagerly awaited the receipt of mail from home. His principal correspondent was his mother. As he explained to his father: It is rather difficult to keep up an active correspondence with two members of the same family, as one is afraid of repetition. I hope you understand this, and are not disgusted by my writing almost exclusively to her. Mills was indifferent regarding the subject matter of letters from home; receiving mail from loved ones was proof that he was never far from their thoughts. You needn’t be afraid at all of your letters being stupid, he assured his mother in a reply to one of her notes. They are always the greatest pleasure of my life here. And in June 1864, he disclosed, I feel pretty lonely sometimes, I assure you letters, letters, letters are my only comfort.

Upon receiving several pieces of mail from home at the same time on one occasion, Mills was quick to reply: I must acknowledge your nice letters …, which I only got last night, and have consequently not read more than four times yet. Two weeks into the Overland Campaign, he had not received any mail. I long to have letters unspeakably, he complained. I feel as if I had been out in this horrible bloody wilderness for months, instead of a fortnight.³⁰

Despite repeated attempts to assuage the fears of his family, Mills’s writing, as might be expected from one who early in his service had been seriously wounded, is tinged with hints of fatalism. His experiences during the battles of the Overland Campaign haunted him. Having passed through the first month of the campaign, Mills wrote in early June that, while he thought the outcome of the fighting would accrue to the North’s advantage, it will take a good while. I hope some of us will be left to reap the benefits. He missed friends and acquaintances who had died, commenting while engaged near Spotsylvania that he thought he could quite enjoy life again if I could call a few to life back to share it with me.³¹

When he learned in June that a distant cousin serving in the army had been taken prisoner, the news having cast a pall over a wedding celebration at home, Mills would have none of it. They should rather rejoice over it, he declared. Those who get through this campaign with nothing worse than capture are to be congratulated. ‘Pro Patria Mori’ [dying for one’s country] is all very well, he continued, but it is a contingency to be avoided if possible.

Hundreds of former Harvard College students served in the Union army and navy during the Civil War. Sixty-one members of Mills’s Class of 1860 donned the blue uniform at some point during the conflict. No Harvard class lost more men over the course of those four years than the Class of 1860, with fourteen of its members perishing in the fighting.³² Among the dead was Maj. Charles J. Mills, who was killed just nine days before the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Harvard students who fought in the Civil War have left behind an impressive body of letters, recollections, and memoirs, some of which are now classics. The intimate and descriptive letters and journals of Mills’s friend Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman are an invaluable source for anyone studying the last eighteen months of the war in the East. The posthumously published letter collections of Mills’s classmate Robert Gould Shaw and classmate and friend Henry Livermore Abbott are among the best wartime accounts available. The detailed, highly readable chronicle of his war service by classmate, close friend, and fellow officer in the Fifty-Sixth Massachusetts Stephen Minot Weld rivals the finest sets of letters by any officer in the Army of the Potomac, Gary Gallagher has noted.³³ The letters and reminiscences of several other Harvard men, notably Charles Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and more recently Henry Ropes, represent considerable contributions to the literature of the conflict.

Mills’s wartime writings are not as detailed and personal as Lyman’s, his experiences not as varied as Weld’s, nor was his war service as noteworthy as Shaw’s. Mills never commanded men in battle, nor did he attain a rank or a level of responsibility that would have allowed him to share a more expansive perspective than the one he experienced as a staff officer. It was not uncommon for Civil War soldiers who were wounded to return to active duty; most who did, however, had not suffered the kind of debilitating wounds that Mills endured. The account of his wounding and recuperation, his resulting permanent disability, and his struggle not only to overcome it but to then, by sheer force of will, return to active service, is noteworthy.

Mills spent a total of twenty months in uniform during the course of the war; of that time, one year was spent serving in the field on active campaign, almost exclusively in noncombat staff assignments. Despite the relative brevity of his service, Mills was present during some of the most intense fighting that the conflict produced. His candid letters to his family (which, like many of the best letter collections, were never intended for publication) chronicling his experiences during the Antietam Campaign, his wounding and recovery, and the nearly eleven months he spent as a staff officer participating in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns are insightful, detailed, and intimate. They are deserving of a place next to the best personal accounts of the war recorded both by former Harvard students and by soldiers of the Army of the Potomac.

1. Quinquennial Catalogue of the Law School, 56. For more on Gordon, see chapter 1, note 20.

2. Charles H. Mills to George Gordon, August 29, 1861, in Coco, Through Blood and Fire, 261.

3. Two of Henry Livermore Abbott’s brothers, Edward Ned and Fletcher, had been commissioned in the Second Massachusetts Infantry. Henry Abbott would eventually gain a commission in the Twentieth Massachusetts, which, because of a preponderance of Harvard graduates in its ranks, was nicknamed the Harvard Regiment. The Second Massachusetts, it is worth noting, counted as many commissioned officers with ties to Harvard as the Twentieth Massachusetts. A modern regimental history of the Second Massachusetts is sorely needed. Scott, Fallen Leaves, 30.

4. Gordon had actually secured commissions for all of the officers of the Second Massachusetts by late May 1861. Gordon, Organization and Early History of the Second Mass. Regiment, 24.

5. Bowen, Memoir of Edmund Dwight, 6–15.

6. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 225. One of the partners in Charles H. Mills’s firm was his wife Anna’s brother. Even though his business had failed, Mills continued to engage in mercantile pursuits. When Edmund Dwight passed away in 1849, his father-in-law’s fortune was divided among his six children, including Anna. Additionally, she received $400 annually from her mother’s estate, and her husband, as an appointed trustee of his mother-in-law’s estate, received $200 annually. When Mills died in 1872, he left Anna the proceeds from his life-insurance policies, valued at $24,000 (over $500,000 based on 2022 values).

7. Boston Advertiser, July 19, 1865; Eliot, Late Harvest, 19–20.

8. Wongsrichanalai, Northern Character, 22.

9. Order of Exercises for Commencement, 18 July, 1860. A part at commencement, on graduating, gratified his parent’s wishes and his own ambition. HMB, 2:133.

10. A confidant and classmate recalled that Mills enrolled in the Scientific School for mental training and useful occupation. HMB, 2:133.

11. HMB, 2:134. CJM visited his Harvard classmate Stephen Weld, serving with the Eighteenth Massachusetts, at his regiment’s camp outside of the city in early February 1862: I met Charles J. Mills on the parade ground, much to my astonishment, Weld wrote. We drove over to see Tom Sherwin [Harvard 1860; adjutant of the Twenty-Second Massachusetts]…. Charles dined with me, and started for Washington as soon as dinner was over. I really enjoyed his visit very much. Weld, War Diary, 51.

12. CJM to Mother, May 26, 1862, in Coco, Through Blood and Fire, 2.

13. CJM to Mother, May 26, 1862, 3.

14. Undated newspaper clipping, Parkman Family Papers, HL.

15. CJM to Mother, July 22, 1862, in Coco, Through Blood and Fire, 3–5.

16. CJM to Mother, July 22, 1862. Capt. Edward G. Ned Abbott (1840–62; Harvard 1860), brother of Henry Livermore Abbott, would be killed at Cedar Mountain on August 9, 1862, while commanding Company A, Second Massachusetts. Maj. Wilder Dwight (1833–62; Harvard 1853), CJM’s maternal cousin, had been captured during Banks’s retreat through Winchester, Virginia on May 24; he was paroled and promoted to lieutenant colonel in June, returning to the regiment following its fight at Cedar Mountain. Dwight would be mortally wounded at Antietam a month later, dying on September 19, 1862. MSSM, 1:71, 72.

17. An officer on a general’s staff has many advantages that he can’t have in a regiment, and the life is so much easier that it is a very great change from one to the other, wrote CJM’s friend Robert Gould Shaw. On the staff, there are a great many opportunities for learning, and for getting acquainted with prominent men in the army. Duncan, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, 224.

18. Lorien Foote writes extensively about competing concepts of manhood in the Union army. It is unlikely that Mills displayed any outward signs of emotion as a result of Stevenson’s death but limited any expressions of the pain the general’s loss produced to his writings. Manly restraint did not require the suppression of feeling, but a man was not to lose control of his emotions. Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs, 56.

19. Although Mills is expressing his private thoughts in a letter to his mother and is not passing judgment on the men in the ranks, only voicing his opinion on a high-ranking officer, he had in this instance elements in common with upper-class officers whose class attitudes were apparent to the men, observes Lorien Foote. "The behavior of wealthy,