First Union officer killed in the Civil War found literary fame after death
On June 10, 1861, in the early days of the Civil War, Union Major Gen. Benjamin Butler in Virginia sent a regiment of troops to attack Confederate forces near a town called Big Bethel on the Virginian peninsula. Many of these men were under the command of Major Theodore Winthrop, a 32-year-old, Connecticutborn and -bred writer and adventurer turned soldier.
It was one of the first land conflicts of the Civil War, and, as with many of those early engagements, it did not go well for the Union. “Even though the Union troops outnumbered their Confederate counterparts two to one, a number of amateurish mistakes and communication breakdowns on the Union side — including a number of friendly-fire incidents — gave the Confederates a huge advantage on the battlefield,” the Today in Connecticut History website notes in an entry about Winthrop.
Around midday, seeing how poorly things were going, Winthrop reportedly tried to inspire one final charge from his men. He left cover and jumped on a log or tree stump and waved his saber in the air while shouting, “Come on, boys! One charge and the day is ours!” Either foolish or gallant, the act put him in view of an enemy marksman who took aim and fired.
Born in New Haven in 1828, Winthrop was New England and Connecticut royalty. A direct descendant of John Winthrop Sr., leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and John Winthrop Jr., an early Connecticut governor, Theodore Winthrop graduated from Yale, where his uncle, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, was president. After graduation he toured the globe, first trekking through Europe, then exploring the western U.S. Eventually he settled in New York City where he studied law. But his true passion was writing. “He had always been writing,” a friend recalled. “In college and upon his travels he kept diaries.”
Prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Winthrop had been published in magazines and newspapers but hadn’t yet found a publisher for his novels.
As the conflict between the states loomed, Winthrop enlisted. While the potential glory of war might have appealed to his adventurer’s heart, he believed deeply in the North’s cause. “I see no present end of this business,” he wrote a friend after enlisting. “We must conquer the South. Afterward we must be prepared to do its polic[ing] in its own behalf, and in behalf of its black population, whom this war must, without precipitation, emancipate.”
Being a soldier proved a boon for his writing career, as he earned a spot as a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and wrote a popular article called “Our March to Washington,” which ran in the magazine’s June 1861 issue. In it Winthrop demonstrates the talent he had for writing, describing one night’s march in vivid detail. “It was full-moonlight and the night inexpressibly sweet and serene. The air was cool and vivified by the gust and shower of the afternoon. Fresh spring was in every breath. Our fellows had not forgotten that this morning they were hot and disgusted. Every one hugged his rifle as if it were the arm of the Girl of his Heart, and stepped out gaily for the promenade.”
Standing on the trunk or log, urging his men to attack, Winthrop was hit in the chest by a bullet and later died of his wounds. He was the first Union officer to die during the war, and his death was mourned in both the Connecticut and national press. “The sad death of the writer, falling toward the foe, in front of the rebel battery, waving his sword to encourage the soldiers, will never be forgotten by this generation,” the Hartford Courant wrote a few months after his death.
The Battle of Big Bethel was an inauspicious start to the ground war for
the Union; Winthrop was one of 18 men who died, and the Union also sustained more than 50 casualties on their way to losing the battle. Confederate forces only suffered one death and a few injuries.
While the losing battle cost Winthrop his life, it led to literary fame as his relatives published several of his novels posthumously. His works were marketed as being written by a hero of the Civil War, and connected with readers. His most significant novel was the semiautobiographical, New York City-set Cecil Dreeme, which explored gender and sexuality. Modern scholar Peter Coviello called it “one of the queerest American novels of the nineteenth century.”
“Cecil Dreeme went through over a dozen editions in the late 19th century, and his memoir of his travels through the Washington Territory, titled The Canoe and the Saddle, was so popular that the town of Winthrop, Washington (as well as the famous Winthrop Hotel in Tacoma, Washington) was named in his honor,” Today in Connecticut History notes.
Prior to his death, Winthrop had been scheduled to write his third dispatch in The Atlantic Monthly. Instead,
his friend, George William Curtis, wrote a moving eulogy to him. “Theodore Winthrop’s life, like a fire long smouldering, suddenly blazed up into a clear, bright flame, and vanished,” Curtis wrote, also noting that his friends “were so impressed by his intense vitality, that his death strikes us with peculiar strangeness, like sudden winter-silence falling upon these humming fields of June.”
In equally grandiose prose, Curtis describes muffled drums beating during Winthrop’s funeral as his body was carried by his fellow soldiers “wrapped in the flag for which he gladly died, as the symbol of human freedom.” Curtis added, “Yet such was the electric vitality of this friend of ours, that those of us who followed him could only think of him as approving the funeral pageant, not the object of it, but still the spectator and critic of every scene in which he was a part. We did not think of him as dead. We never shall. In the moist, warm midsummer morning, he was alert, alive, immortal.”