cruits, and their advertisements set forth
enticingly the advantage of joining a command so comfortably situated
as "this famous regiment" in the Defences of Washington, where, it was
permissible to infer, it was permanently stationed, a belief which had
come to be generally held. The effort, however, was not confined by
geographical limits, and a large part of the men secured were
strangers to Litchfield County. Before the 1st of March, 1864, over
eleven hundred recruits were received, and with the nucleus of the old
regiment quickly formed into an efficient command.

[Illustration: In the Defences. Guard mount]

"This vast body of recruits was made up of all sorts of men," the
history of the regiment states. "A goodly portion of them were no less
intelligent, patriotic, and honorable than the 'old' Nineteenth--and
that is praise enough. Another portion of them were not exactly the
worst kind of men, but those adventurous and uneasy varlets who always
want to get out of jail when they are in, and in when they are out;
furloughed sailors, for example, who had enlisted just for fun, while
ashore, with no definite purpose of remaining in the land service for
any tedious length of time. And, lastly, there were about three
hundred of the most thorough paced villains that the stews and slums
of New York and Baltimore could furnish--bounty-jumpers, thieves, and
cut-throats, who had deserted from regiment after regiment in which
they had enlisted under fictitious names and who now proposed to
repeat the operation. And they did repeat it. No less than two hundred
and fifty deserted before the middle of May, very few of whom were
ever retaken and returned to the regiment. There were rebels in
Alexandria who furnished deserters with citizens' clothes and thus
their capture became almost impossible."

At first, and perhaps to some extent always, there was a mental
distinction made by the men between those who had originally enlisted
in the "old Nineteenth," and the large body which was now joined to
that organization, many of whom had never seen the Litchfield hills.
But there was enough character in the original body to give its
distinct tone to the enlarged regiment; its officers were all of the
first enlistment, and the common sufferings and successes which soon
fell to their lot quickly deprived this distinction of any
invidiousness. The Second Artillery was always known, and proudly
known, as the Litchfield County Regiment