It was an unusual thing to say at such a moment—but then again, the story of the 16th Regiment is unusual, too. Today, as when Whitney gave his speech in Hartford, most Americans know nothing about the unit, but its history shows the difficulty of reconciling the real, often mundane and unheroic aspects of the Civil War with the more celebratory and jingoistic narrative that still lingers in today’s popular imagination.

In front of the monument that day in 1907, Whitney gave a quick overview of the story: the weeks-old Union regiment received a baptism by fire at the battle of Antietam, got captured at Plymouth, North Carolina, and suffered a long incarceration in Andersonville Prison. “Like all troops,” he stated, “we did the best we could, learning as fast as possible, and were soon in shape to stand up with the best.” Whitney glossed over some significant details, including the unit’s breakdown at Antietam, its members’ threats of mutiny, the fact that some pledged to the Confederate side, and the bitter humiliation of capture. He did, however, quote from a colonel’s closing words to the regiment on their mustering out in June 1865: “Although a less amount of glory in the field has fallen to our lot than to many others, no regiment from the state has been subjected to so much suffering.”

The speech was a single salvo in a decades-long campaign—led by Whitney and two of his friends in the unit—to ensure that the memory of the 16th Connecticut endured, and that it was something for which no one would be ashamed. Making public addresses and building monuments, the men sometimes disagreed about the story they were telling, unsure how to acknowledge the regiment’s struggles and still align their accounts with a triumphant story of saving the Union. Whitney, then a 19-year-old machinist from Hartford; Robert H. Kellogg, 18 and training to be a druggist; and 19-year-old Ira E. Forbes, a farm laborer saving money for college, met as fresh-faced volunteers in the summer of 1862, when men were still willingly flocking to fight for the Union, even though the terrible war had begun to take its toll. They would become lifelong friends, and the Civil War would remain the most important experience of their lives.

The 16th Connecticut participated in only one major engagement of the war—the battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862—but that battle, which was the single bloodiest day in the war, shattered the unit. It had been just three weeks since the men had mustered into service, yet they found themselves rushed to the front as part of George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac’s efforts to halt Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland. After a day of carnage and confusion, the Confederates withdrew, but it was in many ways a pyrrhic victory for the Union. For the 16th Connecticut, Antietam was a debacle: Called into action late in the fight, its members were woefully untrained in how to fire their rifles, let alone ready to understand orders barked in the chaos of battle. More than a quarter of the men were wounded, and many others broke and ran from the field.

The unit never recovered its strength or reputation. For more than a year, they moved from place to place, doing mostly monotonous garrison duty, making the men in the ranks feel like, as one member described, “a wondering body of nomads.” By January 1864, they were stationed in Plymouth, North Carolina, a place that struck them as the edge of the world. “It’s a kind of barbarian place, here,” one soldier wrote his brother, “about 9 miles from nowhere, as the boys say.” On April 20, after a three-day siege, Confederates captured the entire regiment, some 400 men. Kellogg recorded in his diary that day that “we threw up the white rag and gave up to them.”

Sixteenth Connecticut Volunteers at their annual reunion in Hartford on September 17th, 1872. Photograph by Daniel S. Camp, albumen print on paper on cardboard mount. Courtesy of Clifford T. Alderman and the Connecticut Historical Society.

Gave up, indeed. The 16th Connecticut soon went to the notorious Andersonville prison in Georgia. First opened in February 1864, by May it housed more than 12,000 prisoners, crammed into an open-air stockade. Men died at alarmingly high rates due to malnutrition, disease and exposure—29 percent of the prisoners overall, and about a quarter of the men of the 16th Connecticut. Conditions were so miserable that some members of the 16th took an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy to gain relief from their grueling captivity. Forbes reflected in his prison diary: “It would be the source of unspeakable happiness to me to return to our army and again fight beneath our glorious banner.” Kellogg later wrote that he and his comrades did not wish to be “free from all participation in strife”; instead they preferred the “sulphurous smoke of the cannon, in the fiercely contested battle, for there,” Kellogg explained, “at least would be glorious action.”

Kellogg, Whitney, and Forbes returned home in 1865, but they were changed men, scarred by their memories. Kellogg tried to resume his career path as a druggist, but found himself disconnected and isolated. When a local deacon died, he wrote in his diary that he felt numb: “Death seems to have lost its solemnity in me since ‘Andersonville.’” Forbes returned to college, graduating from Yale in 1870; but rather than studying theology as planned, he became a journalist, reporting for the Springfield Union, the Hartford Evening Post, and The New York Times. George Whitney resettled in Hartford and began working as a contractor for his family’s machinist firm, Pratt and Whitney.

Whitney decided to create a biographical record of every single member of the 16th Connecticut—laborious work, in which Forbes, who by the turn of the century had authored numerous stories about the Civil War, and Kellogg assisted him. Nearly every single member has at least one sheet in the collection devoted to him. Some pages have only a soldier’s name and nothing more. Others provide long handwritten narrative descriptions of a particular soldier’s experiences, recounting wartime exploits and anecdotes. In addition to preserving these records, Whitney also attended funerals, aided comrades with pension applications, and visited veterans and their families. At one point he told another former member of the unit, “[t]he main thing to me is that they should be satisfied and pleased with what they know is done.”

Robert Kellogg, meanwhile, moved to Ohio, where he worked as an insurance agent. He stayed in close contact with both Whitney and Forbes, offering his own memories of individual soldiers for Whitney’s project, but also spinning his own version of the regiment’s record, focusing on the hardships the men faced at Andersonville. In March 1865, he published Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, an account dedicated to the families of POWs and the “thousands of brave men” who had “gone down to their untimely graves through unparalleled sufferings.” The book bitterly laid blame on Confederate authorities; Kellogg also testified at the trial of Henry Wirz, the infamous commandant of Andersonville. In his accounts, Kellogg emphasized the sacrifice and stoic valor of the unit, seldom speaking of the despair that led some comrades to take oaths of loyalty to the Confederacy. In Life and Death in Rebel Prisons, he denounced these men as cowards, but in his later published writings he was silent about them.

Ira Forbes, too, sought ways to promote positive stories about the unit. His initial account of captivity, written months after his release, is remarkably free of bitterness: “I do not,” he told his readers, “desire revenge.” Forty years later, he completed a lengthy history of Andersonville, anxious to have it available in time for the monument dedication of “Andersonville Boy” at the site of the former prison.

Survivors of the 16th Connecticut did other things, too, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the unit: dedicating monuments at Antietam, Andersonville, and Hartford; attending reunions; marching in parades; and making public speeches. They collected scraps of their regimental flags, which they had hidden and saved from their capture at Plymouth, and had them sewn into a new flag designed by Tiffany & Co., a tangible emblem of their efforts to never forget. But there were always cracks in the narrative: Different soldiers told different stories, with some more willing than others to admit the unit’s failures and foibles. The strands of the story they were trying to create never really came together.

Forbes, in particular, could sound like a Southern apologist, refusing to blame Confederates for the horrors of Andersonville and refuting charges that Confederates wantonly murdered surrendered African American troops at the battle of Plymouth. Kellogg supported his old friend, writing, “You are doing grand good work in a thorough and careful way, and it makes interesting reading.” Whitney, however, was more critical. “I believe,” he maintained, “in putting things as they were, not as you wish they had been.” Forbes did not accompany his fellow veterans to Georgia when the Andersonville monument was dedicated.

The men kept working diligently on these memorials, but their recollections gradually receded in relevance and clarity. By 1907, Kellogg wrote a note to Whitney on the back of a business card: “Were we really ever in Andersonville?” Four years later, Forbes was committed to an insane asylum; Whitney was one of two comrades who signed the commitment papers. Whitney remained indefatigable, devoting years to his biographies, but his records mainly preserve the minutiae of forgotten men. In 1925, soon after his death, Whitney’s family donated this massive collection of notes and handwritten sketches to the Connecticut State Library, where it resides today.

The Civil War service record of the 16th Connecticut was marked by failure in its only full-fledged battle and a long, dehumanizing imprisonment, and it conflicted with conventional narratives of martial heroism. George Whitney, Robert Kellogg, and Ira Forbes were determined to recount their military service, to record and preserve it, and to ensure that no one would ever be ashamed of it. The great irony is that despite their earnest determination to never forget, few Americans know anything about them at all.

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The recipe for “Queen’s Cake” was pure social aspiration, in the British mode, with its butter whipped to a cream, pound of sugar, pound and a quarter of flour, 10 eggs, glass of wine, half-teacup of delicate-flavored rosewater, and spices. And “Plumb Cake” offered the striving housewife a huge 21-egg showstopper, full of expensive dried and candied fruit, nuts, spices, wine, and cream.

Then—mere pages away—sat johnnycake, federal pan cake, buckwheat cake, and Indian slapjack, made of familiar ingredients like cornmeal, flour, milk, water, and a bit of fat, and prepared “before the fire” or on a hot griddle. They symbolized the plain, but well-run and bountiful, American home. A dialogue on how to balance the sumptuous with the simple in American life had begun.

American Cookery sold well for more than 30 years, mainly in New England, New York, and the Midwest, before falling into oblivion. Since the 1950s it has attracted an enthusiastic audience, from historians to home cooks. The Library of Congress recently designated American Cookery one of the 88 “Books That Shaped America.”

The collection of recipes, which appeared in numerous legitimate and plagiarized editions, is as much a cultural phenomenon as a cooking book. In the early years of the Republic, Americans were engaged in a lively debate over their identity; with freedom from Britain and the establishment of a republican government came a need to assert a distinctly American way of life. In the words of 20th-century scholar Mary Tolford Wilson, this slight cookbook can be read as “another declaration of American independence.”

The book accomplished this feat in two particularly important ways. First, it was part of a broader initiative, led by social and political elites in Connecticut, that advanced a particular brand of Yankee culture and commerce as a model for American life and good taste. At the same time, its author spoke directly to ordinary American women coping with everyday challenges and frustrations.

The title page of American Cookery. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

American Cookery was a Connecticut project. There, a still mainly agricultural society of small independent farms was positioned to benefit from trading networks, near and far. But moving beyond mere subsistence farming required an openness to these new markets and to the world of commerce in general. Connecticut’s Federalist leaders were well-connected to influential newspapers, printers, and booksellers, and were able to promulgate a vision of an America where agriculture would flourish with the help of commerce—rather than in opposition to it.

Jeffersonians who disagreed with this outlook emphasized rural life as an end in itself. For them, the future of American society depended on the spread of the smallhold farmer, whose rustic simplicity would inoculate their fledgling country against the corrupting influence of the luxury to which Britain had succumbed.

The two camps took part in a public debate about luxuries—were they totems of prosperity or symbols of social decay? Some American thinkers, such as Joel Barlow, the author of the popular poem The Hasty Pudding, maintained that thoroughgoing simplicity should form the basis of American cooking and eating. But the Connecticut Federalists thought such asceticism left too little room for the aspirations of common people to improve their lot. These moderates preferred to encourage a kind of restrained gentility that would, in time, become the parlor rectitude of Victorian America. For those in the Federalist camp, encouraging education and the modest enjoyment of worldly goods would help build an enlightened society.

While their way of thinking was nothing if not temperate, the Connecticut Federalists promoted their views vigorously. They published Noah Webster’s popular Blue Back Speller (1783), the first American spelling book and primer, so called because of its cheap blue paper covers; Jedidiah Morse’s American Geography (1789), the first general compendium of political and geographic information about the new nation; as well as the writings of a literary circle known as the Connecticut Wits, whose poems allegorized the American Revolution and envisioned a glorious destiny for the new country. Many of these best-selling works were published by the firm of Hudson & Goodwin—which also published the first edition of American Cookery. Complementing this new American literary harvest were other ventures in locally-made goods. Imports were far from rare, but the message was clear: Everything—books, clothing, furniture, and even food—could be given an American slant.

With its new take on a practical topic, American Cookery caught the spirit of the times. It was the first cookbook to include foods like cranberry sauce, johnnycakes, Indian slapjacks, and custard-style pumpkin pie.

Moreover, Simmons had a keen understanding of the care that went into the construction of American household abundance. Behind every splendidly arrayed table lay the precise management of all the fruits and vegetables, meats and poultry, preserves and jellies, and cakes and pies that sustained the home and family—and American Cookery gave cooks and housewives tips for everyday cooking as well as occasions when the aim was to express greater gentility.

Simmons explained how to keep peas green until Christmas and how to dry peaches. She introduced culinary innovations like the use of the American chemical leavener pearlash, a precursor of baking soda. And she substituted American food terms for British ones—treacle became molasses, and cookies replaced small cakes or biscuits.

Above all, American Cookery proposed a cuisine combining British foods—long favored in the colonies and viewed as part of a refined style of life—with dishes made with local ingredients and associated with homegrown foodways. It asserted cultural independence from the mother country even as it offered a comfortable level of continuity with British cooking traditions.

American Cookery also carried emotional appeal, striking a chord with American women living in sometimes-trying circumstances. Outside of this one book, there is little evidence of Amelia Simmons’s existence. The title page simply refers to her as “An American Orphan.” Publishers Hudson & Goodwin may have sought her out, or vice versa: The cookbook’s first edition notes that it was published “For the Author,” which at the time usually meant that the writer funded the endeavor.

Whatever Simmons’s backstory might have been, American Cookery offers tantalizing hints of the struggles she faced. Although brief, the prefaces of the first two editions and an errata page are written in a distinctive (and often complaining) voice. In her first preface, Simmons recounts the trials of female orphans, “who by the loss of their parents, or other unfortunate circumstances, are reduced to the necessity of going into families in the line of domestics or taking refuge with their friends or relations.”

She warns that any such young female orphan, “tho’ left to the care of virtuous guardians, will find it essentially necessary to have an opinion and determination of her own.” For a female in such circumstances, the only course is “an adherence to those rules and maxims which have stood the test of ages, and will forever establish the female character, a virtuous character.” Lest the point somehow be missed, Simmons again reminds readers that, unlike women who have “parents, or brothers, or riches, to defend their indiscretions,” a “poor solitary orphan” must rely “solely upon character.”

The book appears to have sold well, despite Simmons’s accusation on the errata page of “a design to impose on her, and injure the sale of the book.” She ascribes these nefarious doings to the person she “entrusted with the recipes” to prepare them for the press. In the second edition she thanks the fashionable ladies, or “respectable characters,” as she calls them, who have patronized her work, before returning to her main theme: the “egregious blunders” of the first edition, “which were occasioned either by the ignorance, or evil intention of the transcriber for the press.” Ultimately, all her problems stem from her unfortunate condition; she is without “an education sufficient to prepare the work for the press.” In an attempt to sidestep any criticism that the second edition might come in for, she writes: “remember, that it is the performance of, and effected under all those disadvantages, which usually attend, an Orphan.”

These parts of the book evoke sympathy. Women of her time seem to have found the combination of Simmons’ orphan status and her collection of recipes hard to resist, and perhaps part of the reason lies in her intimations of evil as much as her recipes. When the pennywise housewife cracked American Cookery open, she found a guide to a better life, which was the promise of her new country. But worry and danger lurked just below the surface of late 18th-century American life, especially for women on the social margins. In a nation still very much in the making, even a project as simple as the compilation of a cookbook could trigger complex emotions. American Cookery offered U.S. readers the best in matters of food and dining as well as a tale of the tribulations facing less fortunate Americans—including, it seems, the “American Orphan” Amelia Simmons herself.

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