SBU Journalism Professor Authors Article for Civil War Magazine on Maine Army Regiment

Chris Mackowski, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at St. Bonaventure University, has had an article accepted for the upcoming issue of Blue & Gray magazine.

“The 1st Maine Heavy Artillery at Harris Farm: The Hometown Press Reports Their Baptism of Fire” tells the account of a Maine regiment that saw its first action during the Civil War at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse in May of 1864.

The First Maine Heavy Artillery earned a place of infamy in Civil War history during the early days of the siege of Petersburg, Va. On June 18, 1864, the 900-man regiment charged across an open field of fire and sustained 67 percent casualties: 115 men killed, 489 wounded, and 28 missing — the highest casualty rate sustained by any unit in the army during the entire war, Mackowski’s article points out.

But it was just outside Spotsylvania Courthouse that the unit first saw combat, just one month before the men made their ill-fated charge outside Petersburg. According to Mackowski’s article, one member of the regiment said May 19 was “a day long to be remembered by the 1st Maine Heavy, as it was on this day that we received our baptism of fire and learned the stern duties of a soldier.”

Mackowski searched through old issues of two Maine newspapers — the Bangor Daily Whig & Courier and Ellsworth American — to piece together the account.

“Soldiers wrote home, and their families often shared those letters with the local newspapers so that townspeople could get the latest news from the front,” Mackowski explains. “So these newspapers have these fantastic, and sometimes terrible, firsthand accounts from these soldiers. It’s a unique way for us to see the Civil War today.”

Mackowski says that the accounts he used in the article have not been published since they first appeared in print nearly 150 years ago.

“These days, with 24-hour news, it's heart-rending to imagine the folks at home waiting weeks or months to find out about their loved ones,” said Blue & Gray editor David Roth. “The periodic updates of deaths and tidbits on the fighting were interesting to follow in the various accounts. This is a nice piece ... a journalistic slant from a journalism professor.”

The article will appear in the summer issue of Blue & Gray, available this May. In the summer of 2009, Mackowski and historian Kris White co-authored the cover story for Blue & Gray. That story, also related to the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, focused on the May 12 fight at “The Bloody Angle.”

Mackowski has also written and co-written several books on the Civil War, and he regularly gives battlefield tours for the National Park Service in central Virginia. He has taught at St. Bonaventure since the fall of 2000.