From the May 28, 1921 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

Memorial Day means wistful remembrance of the dead, flower sprinkled graves, cemetery pilgrimages, sermons and speeches about heroes of other days. Most of all it means veterans. And when you mention veterans, in the Civil War, waged 60 years ago, veterans they are indeed to withstood the storms of many winters, the heat of many summers, and the joys and sorrows of full lives, well past the allotted three score years and ten in length. A thin blue line of them left, ten out of the dozens of soft cheeked lads and seasoned men, who marched away from Martha’s Vineyard to war.

War has largely lost its romance, though not its heroic deeds, through the ingenuity of man and his hand maiden science. Now they say that in the next war, which ministers and public men, and the great mass of the American people, will pray next Monday may never come, whole cities will crumble before the onslaught of new mankilling and property destroying devices. But let one of these white haired men, who once strode out to battle with the best, tell you of his baptism with fire, his meeting with Lincoln, and in spite of yourself, pacifist or militant as you may be, that war, sixty years ago, assumes somehow a softening veil of romance and allure.

“Were you a minister when you enlisted?” Foolish question No. 74532 elicited a mildly reproachful reply from Rev. Irving W. Coombs, who was only eighteen when he entered the army. This kindly “man of God,” remarkably vigorous in spite of his seventy seven years, took part in the siege of Port Hudson, which, with Vicksburg was taken July 4, 1863, as the battle of Gettysburg ended. Port Hudson fell July 9, and the south was practically shut off from supplies. The expedition to Port Hudson sailed under sealed orders.

In spite of stiff fighting during the taking of this strategic point, Mr. Coombs was not wounded. But a bullet hole through his cap and another through his blouse testified to the genuineness of his baptism with fire.

When the war broke out, the lad wanted to enlist, but his parents were so loath to have him go, that it was not until his older brother, John, enlisted, that he gained their consent. These two New Hampshire boys saw service together in Co. H, the Fifteenth New Hampshire. Mr. Coombs was discharged August 13, 1863. It was in the blood of these youths, for on both sides of the family there were enough ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War to make it almost a foregone conclusion that those who came after them would fight too, for their country’s flag.

A memory which overshadows all else in Richard G. Shute’s Civil War experience is that of his brief meeting with Abraham Lincoln.

It was at Minor’s Hall, Virginia. Attended by several of his cabinet the President drove out to review the troops stationed there. Standing at the head of his column, Mr. Shute was so close to him that he could have reached out his hand and touched the barouche in which Lincoln sat.

Lincoln gazed at him in that sad, kind way of his. Then he asked, “Well, my boy, do they give you enough to eat?”

“If I’d been starving I’d have said yes,” Mr. Shute said “What was he like? Just like his pictures. And his voice, so calm and cool and sympathetic was just as you would imagine it.”

Perhaps that moment was enough to make up for times when four days a piece of hard tack, water, and pork furnished the only rations.

It was in August, 1862 that Mr. Shute, whom the whole island knows as its own and only drummer boy, enlisted. He was seventeen, but slight of frame and stature, he must have looked much younger. The occupation he gave when he enlisted in Company D., 40th Massachusetts was that of clerk, but he was soon at his beloved work of making music. He tells an interesting story of the line-up of drummers who were being put through the various drum calls. When the officer called for the “single drag,” he went down the line in vain, until he came to the slip of a youth, and got what he asked. If a man couldn’t oblige with the “single drag” there was no use in asking him for the “double drag,” so that Martha’s Vineyard’s drummer boy was the only one in line called to perform that difficult musical feat.

In spite of the fact that he was a non-combatant, Mr. Shute was discharged in 1863, as the result of an injury.

With him when he arrived home, came his most prized possession, the drum which had served him faithfully on the battlefield. The top of the head was covered with prized autographs of his comrades-at-arms. But in the fire which destroyed his business place in the seventies, that historic drum answered the last call. There is still in existence carefully cared for, donned only on state occasions, drum major uniform he wore during his months in the army. Certainly no one could find fault with the wearing qualities of that blue cloth, which was all wool and a yard wide if not wider. How many uniforms worn in the Great War will survive the test of 60 years?

Compiled by Hilary Wall
library@mvgazette.com