Julia Cutler's Journal

Julia Cutler's journal entry for Saturday, April 13, 1861 is brief.

"Lucy who has been here two or three days went home this morning. Little Jennie is very sick with erysipelas, very little hope of her recovery. Sister Sarah came this morning and will stay a few days. It is reported that Fort Sumpter is taken by Confederate Forces. We cannot believe it."

In the days to come she would provide additional details of little Jennie's struggle with erysipelas, and the nation's efforts to confront a potentially terminal affliction of its own.

Julia was 47, unmarried, and living with relatives in southeast Ohio, near the river border with Virginia; a few days after Sumter she documented her neighboring state's departure from the Union. However, she noted, "At present Western Virginia manifests a disposition to be loyal," - so there was some hope the border wouldn't become a battlefield. That hope would prove well-founded, but her journal entry for the last day of April reflects the mood of the times:

Rained this morning, after which, I planted some flower seeds, thinking perhaps I might not be here to see them blossoming. Mrs. Greenless called & talked of the war.

Confederate armies didn't march into Ohio, but early in May the war took a different route to her back yard - her nephew wrote of his intention to serve. "Lucy has just received a letter from her brother Rufus in Wisconsin," Julia recorded. "He has raised a company of seventy-eight men and received every vote for captain." Rufus Dawes was Julia's sister's son. By his Aunt Julia's assessment, "If called into the active service Rufus will prove himself a true soldier and a true man." One might suspect her of allowing a maiden aunt's affection to cloud her reason - but time would prove her judgment correct.

Likewise Rufus' words would serve as a tonic to those who fretted that war might soon erupt in their streets. In his letter to his sister he expressed his desire to bring his Wisconsin men to the aid of his friends and relatives now suddenly "on the border."

I have been so wholly engrossed with my work for the last week or I should have responded sooner to your question: "Are you going?" If a kind Providence and President Lincoln will permit, I am. I am Captain of as good, and true a band of patriots as ever rallied under the star spangled banner. We hope to get into the third or fourth regiment, and if old Abe will but give a fair and merited share in the struggle to Wisconsin, we will see active service. The men expect and earnestly desire to go, and wait impatiently their turn. I shall esteem it an honor, worth a better life than mine, to be permitted to lead them in this glorious struggle. I am in hourly dread of hearing of some violence offered you on the border, and wish I might be permitted to bring to you, in your peril, some as strong hands and as true hearts as the Badger State can boast.

Rufus Dawes' company had formed before the end of April, in the enthusiasm following the attack on Ft Sumter. After electing their officers, they turned their attentions to deciding what their unit was to be called - some name that would hopefully one day become legendary, and strike fear into the hearts of foes. "After a discussion in which Badgers and other typical beasts and birds were considered for an appropriate name," Rufus later reported, "we adopted the mellifluous title of "The Lemonweir Minute Men" from the peaceful and gently flowing river, in the beautiful valley of which most of our men resided. It would 'remind us of home' said one, and this argument carried the day."

In combat they would later earn that sort of reputation men of courage and imagination everywhere believed was theirs for the taking in that spring of 1861. They'd find it somewhere other than Ohio, as part of a brigade with its own nickname - and few enough of the men who elected Rufus Dawes their Captain that April day would live to share whatever benefits came with such fame. Those who did would insist - as Americans who marched to war and back time and again for decades to come would in their turn, too - that those who had earned it were dead. But in April 1861 all the blood and glory was yet to come; first Rufus had to fight a battle he later called "two months of incessant, aggravating and provoking labor" - he had his work cut out for him just getting his company mustered in for federal service...

He also had an Aunt Julia who was clearly proud of him. She continued to update her daily journal, documenting the passage of some of the most critical days in her nation's history, and how the news of those days was received in her Ohio town. In the same entry in which she'd noted Virginia's secession she reported the first bloodshed of the war - a deadly mob assault on a Massachusetts regiment passing through Baltimore en route to Washington DC: "The 6th Massachusetts regiment was assailed and three of their number killed, and several wounded. The Gov. of Massachusetts has today telegraphed the Mayor of Baltimore to have the bodies of the slain preserved in ice and sent home."

"We can imagine the effect upon our Yankee kinsman, when they look upon the first blood shed by traitorous hands," Julia concluded. "In the place of each dead soldier ten thousand living ones will start forth." She was right again. To add insult to injury, the attack in Baltimore happened on the 19th of April - the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord. If Sumter had lit a fire in the hearts of northern men, the attack on one of their units had fanned those flames - and no where did they burn hotter than Massachusetts.

Though like many Americans in the 1860s, Julia and several of her Ohio neighbors could claim Massachusetts as their ancestral home, and trace their family history back to that state in the days of the American Revolution (More). Among those who'd later come west, the Dawes family - whose forefather's contribution to American independence was both significant and (outside the family) unheralded. On the 18th of April in 1775, when Dr Joseph Warren of Boston called on two riders to warn the countryside of the British march for Concord, one was William Dawes*, great-grandfather of Rufus Dawes, he who had so clearly demonstrated such patriotic flames still burned in the hearts of Americans three generations removed from the men who'd first lit them.

And the sorts of things they read in their local papers would fan them even further. "Today's Gazette says that gentlemen from Va. & Maryland waited on President Lincoln," Julia related just days after the Baltimore riot, "and proposed an armistice until the meeting of Congress --"

" -- which the President promptly negatived. They then said "Twenty-five thousand troops could be raised to dispute the passage of government troops across Maryland." Lincoln replied, he presumed "that there was room in Maryland to bury twenty-five thousand men".

Next: The Long Roll

Postscript: Julia Cutler's previously unpublished Civil War journal is now appearing online as a blog, with each day's entry published on its 150th anniversary. Follow along with her story here.

*Footnote: "...one was William Dawes..." - the other, of course, was Paul Revere.