(HOST) Today, as we pause to honor our nation’s veterans, commentator Howard Coffin is reminded of a famous story about a young Vermont soldier during the Civil War.
(COFFIN) It’s a tale many times told that seems worth re-telling, now that the leaves are gone and Veterans Day has come round again.
William Scott was a big, friendly farm boy from Groton who had trouble keeping in step once he joined the Second Vermont Regiment in 1861. But a fellow soldier said "he had a heart as big as he was," and everybody liked him. Then deep in a late summer night outside Washington, D. C., Scott was found asleep at his sentry post. Arrested and put before a courts martial, he pleaded exhaustion from having replaced a sick friend on guard the previous night. Scott was sentenced to death by firing squad.
Scott’s fellow soldiers appealed all the way to Abraham Lincoln, but on the morning of September 9 Scott was brought trembling from a tent with a white hood over his head. Pvt. Luke Ferriter, of Brattleboro, a member of the firing squad said, "We were all shaking in nervousness."
But when the execution order was read, the document proved to be a pardon. Abraham Lincoln is said to have remarked, using an old frontier phrase, that he did not want the blood of that young man on his skirts. But more recent research suggests that, all along, the intent was not to shoot Scott, but to scare him – and the whole army – into obeying orders.
Scott, suddenly the most famous private in the army, returned to the ranks a happy young man. Still, he wrote home, "Time is but short at the longest. We are certain death is like a thief which cometh in the night when we think not."
Next spring the army moved up the Virginia Peninsula. At Lee’s Mills the Vermont Brigade made its first assault under heavy fire wading a shallow mill pond against entrenched Confederates. Scott made it to the far side, but as he emerged from the water a fusillade of Rebel bullets slammed through his body.
Scott lived through a night of agony, dying in early morning. Pvt. Charles Emery said, "He was buried in a peach grove. The trees was blossomed out." Years later Carl Sandburg wrote that Scott, "among the fresh growths and blooms of a Virginia springtime… took the burning message of six bullets into his body… All he could give Lincoln or his country or his God was now given."
Today a monument stands along the William Scott Highway in Groton, Route 302, on the site of the Scott home. Some Scotts are buried in the little cemetery across the road, including one of William’s brothers, also killed in the war. Thomas and Mary Scott gave five sons to the Union armies, and four died. It was too much, and before the war ended, they had moved away.
Howard Coffin is an author and historian who’s specialty is the civil war.