Reminiscences of the Nineteenth Massachusetts Regiment — Context and Discussion

The Color-Bearer’s Bargain

One of the most striking episodes in the narrative turns on a negotiation over the regimental colors. When Major Dunn orders Mike Scannell to keep the flag after the standard-bearer falls, Scannell refuses the promotion to corporal—too many corporals have been killed carrying colors. Only when Dunn makes him a sergeant on the spot does Scannell accept: “That is business.” The exchange, rendered in direct dialogue, reveals a practical calculus behind battlefield heroism. Adams does not sentimentalize the moment; he presents it as a transaction, a deal struck under fire. The colors themselves appear repeatedly as a physical burden and a target. Elsewhere, Adams notes that the regiment’s motto was “Follow the colors of the Nineteenth,” and his narrative tracks the flag’s handlers as closely as it tracks the commanding officers. The color-bearer’s role—part symbol, part tactical liability—becomes a recurring motif that ties together otherwise disparate actions.

The Sharpshooter’s Independent Command

A brief but memorable vignette illustrates how Adams’s narrative eye gravitates toward the improvised and the anomalous. During the stalemate at the Bloody Angle, the men spot a pile of dirt on a knoll in front of their lines, from which occasional shots emerge. Digging out, they find Alonzo W. Bartlett, a private from Andrews, Massachusetts, who has crawled out to recover the body of a fallen colonel. Pinned down, he has dug a trench with his dipper and is “fighting the war on his own hook.” His face is cut and bleeding from gravel, but he has a good rifle and plenty of ammunition and intends to hold out. Adams records the names of the men who discover him—Mark Kimball, Gus Bridges, Frank Osborne, Milt Ellsworth—as carefully as he records the names of officers killed. The episode is a self-contained story within the larger battle narrative, a reminder that the war, for Adams, consists of countless such small, autonomous actions that official reports might omit.

The Truce and the Wounded Man

Adams devotes unusual attention to the informal truce that followed four days of constant musketry at the Bloody Angle. When a white flag goes up on the rebel works, both sides cease fire and men mingle freely between the lines. Adams observes that if the soldiers had the power to settle the war, “not another shot would have been fired.” The truce lasts two days; on the third morning, a rebel stands on the works and calls out, “Keep down, Yanks, we uns are going away,” and the firing resumes. Amid the burial details, the men find one wounded soldier who has lain between the lines for four days, shot in the leg, hit by both sides, without food or water. Adams does not name him; the anonymity underscores the randomness of survival. The episode serves as a pivot between the close-quarters fighting and the larger pattern of siege warfare, and it exemplifies Adams’s habit of pausing the narrative for a single, emblematic human detail.

Prison Diary as Structural Anchor

Adams explicitly states that the prison chapters are based on an “imperfect diary” kept while he was a prisoner of war. This shift in source material alters the texture of the narrative. The earlier battle accounts, written from memory years later, are episodic and anecdotal; the prison sections, by contrast, are more compressed and date-specific, though still fragmentary. The diary’s imperfections—gaps, terse entries—become part of the story. Adams does not smooth them into a continuous memoir; he lets the raggedness stand. The result is a structural contrast between the fluid, retrospective voice of the campaign chapters and the staccato, present-tense feel of the prison record. This change in narrative method gives the second half of the book a different rhythm, one that mirrors the confinement and uncertainty of captivity. Readers attentive to form will notice that the book’s architecture enacts its subject: freedom of movement gives way to constraint, and the prose follows suit.

Adams’s Reminiscences rewards a reader who watches for the small, concrete detail—the dipper used as an entrenching tool, the sergeant’s promotion traded for carrying the colors, the truce that briefly erases the line between enemies. The book is not a systematic history, nor does it pretend to be. It is a veteran’s collection of moments that survived thirty-four years of memory, arranged not by the logic of a staff ride but by the logic of what stuck. Approach it as a series of sharply lit scenes rather than a continuous narrative, and its strengths become clear.