The Pennsylvania Bucktailsin the Civil War
" A Bucktail Voice: Civil War Correspondence of Cordello Collins." By Mark Reinsberg.
Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 48 (1965)
These are the letters of a young soldier from Warren County, Pennsylvania, who served as a rifleman inthe original Bucktail Regiment from the outbreak of the Rebellion until wounded and left behind in a Gettysburg hospital. The letters were written to his parents and younger brothers and sisters, and there was a note also to the daughter of a neighbor. Unpublished except for one piece that appeared in the Warren Mail in 1862, this correspondence was preserved in the soldier's pension file in the National Archives,Washington, D.C.
Cordello Collins was 21 years old and unmarried at the time of his enlistment in the elite company recruited by Captain (eventually Brigadier General) Roy Stone known as the "Raftsmen's Guard.” The markmanship of a hunter, the hardiness of a lumberman, were the standards for enrollment in this Warren County group, and Collins easily qualified. He was an excellent shot, having, like most of the Raftsmen, handled a gun in the backwoods since childhood. He sturdy, blue-eyed youth of five-foot-eight, toughened in limb by his apprenticeship as a blacksmith, and several winters of lumbering.
The Collinses were insolvent. Cordello's dollar-a-day earnings in the lumber woods had gone to the support of his parents, as did a substantial portion of his army pay. The latter circumstance, as we shall see, preserved the correspondence.
The Collins family had migrated to Pennsylvania from New York early 1840's. They lived in the village of Kinzua, on the Allegheny River, where John Collins, Cordello's father, had set up as a blacksmith. For a time, Mr. Collins could afford to keep two assistants in his shop. Ultimately, Kinzua was an unlucky choice of location. The area had been celebrated for its pine forest, but by the Civil War period lumbering in Kinzua had declined. The number of households engaged in farming had also declined. Moreover, there were three other blacksmiths competing for business in the village, and hardly 400 souls in the entire township.
The family possessed a few acres of cleared land and two cows. John Collins, approaching sixty, was heavily in debt. His health began to fail during the war years, until he lay bedridden. His wife Dolly, a Vermont woman with eight children to provide for besides her invalid husband, would be reduced to taking in washing while her eldest son defended the Union.
In editing Pvt. Collins' letters I have intruded only so far as to supply initial capitals and periods, and a few paragraph indentations. I have made a point of retaining the misspellings, not to exhibit the soldier's limitations, but because of the clues they occasionally give to the pronunciations of the Pennsylvania Wildcat region in the mid nineteenth century.
Admittedly, the letters of Cordello Collins have no literary merit whatsoever. Their formal historical value may also be slight. And yet, they are affecting to read. And they give us a social insight that is beyond the reach of commentary.
;There were, obviously, other letters in this correspondence which were not preserved.
About a year-and-a-half after this letter, Cordello's father, John Collins, died in Kinzua of tuberculosis. His wife Dolly was left in impoverished circumstances, with four or five children still to raise.
Some time after the Civil War, Mrs. Collins made application to the U.S. Commissioner of Pensions. As proof that her deceased son Cordello had contributed substantially to the family support while in the army, she submitted these letters which discussed money matters And as a consequence this part of the wartime correspondence was preserved in the soldier's pension file.
Cordello Collins had been desperately wounded at Gettysburg on July 3. The Bucktails had fought in the Wheat Field and opposite Devil's Den on July 2, and through the next day they helped to hold Little Round Top, counterattacking after the defeat of Pickett's Charge.
For the next month, Collins made a stubborn fight for his life in Two Taverns Hospital, dying at last of his wounds on August 8,1863.
Careless record-keeping and high cumulative casualties in the Bucktail Regiment deprived Collins of his modest share of posthumous glory. When the unit was mustered out of the service in June 1864 there was apparently no one left who remembered Cordello or, in any case, no one who reminded the regimental clerk of his fate. In the official records he was listed as "Not on muster-out roll."
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