Precious Memories

May 28, 2000

I may be strange, but Memorial Day is one of my most favorite holidays. From my earliest memories of childhood, I remember it as a day for stories: stories about the dead, yes, but stories also about the living. I remember visits to the cemetery with my grandmother Gertrude, to place geraniums at the graves of her loved ones, and the stories she would tell about them. I suppose that I got my love of cemeteries and geraniums from those times. The cemetery, I learned, was not a place to be feared, but a repository for our precious memories.

From a very early age I became fascinated with the American Civil War. Memorial Day, I learned, started out as Decoration Day: a day to remember the Union Dead of that greatest American conflict. It has since expanded into a universal day for memory, but its roots in the Civil War give it a depth and poignancy that it might not otherwise have.

I did not realize until my young adulthood that I had a direct connection to that terrible event. It was then that I discovered, in a little family cemetery plot in West Castine, Maine where my great grandparents are buried, that two of my ancestors, great great uncles, had died in the Civil War: one at the first battle of Bull Run, known in the South as Manassas; and one at the great battle of Gettysburg.

The first to die was Sewell Perkins Bowden, an original member of the Castine Light Infantry of the 2nd Maine Regiment of Volunteers. The casualty report which I sent for and received from the National Archives reports that Sewall was shot through the heart.

He was 24 years old. In other records he is described as 6'1" tall, with gray eyes and brown hair. His occupation is listed as "mariner." This is what it says on his gravestone:

To the memory of Sewell P., son of Samuel & Abigail Bowden, who was born Aug. 23, 1836 and was killed at the battle of Bull's Run, July 21, 1861 while bravely fighting for his country; he was the first martyr from Co. B of the second Regiment of Maine volunteers, in the cause of the Constitution and the union.

Sewell was followed into war by three of his brothers: Wilson, Nehemiah, and Frank. Only Wilson would return home, from the swamps of Louisiana. Nehemiah, who joined the navy, settled in Connecticut after the war. Younger brother Frank died at Gettysburg from wounds he received during the first day of that battle, July 1, 1863. He died nineteen days later. Frank's casualty report reads, "Wounded, arm amputated. Serious." Frank Bowden was 19 years old. He was 5'11" tall, with dark complexion, brown hair, and blue eyes. His occupation was given as "farmer." His gravestone reads,

Frank M., Son of Samuel & Abigail Bowden, Co. K 16 Regt. Me. Vol. DIED July 20, 1863. AE. 19 yrs.

On the back of his gravestone is a little poem:

Soldier rest, thy warfare's o'er
Sleep the sleep that knows no breaking
Dream of battlefields no more
Days of danger, nights of waking.

Bruce Catton, the great Civil War historian, describes the action of the 16th Maine on July 1 as follows:

From Oak Hill all the way to the south of the Seminary there were boiling smoke clouds and a tremendous racket of guns and rifles and yelling men. On the extreme right of this line General Robinson had planted the 16th Maine, with instructions to stay no matter what, and these men were fighting against enemies who had come in so close that the Federals could hear the Rebel officers shouting orders to their men. The 16th's colonel protested that he had only two hundred men and could not stay where he was, but Robinson repeated that orders were to hold on at any cost. The regiment edged back a trifle and found itself isolated on a narrow, wedge-shaped ridge, Southern infantry firing fast from behind a rail fence on one side, a new battle line charging in on the other. This could end in just one way, and everyone present knew what that way was going to be. The color-bearer went dodging along the line at last, and each man tore off a piece of the regimental flag and tucked it into his pocket, and then it was every man for himself, and those who were still on their feet struck out for Cemetery Hill south of town. That evening thirty-five of them reassembled there.

Henry Butler, a neighbor, friend, and comrade of Frank's whose letters home to his wife have been preserved, described first-hand what happened in a letter written July 2, 1863:

Dear Mary,

I take this opportunity to write you a few lines that you may know that I am alive but in the hands of the rebels. We was taken yesterday after a hard fight. Frank Devereux was killed three feet from me by a musket ball. It went through his head. It killed him instantly. Frank Bowden had his arm shot off. Joseph Varnum, Henry Wescott, Mark Hatch, Jack Morgrage and our Colonel Tilden was taken prisoners. They are with me all writing. Charles Devereux, I did not see after we went into battle. I hope he is safe. I have inquired for him but could not find anyone that had seen him. I saw Edward Davis after we went into battle but have not seen him since. Our Captain was killed. He was close to me when he fell. There was 112 of our regiment taken. I think about all the rest was killed and wounded. Our folks had a small force. The rebels had a large force. They are fighting today. I think our folks have got reinforcements. I do not know what the rebels will do with us but I think they will parole us. They have used us well so far. You must not worry about me. I have got so I can talk but not very loud. I don't know when I shall hear from you. We have had some dreadful hard days and marches since we left Virginia. You can do as you think writing to me. If the rebels keep us I shall not be likely to hear from you. But I shall write to you often if I have a chance to send a letter. The last letter I received from you said your father had been sick. I want to know how he is and I want to hear from you all. Kiss the little boy for me. I will close with much love from your affectionate Husband.

Henry B. Butler

Henry Butler was freed soon after the Battle of Gettysbury, but was later wounded near Petersburg, Virginia on February 5, 1865, and died a month later.

This story has become part of my store of precious memories.
My family history identifies me in a special way: it is part of my interior history. I keep the memory of those lost soldiers alive, and though I never knew them, they are real to me, they are a piece of me. I suspect that I look like them. They connect me to great events in our national history, events which helped to shape our national identity.

I have often wondered what led them to abandon their peaceful home on the banks of the Penobscot River, to volunteer for almost certain death and to go off to war. What was it: boredom? the prospect of heroism? wander lust, or patriotism? I suppose that I shall never know. But what a price they and their family paid for it. How innocent they must have been, going off to fight in the bloodiest war of all time. Poor, backward country boys. I still mourn for them, and for the sacrifice exacted from them.

We all have our precious memories. And the older we get, the more of them we have; they grow richer with the years, provided that they are not tinged by the bitterness of old age, or obscured by loss and suffering. We could not go on without them, I suspect. They warm the coldest, darkest times; they increase our joy in life and living when we are happy. They are what we turn to when we wish to say, "Life does make sense," when we want to affirm that, "I have lived; I have lived well; it's been worth the journey!" Our precious memories are the measure of the value of our lives; we carry them with care. At the same time, unless we are gifted with the ability to capture our memories in art or words, we can never really unfold them as we would like. They are safely stored in our minds, but sometimes we are unable to relate them to others with the clarity of meaning which they have for us. Sometimes, we are simply unable to make others understand how precious they are. In spite of the frustration, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

It is thought by some that our earliest memories have a great influence on the remainder of our lives, that sometimes those memories of childhood overshadow the ways in which we will spend our lives. They tell us whether we will be trusting or suspicious, happy or sad, generous or withholding, outgoing or reserved, and so on. I'm sure that there is more than a little truth to this: that we are what we remember, so to speak. As we grow older, our personal memories begin to blend with all of our life's experiences, our personal history blends with our family history, with our national history, and on ever outward to cosmic history. All that we do and read and hear about and even think about is melded together in the entities that are ourselves. Each of us is a walking history book, waiting to be read. What a wonder, truly, each one of us is. What an incredibly rich resource is a group of people such as this one, if we have but eyes to see and ears to hear.

All of us here are caught up in the web of time, flung onward we know not where; as the great Protestant hymn says, "Time like an ever-rolling stream, soon bears us all away." We have come together here for a time, and that in itself is a miracle of sorts. Our precious memories are the offerings we bring forth to the altar of our community. We share them in the hope that we will be understood, and we strive toward greater understanding of one another.

Let us be about our work, then, in the awareness that the way will not always be smooth, in the certainty that we will not always be truly heard, in the recognition that the perfection we are seeking must always elude us to some extent; but in the sure knowledge that our reward is not in heaven, but in the bonds of peace and trust that we build here and now.

I want to leave you with a story. It is the story of a child born in modest circumstances. He was delivered into this world by his grandfather, the only doctor in town, in a little hospital which the grandfather had been responsible for founding. He spent his first three years on a little salt-water farm, called "Weary Acres" with good reason, where his mother and father tried to earn a living raising poultry and selling eggs. He did the usual childish things, like touching the electric fence around the garden, and locking himself in his father's old flatbed truck, and taking walks down the country road with his mother. Once he fell down the stairs and never forgot it. He played in the front yard with his constant companion, a great German Shepherd dog named Dutchess, who never allowed him near the road. At age three his parents moved into town, where he talked for the very first time, and grew older surrounded by the history of a place where the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 had been fought, and where tall ships once filled the bay. He grew familiar with the sight and sound and smell of the ocean and the shoreline, and with dark spruce trees set against a gray winter sky. He attended church in a meeting house built in 1790, and he sat uncomfortable in the stiff, upright box pews, looking wistfully through the great, clear glass windows, out onto the quiet green of the town common, where stood a granite monument to the Civil War dead, several of whom were his ancestors. He wondered about the inscription painted above the church's pulpit: "Have we not all one father?" In his confusion about theology, he waited for visions of a Jesus Christ his forebears had long since denied. Many years later, while painting this same meeting house, he stood, a young adult now, in the stark old sanctuary which had once served as town hall and county court; stood in the building where, in 1861, Sewell Bowden volunteered for the Army of the Potomac, and where in the years that followed his brothers would copy his brave or foolish example. As he stood there, thinking back on the accumulated memories of his life, a conviction entered him, possibly the same conviction that raised that building in the first place, that perhaps he should enter the ministry.

The content of that conviction was this: life is rich and beautiful. It is certainly meaningful, even if we cannot say for certain that it is intrinsically so. We can give our lives meaning, though we are ultimately free to do with them as we will; our duty is to make them as good and meaningful as we possibly can. That is all. In that moment he realized that all of life is deeply religious, that everything is connected, the past to the present to the future; that every experience and every action and every relationship, even every precious memory, is a thread in the wonderful tapestry that we call our lives.

Today let us set aside some time for our memories. We owe it to those who have worshipped here before us, to gather the precious memories of all our lives, and to seek ever-wider sympathy with our fellow human beings, wherever they may be on this small, spinning planet, and with every creature great and small. May we do so with "aspirations pure and high, strength to do and to endure." And may each of us discover and affirm, as it says in that old gospel song,

As I wander, on life's pathway
Knowing not what the years may hold;
As I ponder, love grows fonder,
Precious memories flood my soul.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock