The Reluctant Soldiers

Frank and John Shorey are drafted into the Civil War, but only one comes home

Season Two of Company D is sponsored in part by:

Ep12: The Shorey Brothers

Show Transcript

April 6, 1865. Amelia Springs, Virginia.

Private John Shorey was carried off the field on a stretcher, his upper chest torn open by a shell fragment.

The road behind him was chaos: mud, broken wagons, men firing from behind trees and fence lines. One soldier later wrote, “Every rock and tree… seemed alive and offered resistance.”

Just hours earlier, Union troops had ambushed a Confederate supply train, destroying more than eighty wagons. But the cost was high. Men lay wounded in the road. Shorey was one of them.

As stretcher-bearers carried him to the rear, each jolt sent pain through his leg, and John had every reason to be afraid.

Less than a year earlier, his younger brother Benjamin had been carried off a battlefield in the same manner, but with a wound to the leg.

INTRODUCTION

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Company D, the narrative history podcast about the individual soldiers who fought in the American Civil War. At Company D, we leave the battle tactics and military debates to others. Our mission is to discover and share the very human stories of the average soldier. We do this by focusing on one regiment, the Third Maine Infantry Regiment, and one company in that regiment, Company D.

One regiment. One company. Countless stories.

My great-great-grandfather, Charles F. Snell, fought with the Third Maine and Company D, leaving behind a diary of his wartime experiences. Charles’s diary is the inspirational text for this podcast. He served with all the men we feature in the podcast.

I’m your host, George F. Snell III. And, yes, three is an odd number. Just like the host.

John Shorey and his younger brother Benjamin Franklin Shorey, known as Frank, of Norridgewock, Maine, didn’t volunteer for the war. They were drafted.

In the summer of 1863, their names were drawn in Maine’s lottery under the Enrollment Act, part of an effort to refill the depleted ranks of Union regiments.

Neither brother wanted to be there.

Writing to his aunt and uncle that fall, Frank tried to make light of it. “Well, I suppose you want to know how we like it?” he wrote. “We live better than we expected to. The last time I was weighed, I gained four pounds.”

They shared a tent with Henry Huntress of nearby Harmony, Maine, a paid substitute, a man who had chosen to go to war in someone else’s place.

But Henry wasn’t eager either. Together, the three joined Company D of the Third Maine, a veteran regiment. The men they met there had already seen the worst of the war—and they looked at these new arrivals with suspicion.

The Shoreys would have to prove themselves.

For a brief time, it didn’t seem so bad.

“I am satisfied with my lot,” Frank wrote after his first week. The men were well fed. Most days were spent drilling or doing nothing at all.

But… there was a war going on. And that’s the thing about war: It always catches up to you.

CHAPTER ONE: ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

John and Frank Shorey grew up in Norridgewock, Maine, part of a large, working family of thirteen. John, a twin, was born in 1830, and Frank came four years later.

Their father, Lot Shorey, operated the largest brickmaking business in town, just behind the family home on Mechanic Street along Sucker Brook. Lot’s business probably supplied the bricks for most of the brick buildings and homes constructed in Norridgewock in the mid-1800s, including four that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Brickmaking was hard, filthy work.

Clay was dug from the banks of the brook, hauled by hand, mixed, molded, and laid out in long rows to dry. Nearby, a coal-fired kiln burned day and night, belching thick, sulfurous smoke that settled over everything—the yard, the house, the men themselves.

By the end of a day’s work, Lot and his sons would have been covered in mud and ash, the smell of smoke clinging to their clothes and skin.

It’s no wonder John and Frank wanted out.

John left first. In 1855, at twenty-four, he married Mary Holway and moved to nearby Fairfield to be closer to Mary’s family. The marriage short. Seven months after they exchanged vows, Mary died of unknown causes.

John suffered another setback in 1859, when his twin, Samuel, died.

John didn’t return to brickmaking. In 1860, he married a second time to 28-year-old Mary W. Haggett and worked as a painter, likely for the cabinetmaker with whom he and Mary were boarded in Norridgewock, where he finished furniture and cabinets.

Frank stayed at the brickyard, working with his father, his brother Hiram, and two hired hands, shaping clay into brick, day after day.

When the Civil War started in April 1861, dozens of Norridgewock men volunteered, many joining the Third Maine Infantry Regiment. But the Shorey brothers did not. They seemed content to watch the war from the sidelines.

CHAPTER TWO: LOTTERY WINNERS

Life went on. The war seemed far away, read about in newspaper headlines or in letters from the front.

But John had other worries. In the winter of 1862, his second wife died. He was now twice a widower. He remained at the cabinet shop.

But Frank finally left his father’s brickyard. At twenty-eight, he married Lydia Williamson, moved to Harmony, Maine, and tried to make a living farming.

The summer of 1863 changed everything.

That’s when the Enrollment Act of 1863 took effect. The federal government began drafting men to fill the ranks of depleted Union forces as casualties mounted and volunteerism declined.

On July 23, 1863, the Norridgewock draft was conducted in Augusta. Names were written on cards, placed inside a wooden barrel, spun around, and then drawn.

Frank’s name was called.

Then John’s.

The brothers underwent physical exams. A draftee could be rejected for everything from rheumatism to bad teeth. Frank passed, but John did not.

At least not at first. He was given a second exam weeks later, and this time he was accepted. In a letter home that November, John admitted that he had been in poor health for years, worn down by hard labor. But the Army, he boasted, changed that.

“I have not been so well for 10 years as I am now,” John wrote. “It agrees with me first rate to lug a knapsack and lie in camp. I have gained in health and strength since I have been here.”

The Shorey brothers were assigned as privates to Company D of the Third Maine, a hardened unit that had already fought at Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. They were led by their third captain, Alfred S. Merrill, and first lieutenant Woodbury Hall.

When John and Frank arrived, Company D had been reduced to fewer than twenty men. One veteran noted dryly: “Arrival of conscripts. Two hundred and forty of them.”

The new recruits now outnumbered the veterans.

Frank was just as blunt about his new regiment.

“These,” he wrote, “are some hard-looking men.”

CHAPTER THREE: YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW

When he reached the front, John Shorey was 33 years old. He had lost two wives and his twin brother. He had worked as a brickmaker, farmer, and painter. Despite his years of poor health, John was just shy of six feet tall—towering over most of the men around him.

At 29, Frank was even taller at just over six feet. Both brothers were pale, blue-eyed, and brown-haired. They looked alike, and it was probably obvious to everyone that they were brothers.

The Shoreys shared a tent with Henry Huntress, a 21-year-old substitute from Harmony. Henry knew Frank’s wife’s family.

Henry served as a substitute for William J. Fogg, an unmarried clerk from Bath who lived with his parents. Fogg hired a broker after he was drafted, and they arranged for Henry to enlist on Fogg’s behalf, for a substantial fee of about $300 to $500.

The Shorey brothers took a shine to Henry and took him under their wing. They often mentioned him in their letters home.

The new recruits spent their first weeks at camp drilling and learning how to be soldiers. “I have got good officers,” Frank wrote to his uncle. “They are all from Bath and Augusta. Captain Alfred S. Merrill… is a good fellow.”

For men raised on a brickyard with long, grueling hours of back-breaking work, Army life didn’t seem so bad.

CHAPTER FOUR: DEAD MAN WALKING

They got their first taste of the war’s brutality before they even arrived at Company D.

On the way to joining the Third Maine, they stopped at Fairfax Station, Virginia—a major supply depot along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. There, they found thousands of soldiers and recruits waiting among crates, barrels, and rows of tents.

Frank described the scene in a letter home: “All kinds of people and colors, and it is a hard-looking sight to see how things have gone to ruin.”

Then something unusual happened. The recruits were ordered to assemble in an open field. Two lines of sharpshooters formed, and a military band began to play.

A wooden coffin appeared. Behind it trudged Private Henry C. Beardsley, a 25-year-old private from the Fifth Michigan Infantry. Beardsley was a deserter who had been caught, court-martialed, and sentenced to death.

Beardsley would be buried in the coffin he walked behind.

“He was a large, stout fellow,” Frank remembered.

A minister offered a prayer. Beardsley was blindfolded and seated on the lip of his coffin, right next to the already-dug grave.

The sharpshooters moved six paces and then gunned him down.

Beardsley dropped into the coffin, dead. The field went silent. Then orders rang out. The men were dismissed.

Frank wrote that some recruits from Maine had already deserted, and a few had already been caught. Now they all understood what that meant.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE BATTLE OF RAPPAHANNOCK STATION

The Shorey brothers faced combat for the first time within a week of joining Company D.

On November 7, 1863, the Third Maine attacked rifle pits at Brandy Station.

Frank described what followed: “About two o’clock, we found them in rifle pits on the other side of the river. Shooting for about three hours, not but a few wounded.”

John remembered it differently: “We took some 200 prisoners, and the bullets flew lively some time over our heads till dark.”

That night, Frank guarded the stockade, where the Rebel prisoners were held, listening as they talked among themselves.

“One said he was ten days from home… One says we are going to Washington, where we can get something to eat… One says give my respects to General Lee when you see him.”

 Some of them, he noted, were ragged. Others look hard.

The next morning, the war came closer. John and Frank were sent out with a scouting party. In a field, they found a Third Maine soldier lying dead under his blanket. Shot in the shoulder, unable to move, he bled to death overnight.

Later, came to an abandoned camp. A sharpshooter opened fire and struck the rucksack of a soldier standing next to John.

No one was hurt.

“I think this war will be closed soon,” Frank wrote.

CHAPTER SIX: THE CHAOS OF MAY 1864

The worst fighting for the Shorey Brothers came in May of 1864. The Army of the Potomac launched a massive offensive, one big push before the three-year enlistments of veteran regiments like the Third Maine expired. The Battle of the Wilderness bled into the Battle of Spotsylvania.

At Wilderness, in the smoke and confusion, Company D lost Captain Merrill. He disappeared without a trace. They would never see him again. Lieutenant Woodbury Hall took over.

The losses stacked up:

• Sergeant David Ring. Killed.
• Private James Jameson. Killed.
• Corporals Charles F. Snell and Joseph E. Purington. Captured.
• Sergeant Henry H. Shaw. Shot.
• Corporal Jeremiah Wakefield. Shot.

And then, Frank Shorey. Shot.

On May 10, 1864, a bullet struck Frank in the right ankle, shattering his bone. He lost part of his foot. They carried him to a field hospital and then transferred him to Campbell U.S. General Hospital in Washington, D.C. Poet Walt Whitman walked those wards as a volunteer nurse.

Assistant Surgeon Alfred Delany, a Philadelphia-born doctor, conducted an experimental operation on him, removing six inches of Frank’s tibia. The operation was deemed a success. There was hope.

But an infection set in.

Then gangrene.

The man who wrote home about first-rate baked beans and enjoying sunny days—who tried to make the best of an Army life that was thrust upon him—was fading fast.

Frank had been married only six months when he was drafted. His wife, Lydia, whom he affectionately called “Lid,” was waiting for him back on the farm.

But he would never return. Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Shorey died on July 1, 1864, at the age of 30.

It’s doubtful his brother John got to see him before he died.

Frank was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE LONE BROTHER

That left John.

On June 4, 1864, the Third Maine disbanded. John Shorey still had two years left to serve. He was transferred to Company F of the Seventeenth Maine Infantry Regiment along with several other men from Company D: John Lakin, Patrick Lyons, Horatio Nevells, and his tentmate, Henry Huntress.

On the day his brother died, John was already stationed along the front lines during the Siege of Petersburg.

His new company with the Seventeenth Maine was in tatters. Its captain and first lieutenant had been shot at Wilderness and would never return. Command fell to a young second lieutenant, Parlin Crawford, a 24-year-old farmer from Gardiner, Maine.

The Seventeenth’s losses ran so deep that a major from Indiana was in charge.

For the next nine months, John would fight through the long grind of the Petersburg campaign.

Then, on April 6, 1865, John was shot in the upper chest at Amelia Springs, just days before the war’s end.

He was sent to Harewood U.S. General Hospital in Washington, D.C.

While he recovered, the Seventeenth Maine’s term of service expired. John was transferred again—on paper anyway—to the First Maine Heavy Artillery Regiment. But he never joined them. Instead, on June 28, 1864, John Shorey mustered out of service.

John had survived the war.

Had John joined the First Maine Heavies, he would have found a familiar face. Henry Huntress, his old tentmate, who was now a sergeant.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT HENRY

When Henry Huntress became the tentmate of the Shorey brothers, he was at the very bottom of the pecking order. A substitute. A man paid to take someone else’s place. Veterans looked down on men like Henry.

The Shoreys did not.

They took Henry in. They shared a tent, their blankets, and their meals with him. Henry appears often in their letters home, less like a stranger and more like a family member, a little brother. Back home in Maine, Frank’s wife, Lydia, knew Henry’s brother, Joel, and at one point, Joel sent Frank a tub of butter.

Henry grew up on a farm in Harmony, the youngest of seven children.

Somehow, Henry turned into a good soldier. He, like few other men, served three years in the Army without a scratch. He was never sick. Never wounded. He rose to corporal with the Seventeenth and to sergeant with the First Maine Heavy Artillery.

But surviving the war didn’t mean Henry escaped it.

When the war ended, Henry returned to Harmony to build a life. In 1868, he married a 19-year-old Abigail “Abby” Johnson,  from nearby Wellington. Abby died of “inflammation of the brain” less than a year later.

Widowed at 28, Henry started over. He moved to Petersham, Massachusetts, where he married Julia Spaulding. Julia was a Maine transplant, and with his second wife, Henry became a mechanic and a farmer.

For a while, it seemed like Henry had made it through. But in the early 1880s, his life began to unravel. In 1883, both his parents died within months of each other. Then, his health deteriorated.

By August 1884, Julia could no longer care for him. She took Henry to the Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Togus, suffering from what the doctors called “softening of the brain.”

Two months later, Julia died. A month later, Henry followed her to the grave. He was dead at 40.

There are no surviving medical records that tell us exactly what killed Henry and his wife, but it is likely that both of them were suffering from some kind of infectious disease, tuberculosis or perhaps typhoid. 

Henry was buried at Togus, one of the men who survived the war, but not its aftermath.

CHAPTER NINE: JOHN SHOREY GOES HOME

After the war, John returned to Norridgewock.  He moved back in with his parents, back at the brickyard.

But he did not return to that work. He continued on as a painter.

In 1866, he married a widow, Philena (Witham) Hurd, and became the stepfather to her two boys. Together, they had four children of their own, two sons and two daughters. One of those sons he named for his brother.

The health problems he experienced before the war returned, made worse by his war wound.

On August 22, 1877, John Shorey died of chronic diarrhea, a condition that followed him home from his months in the hospital.

He was 46 years old. He was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Norridgewock.

Philena received a widow’s pension. She never remarried.

Many men who fought in the American Civil War didn’t volunteer to go. They were drafted, just like the Shorey brothers, or they went in someone else’s place, like Henry Huntress. They were not always celebrated like the volunteers. But they fought the same war.

Some, like Frank Shorey, never made it home. Others, like Henry Huntress, survived the war but not its aftermath.

And some, like John Shorey, returned carrying wounds that never healed. John Shorey came home, but unfortunately, the war came home with him.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Company D. We want to extend a special thank you to the Norridgewock Historical Society for their help in collecting information about John and Frank Shorey, with a special shout-out to Becky Ketchum and John Wilder.

We also want to take a moment to thank our Patron Sponsors, whose support has helped make this season of Company D possible. A special acknowledgment goes out to: Pritesh Ghandi, Trapper Markelz, Jeff Parent, Alex Mueller, Michael Scelfo, Erik Snell, Andy Polansky, Mike McGrail, Scott O’Donnell, Lisa Furnald, Jay Hanley, Art Trapotsis, and Jeff Govoni.

Please visit our website at companydpodcast.com for bonus materials on the Shorey brothers and Henry Huntress, including exclusive photographs and historical documents. You can also find our video shorts and other materials on our social media channels, including Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Just search for the Company D podcast.

We appreciate your attention and your help in preserving the unique history of the Third Maine Infantry Regiment. If you like the show, please consider subscribing on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app.

I’m your host, George F. Snell III. And remember – if you go to war, leave your brother at home.