Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

I also got another regiment very curiously; and I give the story, because it will show what discipline can do.

Passing through Connecticut I called upon Governor Buckingham, who said to me: “You can do me a great favor, General.”

“What is that, Governor? I will do it if it is possible.”

“I have almost a regiment, something more than eight hundred men, all Irishmen, enlisted and encamped here near Hartford. I cannot get the regiment up to a thousand men so as to have it mustered in and have officers appointed. They are naturally good men, but they have been idle here for months, and they are wholly without discipline and without control. They are an actual nuisance. I wish you would take them in your division, and then there will be one more regiment for you; and you can take them to your camp where you can control them; I cannot control them here any longer.”

“Governor,” said I, “I will send an order for them by my quartermaster and his assistant, with directions to have them brought in the cars to Lowell, if you give an order that they shall march.”

“I will, and with pleasure.”

So the Ninth Connecticut was sent for. Their fame preceded them, and their conduct on the route to Lowell fully justified their fame. They managed to tear the roof off of all the cars of the train which they were in. They so delayed the train that when they got to Groton Junction, twenty miles from Lowell, it failed to connect, and they had to stay there all night. Groton Junction was a little village, and they proceeded to ransack it for liquor, and they found some barrels of it, which they brought away with them. When they arrived in Lowell the next morning, under charge of a detachment which had been sent for them, they were lying packed in the cars like herring in a box. They were tumbled into army wagons and carried up to the camp. I happened to be there when they came in. I had their officers called to me, and I looked them over. They seemed to be good enough men, and only one or two were any the worse for liquor. Their colonel was a very superior man.

As I rode down town, I got a note from the mayor informing me that a special meeting of the city council had been called, and an appropriation voted for the expense of employing five hundred