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When he enlisted in early March of 1865, the Confederacy was crumbling, and the final campaign of the war was about to begin. Like many young men, Wolcott no doubt wanted to serve his country before the war came to an end. Per “Memorial of Henry Wolcott” on page 397, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned as an aide-de-camp for General Alfred Gibbs (1823- 1969). Gibbs was a family relation via his mother, Laura Wolcott (1794-1870), which likely gave his parents some comfort. Thanks to the prominence of the family and
his relation to Gibbs, we have more details of Wolcott’s service. Letters written by Gibbs are quoted in “Memorial of Henry Wolcott, One of the First Settlers of Windsor, Connecticut, and of Some of His Descendants.” Gibbs wrote to Lieutenant Wolcott’s father on March 24, 1865: “Lieutenant Wolcott joined me this morning. He comes just in time before we start on another of Sheridan’s raids. He will have plenty of opportunities of showing the stuff the Wolcotts are made of, and distinguishing himself.” Indeed, he joined in time to fight at the historic Battle of Five Forks on April 1, 1865, where Union forces directed by General Ulysses S. Grant and led by General Philip Sheridan defeated the entrenched but outnumbered Confederates under General George Pickett. Gibbs wrote of the young officer again: “Huntington Wolcott, who was acting on my staff, behaved nobly, -like a Wolcott,- and went into the thick of the fight and brought down a lot of prisoners. He is just as earnest and ardent as ever, in action as well in expression.”The Union victory helped force General Robert E. Lee to abandon Petersburg and the nearby Confederate capital of Richmond, and Wolcott and the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry then participated
in the pursuit of Lee’s forces during the Appomattox Campaign, including in stopping James Longstreet and Richard Anderson’s columns. On May 9, 1865, Gibbs wrote of the young officer again, “I consider his pluck as most extraordinary, and he has been so fortunate as to have joined us in the most eventful campaign of the war, - the one that sealed the fate of the hated confederacy. He has passed through it unscratched. From frequent and close observation of his conduct, I have noticed
particularly his gallantry at Dinwiddie Court House,
Five Forks, ‘Clover Hill,’‘April 9th,’ and on various other occasions, and have often refused him permission to ‘go in,’ when duty did not require him to do so. He has had a terribly tough baptism in military service, but has come out of it with increased vigor and vitality of both body and mind.”Tragically, that was soon about to change. After Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Wolcott was among the thousands of victorious Union soldiers who proudly marched in the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C., on May 23-24, 1865. The war was over, and the young 19 year old officer likely looked forward to returning home as a hero, but he grew seriously ill and feverish and was sent home in hopes that he might recover. Instead, he continued to decline and died on June 9th. Some other sources list the cause of death “camp fever” a blanket term that included typhoid or yellow fever. The “treatments” he may have received would have likely worsened his condition as
the “medicines” used often amounted to poison and included lead acetate, mercury, opium, and other
toxic chemicals.
His death was reported in several newspapers, including on June 29, 1865, in the Litchfield Enquirer which stated: “Lieutenant Huntington Frothingham Wolcott died at
the country seat of his father, J. Huntington Wolcott, Blue Hill, Milton, on the 9th inst. There is something unusually mournful in the death of this young officer. He had, as it were, but just left school, and it was not easy to realize, when he girded on the sword, that he was not still the beautiful boy, fondly cherished by all who knew him.
A few months since, he was commissioned in the 2d Mass. cavalry. His pure and earnest soul had long been devoted to the service of his country, and he had not touched the edge of manhood when his appeals to join the army became irresistible. It would have been almost a cruelty to have thwarted his fine impulse. He was assigned to the staff of General Gibbs and took his part in the brilliant closing campaigns of Sheridan, especially distinguishing himself with coolness and gallantry at the battle of Five Forks...His strength yielded to the hardships
and struggles of the march and the battle; and after the review of Washington he was stricken down with malarious fever. The hope that he might be saved by breathing his native air, was not fulfilled.”
Wolcott was one of the estimated 440,000+ soldiers that died from disease during the Civil War. His death was
no doubt made even more poignant for his family by the fact that he was just 19 years old and had served at the tail end of the war and nearly made it home safe. Unfortunately, the crowding of soldiers in camps, poor sanitation, little understanding of disease, and lack of proper medical treatment led to the spread of deadly diseases throughout the war. Of the 231 men the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry lost, 143 were to disease.
His family and community naturally sought to commemorate the young soldier. An excellent portrait of 2nd Lieut. Wolcott painted by William Morris Hunt was owned by parents and hung prominently in their home and was passed down through the family until
it was gifted to the Museum of Fine Art in Boston (coincidentally happens to be on Huntington Avenue). A marble bust of 2nd Lieut. Wolcott by Richard S. Greenough in 1867 is also in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The bust was commissioned by his step-mother, and the pedestal reads: “Dear Mamma you must let me go
I feel so about it I think it would be sweet to die for
my country,” a passage from a letter he had written to her, itself a reference to a passage from Horace’s Odes: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet
and proper to die for one’s country). In addition to
the works of art, other tributes to the young officer include: the Huntington Frothingham Wolcott Fund at Harvard started with $10,000 from his father’s estate in 1891 for the use of the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, the Grand Army of the Republic’s Huntington Frothingham Wolcott Post 102 in Milton, Mass., and the poem “Not All is Lost” in memory of Wolcott by Chaplain Charles A. Humphreys and dedicated to Wolcott’s parents.
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