The 2nd Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment (also known as the Second Maine Regiment, Second Maine Infantry, or The Bangor Regiment) was mustered in Bangor, Maine for two year's service on May 28, 1861 and mustered out in the same place on June 9, 1863. This was the first Civil War regiment to march out of Maine (in 1861), and was greeted with accolades by civilians as it made its way to Washington. It engaged in "eleven bloody and hard-fought battles" including both the First Battle of Bull Run, where it was the last regiment to leave the field, and Fredericksburg, where it took its greatest number of casualties.
The first commander of the 2nd Maine was Col. Charles Davis Jameson, a lumber merchant from Old Town, Maine who later became a Brigidier General. He died of camp fever after being wounded in battle. Jameson's successor was Col. Charles W. Roberts of Bangor, who had a horse shot out from under him at 2nd Bull Run. The last commander was Col. George Varney.
Augustus Choate Hamlin of Bangor, nephew of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, was the regiment's Assistant Surgeon, and later Surgeon. He would write books about Andersonville Prison and the Battle of Chancellorsville after the war. Quartermaster Sargeant Luther H. Pierce became a wealthy Bangor lumber merchant in the post-war period and paid for the erection of a monument to the 2nd Maine at Mount Hope Cemetery.
Five of the ten companies of the regiment were raised in Bangor, including a Gymnasium Company, the Grattan Guards, and a company of Ex-Tigers (firemen) under Capt. Daniel Sargent of Brewer, Maine, who would be promoted to Lt. Col. (second in command) under Varney. Other companies were from Castine, Milo, and Old Town.
When the regiment was eventually mustered out in Bangor, huge crowds gathered to celebrate its return on Broadway, and a ceremony was held at Norumbega Hall downtown.
Survivors of the 2nd Maine who had enlisted for three, rather than two years were transferred to the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment under protest.
Read more about 2nd Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment: Casualties
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“Those Maine woods differ essentially from ours. There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot, some widow’s thirds, from which her ancestors have sledded fuel for generations, minutely described in some old deed which is recorded, of which the owner has got a plan, too, and old bound-marks may be found every forty rods, if you will search.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“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)