To the world he would be “the Boy General,” the “Invincible” William Francis Bartlett, the man who could not be killed. Agnes Pomeroy knew better. He was her Frank.
She never knew him in perfect health. When they met in the fall of 1862, he had already given one leg to the Union cause at Yorktown a few months earlier. She found him an impressive figure, this resolute young captain who had finished his Harvard degree while recovering, and was now drilling new recruits from crutches at Camp Briggs (Deming Park area in Pittsfield, MA today).
One of those privates would later write of the “intelligent energy, and gentlemanly manner” that made him a favorite among the men. “Though quiet, there is an air of command about him that would make obedience to his orders almost involuntary.”
They wrote to each other after Frank returned to the war in November. Agnes, then 21, busied herself raising funds and supplies for the war effort. She was eldest of five daughters living with industrialist Robert Pomeroy and his wife Mary (Jenkins) in their homestead near the town center.
Now a Colonel, Bartlett led the 49th Mass. regiment in several assaults in the Siege of Port Hudson. In May of 1863 he was shot twice- a bullet shattering his wrist while buckshot wounded his good right leg. In August he returned to Pittsfield, riding at the head of the local regiment with his arm in a box sling. Along with Agnes in the crowd was a writer named Herman Melville, who would pen the poem “The College Colonel,” based on his observations that day.
That fall, Bartlett was organizing a new regiment to command, the 57th. When they went south in the Spring of 1864, most biographers believe Frank and Agnes were quietly engaged, though a formal announcement would not be made until January 1865.
Riding at the front of the 57th in Grant’s Overland Campaign, Frank has a serious head injury on May 6, and returns to the Berkshires to see her at the Pomeroy homestead in early July. By July 19 he is back at the front lines in Virginia, newly appointed to Brigadier General.
“We storm the works tomorrow at daylight,” he writes in his diary on July 29, just before the Battle of the Crater. “Our Division leads. I hardly dare hope to live through it. God have mercy. . . If I could only ride, or had two legs, so I could lead my brigade, I believe they would follow me anywhere. I will try as it is. God have pity on dear mother, Agnes, and all loved ones.”
Follow him they did. Even into a blinding, dusty crater of exploded mine shafts in what was arguably the worst-planned Union attack of the war. Whole books have been written about what all went wrong at that battle, but suffice to say, it seems Bartlett did basically what generals above him had commanded. His brigade charged into the chaotic crater, fighting the Confederate army for more than an hour over the works, at a distance of barely 7 or 8 feet. Finally they were down to bayonets and throwing bottles as ammunition ran out. A falling rock from the unstable canyon of exploded mine shafts crushed Bartlett’s prosthetic leg and killed the man next to him. Unable to retreat with his men, he is captured.
Frank languishes in an open medical tent before being taken to Libby Prison in Richmond, VA. He develops chronic dysentery and suffers additional damage to his left leg without his prosthetic. By the time he is released in a prisoner exchange a few weeks later, he is gaunt and sickly, with doctors predicting a six month recovery time.
Agnes takes the train to meet him in New York City on his release. She spends the next couple days at the weakened General’s bedside. He records they didn’t “talk much,” but that her greeting “repays one for all the misery and pain.”
And again, the next day, “These are happy days. It makes up for everything.”
Over the next few months, Frank returned to his family home in Haverhill. He remained registered as active duty, on a series of medical extensions, the rest of the war. The Army seemed to like the way the idea of him scared Confederates. Agnes continued supporting the war effort, traveling, visiting friends. They wrote luxuriously long letters. She ordered a bookcase and a desk sent to him (swoon).
On October 14, 1865. They married at the Pomeroy homestead. They got on a steamship named Persia to Europe for their honeymooon, and didn’t come back to the U.S. for eight months.
“We are enjoying every moment. I think it would be hard to find two happier people than Frank and myself anywhere in Christendom.”
Frank never recovers physically in any real sense, and is wracked with health problems the rest of his life. But Agnes admires how graceful he is on his prosthetic leg. Some systems still work just fine, and within three months of their European tour they conceive their first child, Agnes Francis Bartlett (who will one day marry Henry Francis, and become a double-Francis).
Five more children follow over ten years, as they settle down in a house around the corner from the Pomeroy homestead, on Wendell Avenue.
Even in early 1876, by which time he is fully bedridden, they conceive their youngest daughter Edith. Two months after her birth, Frank dies at home on December 17, aged 36.
Local Union veterans encircle the family like a brigade, assuring they never want for any material need, though she was never in any danger of being an impoverished widow. One of those veterans was Colonel Walter Cutting, who happened to have married her younger sister Maria. His father happened to be President of the New York Stock Exchange. In 1887, he built her a new 8 room house on the street named for her late husband.
By that time, Mary Agnes Pomeroy Bartlett had left quite a legacy. The Women’s Relief Corp that she founded had flourished and doubled in size. She remained involved with veterans all her life, and was called “the mother of the 49th Regiment,” whose reunions she attended in a ceremonial role over the coming decades.
“Mrs Bartlett was a woman of striking beauty, and her sweet face, crowned with white hair, was loved and honored by every one who knew her,” wrote the Berkshire Eagle at her death in 1909. “She was of a singularly lovable disposition.”
Sources:
Francis W. Palfrey, Memoir of William Francis Bartlett, (1878) Online.
Richard A. Sauers and Martin H. Sable, William Francis Bartlett: Biography of a Union General in the Civil War (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009)
Lorenzo Bowen . Massachusetts in the War: 1861-1865. (1889) Online.
Berkshire Eagle: 8/20/1863; 10/19/1865; 2/17/1909
These Mysterious Hills 