St Rose Students Step Outside Into The Civil War

By Eliza Hallabeck

From 1861 until 1865, the country split, with the Northern and Southern states fighting each other. St Rose students were told the story of the Civil War one grade level at time last week by Newtown resident Bob Graves, a reenactor member of the 2d Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery Regiment of Woodbury.

“The North fighting the South sounds strange today, because we are all one country,” said Mr Graves. “But that was what happened then. There were a lot of reasons for it, and slavery was one of them. The South wanted to keep the institution of slavery, and the North wanted to abolish it. They could not settle this peacefully, so they had this war that lasted four years. You may have heard, they called it the brother against brother war, because it would literally split families apart.”

A smell of smoke from a fire with salt pork cooking over it greeted students outside the school on Thursday, October 2. Salt pork, Mr Graves explained to students in the sixth grade, tastes bad, but it is what soldiers during the Civil War would have eaten.

Mr Graves wore the clothing a Union soldier from the North would have worn. As the students learned, the North wore blue uniforms, like Mr Graves’, and the South wore gray uniforms. The clothes were all wool, because it was cheap, wool lasted a long time, and wool is water-resistant. Mr Graves then took his hat off to demonstrate why soldiers would have called that part of their uniform the forage cap. He held it upside down to students to see where grain could be put to feed a horse.

Maryland and Virginia were where most of the battles were fought during the Civil War, according to Mr Graves, and the wool clothing would have made the summer fighting extremely hot.

“This is the canteen,” said Mr Graves holding one up for students to see. “This was essential. Battle is a hot, dirty, noisy business. They would empty one of these things quickly, because they had to stay hydrated to not get heat stroke.”

Although the canteen was essential, it added weight to what the soldiers already had to carry with them into war, Mr Graves said. Along with a canteen the soldiers would have had to carry ammo, a musket, and other necessities.

A bayonet would have accompanied a Civil War soldier’s musket, as the students learned. Mr Graves demonstrated why a bayonet would generally not be attached to a musket during war, because when loading the musket the bayonet would have been in the way.

“As I said before, one of the main things a soldier needed was his musket,” Mr Graves said. “Now these were single shot muskets. They fired one shot. They did not have automatic weapons during the Civil War. It was very time-consuming to load this weapon. Back then they did not hide behind trees or any other things. They stood in line and fired at the enemy, who stood in line and fired back at you.”

To load a musket it took nine separate steps, as Mr Graves explained. The soldiers were taught to load as ordered. A whole platoon, he said, would be standing and waiting for a command to “load,” “handle cartridge,” “tare cartridge,” “charge cartridge,” “ram cartridge,” “return rammer,” “prime,” “aim,” and “fire.”

“And remember as I am doing this people are shooting at me,” he said. “It is important to keep that in mind.”

St Rose assistant teacher and Cultural Activities chair Alice Walsh, who asked Mr Graves to speak at the school on Thursday, said his presentation brought what the students were learning in their books off of the page.