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For 16-year-old Harry Kieffer, 1862 provided plenty of military drama. First he joined Company D of the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers at Mifflinburg in Union County. Then a passenger train took him to Camp Curtin at Harrisburg, where he and his new comrades in arms were sworn in and issued a uniform and accouterments.
Too young to serve as an infantry soldier, Kieffer became a drummer boy.
“The contagion of enlisting and going to the war was in the very atmosphere,” Kieffer wrote later. “You could scarcely accompany a friend to a way station on any of the main lines of travel without seeing the future wearers of blue coats at the car windows, and on the platforms.”
His first impressions of army life were so vivid that they lasted a lifetime. He especially remembered the hordes of new recruits.
“They poured into Harrisburg, company by company, usually in citizens’ clothes, and marched out of the town a week or so later, regiment by regiment, all glorious in bright new uniforms and glistening bayonets, transformed in a few days from citizens into soldiers, and destined for deeds of high endeavor on many a bloody field,” Kieffer said in “The Recollections of a Drummer Boy,” a memoir that he wrote decades later.
Less than a month after leaving Mifflinburg, Kieffer’s company had reached Washington City, as Washington, D.C., was then known. “Quite proud we felt as we tramped up Pennsylvania Avenue, with our new silk flags flying, the fifes playing ‘Dixie,’ and we drummer boys pounding away, awkwardly enough no doubt, under the lead of a white-haired old man, who had beaten his drum, nearly 50 years before, under Wellington, at the battle of Waterloo,” Kieffer said.
He said that in camp, a drummer’s duties included beating reveille at daybreak, retreat at sundown, tattoo at 9 p.m., and lights out a half hour later.
Kieffer said that he had once naively thought that drummer boys kept drumming throughout a battle, but he soon learned what drummer boys really did when the shooting started. The regiment’s colonel early on set them straight: “You drummer boys, in time of an engagement, are to lay aside your drums and take stretchers and help off the wounded.”
Any notions about the gallantry of warfare were shattered in the spring at Chancellorsville in Virginia. A savage battle raged there in early May 1863. As Kieffer reported, “Over there where the Forty-third (Regiment) lies, to our left, come three stretchers, and you can see deep crimson stains on the canvas as they go by us, on a lively trot, to the rear and we are under fire for the first time.”
During his years in the Union army, Kieffer served in such memorable battles as Gettysburg, The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. At one point, he described the terrible noise made by Confederate bombs that came “shrieking and screaming, through the air, and of that peculiar whirring sound made by the pieces after the shell has burst overhead or by your side.”
He also reported on the presence of “vultures or turkey-buzzards, vast flocks of which followed the army wherever we went, almost darkening the sky at times, and always suggesting unpleasant reflections.”
Of the thousand soldiers sworn in with Kieffer at Camp Curtin in 1862, how many survived three years of war and returned to Harrisburg to be mustered out of service when the war ended in 1865?
“Not more than 150,” Kieffer said.
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John L. Moore is an author and storyteller based in Northumberland, Pa. Information about the eight non-fiction books in his Frontier Pennsylvania Series is available online at johnleonmoore.blogspot.com/