Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/241

 Colonel Albert A. Pope.

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��While in the employment of Brooks & Mecuen he had to do the work that porters do now ; shovel the sidewalks, wash the windows about once a week winter and summer, lift heavy machin- ery, carry bags of pegs amounting to three bushels from the store to the cor- ner of Milk and Kilby Streets, and sev- eral times a week carry on his back bales of thread weighing one hundred pounds many blocks away. In those days he had to do work that no one now would think of imposing upon a full grown man.

When the mutterings of the Rebellion were first heard in the land the young man was imbued with patriotic and mili- tary ardor, and devoted all his spare time to studying the tactics and army regula- tions. He joined the Zalimac Zouaves, was sergeant in a battery of artillery, a section of which he used to drill to be- come familiar with artillery practice, and was a captain in a company of Home Guards. In the meantime the firm which employed him moved up to 107 Milk Street. He had a gun in the store, business then was very dull, the neighboring clerks frequently dropped in, and whenever he could he drilled them in the manual of arms.

In the summer of 1862 President Lincoln called for three hundred thou- sand volunteers for three years or for the war ; and in response to the call the Thirty-fifth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, took the field. One com- pany was from Newburyport, one from Chelsea, one from Haverhill, one from Weymouth, one from Roxbury, the bal- ance from eastern Massachusetts towns. The Roxbury company, K, illustrates the character of the regiment. One hundred and fifty volunteers offered their services. Of the one hundred and one who were accepted, eighty were

��between twenty and thirty-five years of age, and about one half of the company were married men. All signed their names in a clear, legible hand writing. In this regiment of one thousand and thirteen men, Albert A. Pope, at the age of nineteen years, was commissioned second lieutenant, being the junior, and joined his command at Camp Whipple, on Arlington Heights, in the neighbor- hood of Washington, early in Septem- ber. Before the close of the war it happened that in an important engage- ment the junior officer had command of the regiment.

The history of this regiment, the Thirty-fifth Massachusetts Volunteers, has been ably and carefully written by a committee of the survivors, and from it one can trace not only the perils and hardships of the organization as a whole, but of the individual soldiers and offi- cers. Of the original members one hundred and twenty-five were killed or died of wounds in the service ; sixty- four died of disease or accident in the service ; three hundred and thirty-seven were discharged for disability from dis- ease or wounds ; one hundred and ten were transferred to the Veteran Reserve Corps and other organizations ; and only three hundred and thirty-two vet- erans were mustered out at expiration of service at the close of the war in 1865.

The regiment participated in the Bat- tle of South Mountain with but slight loss, but at Antietam it was terribly cut up, losing in the two days fight seventy- eight killed and one hundred and sev- enty-five wounded. Less than three hundred men reported for duty the fol- lowing morning, including five line offi- cers. These first battles made men of boys, soldiers of recruits ; the ensuing campaign made every soldier a veteran.

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