by David Flint
Timothy Mulholland, a down to earth aging country boy from north central Pennsylvania, was at the Stephentown Heritage Center Monday evening to tell of his experience in the Civil War, “some 20 years ago.” Tim joined the Pennsylvania “Bucktails” regiment right after the rebels fired on Fort Sumter and stayed on right through to Appomattox Court House. [private]He made Sergeant after re-enlisting and later became a Lieutenant, but Tim is not one to put on airs. He’s proud of his service but not one to pretend that army life and fightin’ a war is all glory and spit and polish. “It warn’t quite as exciting and romantic as we thought,” he said.
The Mulholland boys – Tim was the oldest of three brothers – hearing the news in April 1861 about Sumter, figured they’d just take a boat down the Susquehanna and “go whip them rebels all by ourselves.” They were all crack shots and great hunters, and they’d “be back for fall harvest,” they told their Ma. Well, it turned out it wasn’t quite that simple. First they had to learn to become soldiers at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg, PA. Drill, drill, drill and more drill, until finally they went on to Camp Mason & Dixon in Maryland – “Camp Misery & Despair,” they called it. Eventually they got used to scratchy wool uniforms and subsisting on mostly hardtack and strong coffee.
It was at Dranesville in Virginia that they first met the enemy under Jeb Stuart and the first time they heard that rebel yell. “A lot of our fellers had brave hearts, but their legs were kind of cowardly, ‘cause they went skedaddling to the rear, they did,” Tim recalled. After that Tim’s Company chased after Stonewall Jackson for a bit before Jackson caught them at Harrisonburg and chased them back up North. There was some skirmishing around South Mountain in Maryland followed by a fierce battle by a nice little stream called Antietam Creek. “The bloodiest day in the whole war,” Tim said.
Tim was not reticent about expressing his opinions of some of the Union generals. “A lot of the fellers loved Little Mac [Gen. George McClellan] cause he made sure we was well fed and well taken care of. Uncle Abe Lincoln was getting antsy and asked that if Mac weren’t going to be using the army, maybe he could borrow it?” Well Lincoln soon replaced Little Mac with Ambrose Burnside, “a man far incompetent beyond his means,” according to Tim. “This feller warn’t fit to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on it,” Tim added genteelly. Nothing was going right after that and “The war was turning real ugly for the North, it was.” The troops suffered from bad food and no pay. “We was marching across the old Bull Run battlefield,” Tim recalled, “and there was a skeletal hand reaching out of the ground from a shallow grave, and one of the soldiers yelled, ‘Hay lookit boys, there’s a old soldier looking for his back pay!’”
After the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Lincoln replaced Burnside with “Fightin’ Joe” Hooker, “another one of them West Pointers.” But Hooker did some good things. Food was better and, because at times camp life was just downright boring, Hooker “had some ladies come in and he actually encouraged a little bit of horizontal refreshment.”
In June of 1863 the Bucktails found themselves marching north into Pennsylvania because General Lee had had the audacity to invade Tim’s home state. They met Lee’s army at a little crossroads town called Gettysburg. In the three day battle that followed the Bucktails lost their colonel and Tim was wounded. Finally released from the grisly field hospital, he rejoined his unit. The entire Union Army was now headed by “Sam” Grant. As it turned out Tim realized that, “Here we’d found a man that weren’t afraid to fight.” After getting “whupped” once again in the Wilderness, Grant turned and chased after Lee. Tim’s unit participated in bloody battles at Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg and finally ended up witnessing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. It was at Spotsylvania that Tim lost his younger brother Sam. He was guarding rebel prisoners when hit by Confederate artillery.
With his three year enlistment running out, Tim felt compelled to re-enlist. “In 1861 we was patriotic, and we was gonna go off to save the Union, but by 1864 most of the fellers had had their fill and just wanted to get it over with,” Tim said. But the Army was now populated with too many scoundrels and bounty jumpers. As a fellow soldier, who was killed at Cold Harbor, put it, “If the new fellas won’t finish it, the old fellas must.”
Tim showed off the equipment he used as a soldier and the uniforms, some of them a bit tight fitting now. He
demonstrated the loading and firing of the musket – “You needed to have two teeth opposite each other so you could tear open your cartridge” – and how the bayonet “made for a mighty fine candle stand.” He showed the fancy stuff he got as an officer, the sword – “mostly for pointing directions” – and his Colt sidearm – “to keep the boys in line”. Keeping the boys in line meant keeping them going in the right direction. Tim recalled how one General, trying to stop his troops from fleeing to the rear, yelled at one soldier, “Stop, stop, don’t you love your country?” The answer came back, “Yessir, I do an’ I’m tryin’ to get back there as fast as I can!”
Despite his irreverent banter, it was clear that Timothy Mulholland spoke with pride about the boys he served with some 20 years back. Many of them never returned from that war. A regiment is typically made up of 1,200 men. By the time they got to Gettysburg they were down to 250 men. Most of them were not cut down by rebel miniballs, but rather it was things like the Virginia Quickstep (diarrhea) that did them in, “especially us country boys – we wasn’t used to living around so many people.” A lot of them also were wounded and went home, and not a few took “French leave.”
Timothy Mulholland in his current day persona is Tim Case, a biology teacher at Hoosac Valley High School in Cheshire, MA. An avid re-enactor since 1988, he also portrays a Mingo warrior in the time of the French and Indian and the Revolutionary wars. Like Mulholland, he hails originally from central Pennsylvania.[/private]