During the Civil War in upstate New York, Finger Lakes region, most of the eligible men went to fight in the brutal, grisly war which was mostly fought down in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia, well south of New York. A huge number of men were killed right away and in particular in the first three years, 1860-1863. Tales came back to the towns in the north about how people lost limbs and then just died because there was no care, or died from exposure to the harsh weather of the Appalachian Mountains that they kept having to tromp through to get to these various battlefields.
People stayed home mostly only if they had very young children who would be endangered by their leaving. Such was the case with Joseph Lafayette Mansfield, who had children 8, 6, 4 & 2, or something like that, and felt that if he left for the war they would have no way to eat. Sometimes if a guy could leave his wife with her family or another well-established family he could go anyway. but this did not seem to be the case with Joseph. He stayed behind, and farmed for the sustenance of his young family, and listened to the reports of people coming back from the front.
In those days support for the war wasn't universal; it had happened suddenly, and there were plenty of people who didn't feel like marching off into the cold mountains to the south, to get killed or wounded in the rain. There were plenty of people who tried to rustle up patriotic feelings for keeping the union together, but some just felt that if they wanted to separate off, let them. Most people were at least nominally in support of the soldiers though, and gave what they could to help the war effort. If you were a farmer you gave food. If you were able to work in a place that made war implements, you did that.
Joseph Lafayette Mansfield, I think, was a farmer, but he was also a poet and a very literate man. So when an army sergeant returned from Andersonville, toward the end of the war, he wrote a poem about him.
Andersonville, Georgia, was the worst of prisoner-of-war prisons, deep in the heart of Georgia. The sergeant, Daniel Blanchard, came back to upstate New York emaciated and starved, in terrible condition. There is no telling how he even got back to New York in the condition he was in. His stories and his condition shocked everyone.
By this time it was the end of the war. Confederate soldiers were themselves starving, so there was no way they would use their limited food supplies to feed northern prisoners of war. But the Andersonville prisoners had been swapped for Confederate prisoners toward the end of the war, and that's how Blanchard got free and was able to make it back home to central New York.
Joseph Lafeyette's poem was a tribute to brave soldiers who had endured starvation and privation in the name of the Union, and who saw the Union flag upon their release, and felt that their suffering was justified and worthwhile. The poem was Joseph's contribution to the war effort.
