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The Thirty-Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862-1865 cover

The Thirty-Ninth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, 1862-1865

Chapter 68: CHAPLAIN
By Alfred S. Roe
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About This Book

The narrative follows a volunteer regiment from its organization through training, marches, combat, and duty, documenting engagements in the eastern theater and episodes of capture and imprisonment. Company-level sketches, officers' reports, and veterans' recollections reconstruct daily camp life, battle actions, maneuvers, and periods of garrison and picket duty. The volume intersperses firsthand diaries and letters with a campaign chronology and includes appendices containing rosters, officers' lists, casualty returns, and veterans' association records, offering both readable accounts of soldiering and a reference resource for descendants and historians.

CHAPLAIN

Edward Beecher French, 29, M.; clergyman, Chatham; August 18, 1862; a graduate of Harvard's Divinity School, 1859, Chaplain French enlisted as a private from his pastorate, and was commissioned from the ranks; of him Thomas E. Small remarks, "At the battle of the Wilderness the Chaplain was right up at the front with the boys and when Daniel Burnham of our Company was shot and about to die, the Chaplain took his last message and whatever he had to send to his wife and family and comforted him in his last few moments of life; he accompanied the remains of Colonel Davis from Petersburg to Cambridge and spoke at the funeral; M. O. June 2, 1865; he was born in Lowell, Nov. 20, 1832; his earlier years were spent in Holliston; his first pastorate was in Chatham, whence he was the first man to enlist in the Thirty-ninth; after the war he served pastorates in Babylon, L. I., and Perth Amboy, N. J., but his health, enfeebled by exposures at the front, broke and recovery was sought in Texas and Wisconsin, but without avail. He died July 14, 1907, in Harwich with relatives of his wife, who had preceded him to the other world, and his body was laid by the side of hers in the Harwich burial ground."