AllOtsego.com

By JIM KEVLIN

Over three Civil War years, 1,900 men served in the 121st. Only 330 came home.
The 121st participated in 25 major battles, from Antietam to Appomattox.
Its soldiers won six Medals of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.
Famously, the 121st captured Robert E. Lee’s son, Custis, three days before the final surrender.
"These were just ordinary young men" – from Burlington Flats, Cherry Valley, Cooperstown, Oneonta, Schenevus and points in between – "who did really extraordinary things," said Joe Covais of Winooski, Vt., a Civil War buff since before his teen-age summer in the Herkimer County Historical Society’s reading room.
"They were placed in extraordinary circumstances, and they performed."
Covais was talking about the 121st New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment from Otsego and Herkimer counties, mustered in on Aug. 23, 1862, after Lincoln called for 300,000 volunteers to save the Union.
There were 200 regiments from New York State alone, and thousands from across the United States, but the 121st is now the focus of 586 gripping pages: "Upton’s Regulars," by Salvatore G. Cilella Jr., just published by the University Press of Kansas.
Sal Cilella, an alumus of SUNY Oneonta’s Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies and now president of the 33-acre Atlanta History Center, packed the house when he spoke to local historians at The Farmers’ Museum’s Louis C. Jones Center on Oct. 15.
The lecture was moved when it was clear the 138-member crowd would exceed the 120-seat auditorium at The Fenimore Museum. Cilella spent that day and the next talking to similar capacity crowds at NYSHA’s annual October Conference For Teachers.
And before he returned to Atlanta, Cilella and NYSHA administrators had agreed to mount an exhibit related to the 121st, to open on July 1, 2012, the 150th anniversary year of the mustering in Aug. 23, 1862, at Camp Schuyler, Herkimer County.
Connecting with Covais, who provided Cilella with three boxes full of files and photos on the 121st was one of the high points of the author’s research, he told The Farmers’ Museum audience.
Cilella had happened upon an edition of Isaac O. Best’s 1921 "History of the 121st," updated by Covais, and through the publisher, Butternut & Blue, learned he’d been living in Middlebury, Vt.
Foiled in efforts to locate Covais, Cilella called a local bookstore. "This guy comes in here," Cilella was told. "He likes the Civil War."
They gave Cilella Covais’ name and his number in Winooski. (The two men had talked of collaborating on "Upton’s Regulars," but Covais, suffering from diabetic retinopathy, lost his sight and had to withdraw.)
Another eureka moment came while poring over microfilmed copies of The Freeman’s Journal in the NYSHA library.
Cilella had been trying to find Joseph Beckwith’s memoir of his times with the 121st, to no avail. There, in the final paragraph of an article from 1892, it was mentioned that the Mohawk Democrat had been publishing it as a series.
In that Herkimer County newspaper, Cilella found the whole thing.
Of all the regiments that fought in the Civil War, the 121st deserves this attention for a lot of reasons, Cilella said.
For one thing, primary sources – letters, diaries, memoirs – were available to write "a sociological study in a military setting."
In particular, Cilella was impressed by the soldiers’ "egalitarian attitude toward the Army. They actually signed petitions to have officers removed, and they were successful. How they ever got away with this, I don’t know."
The Internet helped the author connect with descendants of 121st members, including the Mabie family of Roseboom and Westford, who provided original correspondence from ancestors Allen and John Lovejoy of Company G.
Another reason was Emory Upton, the 121st’s commander, who was called "brilliant" and a "genius" in Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson’s introduction to "The Life and Letters of Emery Upton," published in 1885.
As a lieutenant, Upton fired the first shot in the action that led to Bull Run, the war’s first battle, and fought beyond Appomattox, in mopping up operations in Alabama.
The tactics he devised, both during the war and following international study tours at the Army’s behest in the years that followed, were used well into the 20th century, Cilella said.
Upton was a general, commander of The Presidio in San Francisco, when – stricken by constant headaches caused by a sinus disorder – he committed suicide in 1881.
We think of "shell shock" and PTSD as modern ailments, but Cilella wonders.
Beckwith "seemed to be pretty normal," Col. Egbert Olcott, who brought the survivors home, died in an insane asylum in Utica.
One soldier after another died an unexplained death, from wagons turning over or drownings; Cilella wonders how many may have been suicides, and suggests this as a topic worthy of future research.