The 1st Maine Heavy Artillery Regiment was a regiment in the Union Army during the American Civil War. It suffered more casualties in an ill-fated charge during the Siege of Petersburg than any Union regiment lost in a single day of combat throughout the war. It was also the Union regiment with the highest number of officers killed (23).
The regiment was mustered in Bangor, Maine, in 1862 as the 18th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment and consisted mostly of men and officers from the Penobscot River Valley (the area around Bangor and points east). It was commanded by Col. Daniel Chaplin, a Bangor merchant. Charles Hamlin, son of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, was originally an officer in this regiment, but was promoted to a position on the staff of Maj. Gen. Hiram G. Berry before it saw significant action.
The regiment's name was changed in 1863 to the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery Regiment, and it served in the defenses of Washington, D.C. before being reassigned to the Army of the Potomac during the Overland Campaign in the spring of 1864. At the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, the regiment took its first heavy casualties—6 officers and 76 men killed, and another 6 officers and 388 men wounded. At Petersburg, however, an ill-advised charge across an open field toward Confederate breastworks on June 18, 1864, ordered by Chaplin, resulted in the greatest single loss of life in a Union regiment to occur in the war, with 7 officers and 108 men killed, and another 25 officers and 464 men wounded. These casualties constituted 67% of the strength of the 900-man force. Chaplin survived the action but was later killed by a sharpshooter.
All in all, the 1st Maine sustained one of the highest casualty rates in the war, with 421 killed, and another 260 dead of disease.
A monument to the 1st Maine stands on the former battlefield at Petersburg.
Famous quotes containing the words maine, heavy, artillery and/or regiment:
“These were such houses as the lumberers of Maine spend the winter in, in the wilderness ... the camps and the hovels for the cattle, hardly distinguishable, except that the latter had no chimney.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One story recounts that a Tennessean, after a single day in the then almost impenetrable tangle of cypress, briars, and canebreaks, pestered by myriads of mosquitoes, and bogged in the heavy gumbo mud, declared: “Arkansas is not part of the world for which Jesus Christ died—I want none of it.””
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)