Some of the major characters in Uncertain Glory, and many of the minor ones, were real people who lived in Wiscasset, Maine, during the 1860s.
Teenagers Joe Wood and Charlie Farrar did own a printing business in Wiscasset, and published the Wiscasset Herald, a four-page newspaper. I’ve taken the liberty of moving the time of their business from 1859 to 1861, and of giving full ownership to Joe.
Charlie Farrar enlisted in the Union Army. When he and the others serving under Edwin Smith reached Rockland in 1861, the citizens of Rockland and Thomaston gave each of them a small Bible to keep with them while they were serving their country. Some of those small “Testaments” may be found in homes, libraries, and historical society museums in Maine today.
Charlie didn’t stay in the army long. Perhaps war wasn’t as glorious as he’d thought it would be. Instead, he settled in Massachusetts, where for many years he ran a printing business during the winters. During the summers he lived in northern Maine, where he captained a steamboat in the Rangeley Lakes region, and wrote guides to hunting, fishing, and hiking in the Maine wilderness and adventure stories for boys. Charlie married, but never had children. He died in 1893.
Joe Wood stayed in Wiscasset. At the beginning of the war he served in the Maine Home Guard under Richard Tucker. He then left for Portland, where he served an apprenticeship at the Portland Evening Courier. After attending business school he returned to Wiscasset, and, in 1869, began publishing another, more ambitious, Wiscasset newspaper, the Seaside Oracle (1869–76). Joe spent the rest of his life in the newspaper business, publishing newspapers in Skowhegan, Bar Harbor, and Bath, Maine. He married in 1880, and named his children Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Frances (after his wife). He died in 1923.
The group of volunteers that left Wiscasset under the command of Edwin Smith became part of the Fourth Maine Volunteers, together with units from Searsport, Winterport, Damariscotta, and Belfast: a total of 1,085 men, including a band. They were not disbanded until July of 1864. During that period a total of 1,440 men served in the regiment: 170 were killed, 443 were wounded, 137 died of disease, and 40 men died in Confederate prisons. There is a monument to them at Gettysburg. Captain Smith was killed at the Battle of Fair Oaks (also known as the Battle of Seven Pines) in Virginia, on May 31, 1862. His body was returned to Wiscasset for burial.
Nell Gramercy and Owen Bascomb and their families are fictional, but there were real people like them in New England in 1861. In the mid-nineteenth century, between one and two million Americans believed that the dead do not cease to exist, but become spirits who can communicate with the living through “spiritualists.” Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of spiritualists toured the country, advertising their services. Many of them were young women and girls who were thought to be particularly sensitive and finely attuned to the voices of spirits.
Pure opium and its liquid form, laudanum, were commonly used during this period, though reports from Europe were beginning to indicate that addiction could be a serious problem. Despite this, there were no other medications as powerful for pain, and opium was widely used to treat soldiers wounded during the Civil War. Many of them returned from the war addicted to the drug.
In 1861 the Union government took control of all northern telegraph lines for the war effort. During the four years of the war, more than 15,000 miles of telegraph wires (all strung between poles) were used exclusively for military communications. In the field, wagons containing reels of insulated wire and telegraph equipment batteries took the telegraph to the front, where, in the North, the telegraph operator’s office was usually a tent near either General Meade or General Grant. More than three hundred telegraph operators were either killed or seriously wounded during the war.
President Lincoln spent hours in the telegraph office at the War Department, waiting for messages from the front and sending back commands. At the beginning of the war, both the North and the South used the usual dots and dashes of Morse Code to send information, but as the war continued, both developed secret messaging systems so their telegrams could not be read by the opposition.
All of the events mentioned in the book, except those related directly to Nell and Owen, did take place in Wiscasset during April or early May of 1861. For those wondering why Charlie, Joe, and Nell did not attend school: As in many other states, although public schools were available (the teachers were often recent graduates), Maine had no compulsory education laws until after the Civil War. It was common for students to attend classes only until they felt they’d learned enough reading and arithmetic to pursue whatever their future profession would be. A few students went on to higher education, but most boys stayed at home to help their fathers, or were apprenticed, and girls learned homemaking skills from their mothers or “went into service” with other families.
Although the causes of the American Civil War can be traced to issues whose seeds were planted decades earlier, the war officially began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, 1861, and ended with the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. The four years between those dates were the bloodiest in American history.
By the end of the war, approximately half of the military-aged white men in the North had served in either the army or the navy, as had close to eighty percent of the white men in the South. During the first year of the war, African-American soldiers were not welcomed in the army (they were accepted in the navy), but in the summer of 1862, the Militia Act allowed them to enlist, although only to serve under white officers. By the end of the war, 179,000 African-American men had served in 166 black Union regiments.
Of all men who served, on both sides, 620,000 died; 414,000, or two-thirds, died from diseases contracted because of unsanitary conditions in the field and lack of medical supplies and knowledge.
Every citizen in the country was involved in the war. It was fought in farmyards and cornfields. It took sons and fathers away from families who needed their support. Women, children, and men too old or too disabled to fight took over the jobs of the men who were fighting.
More than 70,000 Maine men were in uniform at some time during the war, not including those who served in the Home Guard; 204 of those men came from the little village of Wiscasset. Maine had the highest percentage of volunteers of any Union state: sixty percent of eligible men aged eighteen to forty-five. Close to 9,400 of those men died; an additional 5,800 were discharged for injury or illness; and more than 600 were listed as “missing in action.”
On the home front, the Bates Mills in Lewiston, Maine, advertised for 120 girls and boys, “to work nine hours per day to run their machinery extra time, to supply the government with tent cloth, so much needed by our soldiers in the field.”
Not all fighting was in the Southern and middle states. In June of 1863, Confederates seized the Caleb Cushing, a Union ship in Portland Harbor, and sailed it out to sea before being caught. (The Confederates were captured, but the Caleb Cushing was a total loss.) In 1864, Confederate agents held up a bank in Calais, Maine, but they also were captured.
Concerned by these activities, new fortifications were added to protect Portland Harbor. Fort Knox was built to protect the Penobscot River region; Fort Popham was built at the mouth of the Kennebec River; and Fort Edgecomb (near Wiscasset) and Fort McClary (at the mouth of the Piscataqua River in Kittery) were re-garrisoned. Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, who had enlisted as a private in the Maine Home Guard when the war began in 1861, was called to active duty in 1864, and reported at Fort McClary in July of 1864—the only time a president or vice president of the United States has served in active military duty while in office. (Hamlin served as a cook for six months.)
In Chapter 28 of Uncertain Glory, Mr. Bascomb mentions the trial of Nathaniel Gordon. Captain Gordon (1834–62), a Portland, Maine, man, was the only American slave trader to be tried, convicted, and executed for being engaged in the slave trade. He was hung in New York City in 1862.