COMPANY D: NO WAR IS CIVIL
Just a Teenager. Caught up in a War. Writing it all Down.
FROM SCHOOL BOY TO GRIZZLED VETERAN
Charles F. Snell was just eighteen when he enlisted with Company D of the Third Maine Infantry Regiment. He carried a musket—and a diary. His words inspired Company D.
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“Just as we got there the artillery got out of powder… the soldiers got in a panic and retreated in confusion… we had no battery with us, nothing only our muskets and we fought against the Rebels batteries and… it began to cut up our brigade badly.”
Charles F. Snell, July 21, 1861 Diary Entry (The Battle of Bull Run)
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FROM BULL RUN TO WILDERNESS
Battle-hardened Before the Age of Twenty
Charles fought at Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Fair Oaks, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness — a brutal march through nearly every major battle in northern Virginia. At Chancellorsville, an exploding shell tore past him, leaving only a burning graze across his hand — a near miss that could easily have killed him.
Diary entry from May 3, 1863:
“We stopped on this position about half a hour when we advanced up to the road and was going down the road by the left flank when a shell come and burst almost in the centre of our regiment killing a lieutenant and private and wounding four or five others. Piece of a shell hit me in the hand wounding me slightly.”
PRISONER OF WAR
More Than Nine Months in Rebel Prisons
Captured by North Carolina troops at the Battle of the Wilderness, Charles was sent first to the Florence Stockade in South Carolina, then to the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia—where more than 14,000 Union soldiers died in just 14 months.
Diary entry from June 10, 1864:
“The Prisoners are dying of very fast. And some are escaping by digging tunnels under the ground.”
George’s Personal Journal
My great-great grandfather’s diaries inspired me. I was curious about the men Charles served with. Who were these strangers that a teenage boy joined for more than three years of war? I started to compile a list of every soldier who served in Company D—hundreds of volunteers and conscripts. I wanted to know more, so I dug deeper.
Using military and government records, newspapers, genealogies, census documents, letters, diaries, and cemetery visits, I built a detailed database on the lives of the Company D soldiers. I reached out to descendants, worked with local historians, visited Bath, Maine many times. I pieced together fragments of history that had mostly been forgotten.
