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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The regimental history of the 6th New York Heavy Artillery is 420 men long, if you count only the dead. The regiment fought at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Cedar Creek — every major engagement of Grant’s 1864 Overland Campaign, the grinding, relentless, deliberate destruction of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Of the men who served in the regiment, 420 did not come home. The number is exact. Someone counted.
Norman Melvin Putnam came home.
He was from Bethany, New York, a small farming settlement in Genesee County between Rochester and Buffalo, and after the war he moved to Iowa and then to Dakota and he died in Aberdeen in June of 1895, fifty-eight years old, having lived long enough to watch the frontier itself run out. His wife was Julia Stratton — daughter of Francis Joel Stratton, the doctor and Union spy whose story is told elsewhere in this collection, and of Joel’s first wife Asenath Hawks, who died when Julia was six months old. Julia was raised as a stepdaughter by Hester Donnellan, Joel’s third wife. Frank Nelson Stratton, my grandfather, was Julia’s half-brother — same father, different mothers. Norman Putnam married into this family as my grandfather’s uncle by marriage, which is how he came to me.
What I know about Norman Putnam’s war comes largely from the published regimental history of the regiment he served in, one of the more thoroughly documented units of the Army of the Potomac. What I know about the rest of his life comes from census records, family records, and the particular shape of a man who survived everything 1864 had to offer and then spent the next thirty years moving steadily west, as though the country he came back to wasn’t quite large enough to hold him.
“A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.” —Carl Jung
Norman Melvin Putnam was born on June 1, 1837, in Bethany, Genesee County, New York — a township that had been settled barely a generation before his birth, carved out of the Genesee Valley forests by families who had come west from New England looking for better land than their rocky home counties had offered. The Putnams were among those families. They were farming people, which in western New York in the 1840s and 1850s meant wheat, and then increasingly the kind of diversified mixed agriculture that the expanding canal system and the railroads were beginning to make profitable by connecting the interior counties to the markets of New York City and the East.
Norman was twenty-four years old when the war began, a farmer’s son in a county full of farmers’ sons, a young man with all the ordinary circumstances of that particular time and place: a community small enough that everyone knew everyone, a family rooted deeply enough in the soil that leaving it was not undertaken lightly, and a country that was about to ask every young man of his generation to do exactly that.
He enlisted in the summer of 1862, when the war was already sixteen months old and clearly would not end quickly. Bull Run and Shiloh and the Seven Days had happened. The easy patriotism of 1861 was gone. He signed his name and he went.
“In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.” —José Narosky
The regiment Norman joined was organized in the summer of 1862 at Yonkers, New York, as the 135th New York Infantry. It drew its men from the counties north of the city — farming communities, river towns, the kind of places that produced steady, reliable recruits who knew how to work and how to follow orders and who would, in the next three years, demonstrate those qualities under conditions that no one in Yonkers in the summer of 1862 could have fully imagined. The regiment was nicknamed the Anthony Wayne Guard, after the Revolutionary War general who had campaigned through the same Hudson Valley country where many of its men were born.
In October of 1862, the regiment was redesignated the 6th New York Heavy Artillery. This was, in theory, a distinction with practical consequences: heavy artillery units were assigned to garrison the extensive fortifications protecting Washington, D.C., which meant that for the first eighteen months of the regiment’s service, Norman Putnam was not in the field at all. He was in a fort. He was sleeping in a barracks. He was drilling on heavy siege guns and learning the geometry of fortress warfare — the angles of fire, the mathematics of powder charges, the physics of large projectiles at long range.
It was not the war anyone had imagined when they enlisted. It was safe, and boring, and it was not going to stay that way.
In the months between the redesignation and the spring of 1864, the regiment saw action at Harper’s Ferry, Manassas Gap, and Mine Run — real engagements, real casualties, real evidence that the war was coming for everyone eventually regardless of where they were stationed. But these were skirmishes compared to what was being prepared. In the winter of 1863 and 1864, the Army of the Potomac was reorganizing under a new commanding general, and that general had a theory about how the war was going to end, and the theory had consequences for every heavy artillery regiment in the Washington defenses.
“Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” —Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant took command of all Union armies in March of 1864. He saw where the men were: the heavy artillery regiments sitting in the Washington fortifications, fully organized and fully trained, doing work a smaller garrison could do just as well. He stripped the forts and sent them south.
Norman Putnam and the 6th New York Heavy Artillery were assigned to the 5th Corps. They crossed the Rapidan River on May 4, 1864, in the first movement of Grant’s Overland Campaign. The men around them — veterans of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg — looked at the big, clean, well-fed artillerists with the professional skepticism of men who had been through things and were not sure these newcomers understood what they were walking into.
They found out quickly enough.
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” —William Tecumseh Sherman
The Wilderness was a tract of second-growth forest in Spotsylvania County, Virginia — dense scrub oak and pine, cut through by narrow roads and nearly impossible to move through in formation, the kind of terrain that neutralized every advantage Union numbers and artillery should have provided. Lee had fought here before, at Chancellorsville, and he had chosen to fight here again precisely because it was so difficult. In the Wilderness, a smaller army that knew the ground could contest a larger army that didn’t.
The fighting in the Wilderness was unlike anything the heavy artillery regiments had trained for or could have fully anticipated. Lines of battle disappeared in the undergrowth. Men fired at muzzle flashes rather than at visible enemies. The woods caught fire from the powder charges, and wounded men burned. Units lost their way in the smoke and the tangled scrub and fired into their own flanks. The noise was beyond description — not the ordered thunder of an artillery duel but something continuous and close and disorienting, coming from no single direction, filling every space.
The 6th New York Heavy Artillery, newly infantry, learned in two days what the veterans of the Army of the Potomac had been learning for three years. They learned it the hard way, which is the only way the Wilderness offered.
Grant did not stop. When Lee expected the Army of the Potomac to regroup and fall back north — as every previous Union commander had done after a battle in Virginia went badly — Grant moved south instead, sliding around Lee’s flank, toward Spotsylvania Court House.
“I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” —Ulysses S. Grant, dispatched from Spotsylvania, May 11, 1864
Spotsylvania was thirteen days of fighting, the longest sustained engagement of the campaign and one of the costliest single battles of the entire war. The Confederate line was a heavily fortified semicircle of earthworks with a protruding salient — the Mule Shoe, soldiers called it, for its shape — that Union forces attacked again and again, most memorably on May 12, when the assault on the Bloody Angle produced hand-to-hand fighting at the parapet for eighteen hours in the rain, men stabbing and shooting and clubbing each other across a wall of logs and dirt while the rain turned the ground to red mud.
The 6th New York Heavy Artillery was in it. The regimental history records eighteen killed, one hundred and thirty-one wounded, and six missing at Spotsylvania. One hundred and fifty-five casualties in thirteen days, from a regiment that had entered the campaign at full strength because it had been sitting in Washington forts for eighteen months. The men who had looked at the heavy artillerists with professional skepticism a month earlier were looking at them differently now.
Norman Putnam’s name does not appear in the casualty lists for Spotsylvania. He was there. The regiment was there. One hundred and fifty-five men gone, and he was not among them.
“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can.” —Ulysses S. Grant
The Overland Campaign moved south after Spotsylvania: North Anna, where the regiment lost another seventeen killed, ninety-nine wounded, and seventeen missing. Then Cold Harbor.
Cold Harbor was June 3, 1864. Grant ordered a frontal assault on Confederate earthworks. Seven thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded in less than an hour. Veteran soldiers in some units pinned their names to the backs of their coats before the assault so their bodies could be identified afterward. The 6th New York went in with them.
Grant said afterward it was a mistake.
The Overland Campaign moved south again. The 6th New York crossed the James River and took up positions around Petersburg, where the Confederate lines were dug in so deeply that Grant’s army settled in for a siege. The regimental history records ninety-two casualties at Petersburg over the course of the siege operations. Then, in the fall, the regiment was detached north to the Shenandoah Valley, where Phil Sheridan was making the Valley uninhabitable for Confederate forces and the civilian population that sustained them.
“There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” —Winston Churchill
Cedar Creek is the battle where Jubal Early’s Confederate army surprised the Union camps at dawn, routed three Union corps before breakfast, and had everything going well until Phil Sheridan rode twenty miles from Winchester on a horse he had been pushing since he heard the guns, arrived at the head of his retreating army, turned it around by sheer force of personal authority, and destroyed Early’s army in the afternoon of the same day it had routed his own.
The 6th New York Heavy Artillery was in it on both ends: the morning rout and the afternoon counterattack. The regimental history records ninety-four killed, wounded, or missing at Cedar Creek. Colonel James P. McMahon, who had led the regiment since its organization, was mortally wounded. Major William H. Doyle, the second in command, was also mortally wounded. The regiment lost its two senior officers in a single day.
Ninety-four casualties. That is the number the history records, clean and precise and utterly inadequate to what it describes. It does not record the particular sound of October mornings in the Shenandoah Valley, or what it is like to run from a fight in the gray dawn and then, a few hours later, walk back into the same ground with your colonel dying behind you and the enemy now on his back foot, or how a man makes sense of a day that contains both of those things before supper.
Norman Putnam was there. He came through it.
“It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” —Robert E. Lee
The regiment wintered in the Shenandoah after Cedar Creek and returned to the Petersburg lines in the spring of 1865. On April 2, 1865 — a Sunday morning — the Union lines attacked and broke through the Confederate earthworks at Petersburg. Lee abandoned the city that day and began the retreat that ended a week later at Appomattox Court House.
The 6th New York Heavy Artillery was among the forces that moved through the Petersburg lines on the morning of April 2. The regimental history is brief: the lines were carried, the city fell, the regiment moved through. There was still fighting — the Confederates did not simply stop — but it was over.
Four hundred and twenty men from the regiment had died since Yonkers in 1862. That number does not include the wounded who recovered, or the men who came home with something interior broken that left no mark in the regimental casualty lists. It counts only the dead.
Norman Putnam came home.
“The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” —Douglas MacArthur
The 1870 census finds Norman Putnam in Melrose Township, Grundy County, Iowa. He is thirty-three years old. He has married Julia Stratton — daughter of Francis Joel Stratton, who died in Washington in April 1863, and of Joel’s first wife Asenath Hawks, who died in 1840 when Julia was only six months old. Joel wrote his young wife’s obituary himself, in the Gates, New York papers: “By this death, a fond husband is bereaved of an amiable and lovely companion, and his only child — but six months of age — of a kind and watchful mother.” Julia grew up as a stepdaughter in Joel’s household, raised by his third wife Hester Donnellan, and by 1860 had left for New York State. She married Norman sometime before 1870. They have begun a family. Norman is farming again, in the good black soil of the Iowa prairie that is nothing like the Genesee Valley loam he grew up in and nothing like the Virginia clay that soaked up so much blood in 1864.
Iowa in 1870 was not the frontier anymore — the state had been settled since the 1840s, and Grundy County had farms and roads and churches. But it was west. Farther from Bethany, and farther from Spotsylvania and Cedar Creek. Norman Putnam looked out a different window in the morning.
The 1880 census finds him in the same place, still farming, the family grown. He is forty-three years old. He has lived nearly two decades since the war ended, long enough that a man who was not paying close attention might have thought he was simply a farmer in Grundy County, Iowa, with no more particular history than any of his neighbors. Whether he talked about the war — the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cedar Creek, the April morning at Petersburg — with his wife or his children or the men he met at the grain elevator or the church social, the record does not say.
What the record says is that by 1890 he had moved again.
“Go West, young man, go West. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.” —Horace Greeley
Aberdeen, South Dakota, sits in the northeastern corner of the state, in the glaciated prairie that the Great Plains writers always describe as flat and open and enormous in a way that is not precisely threatening but is not quite comfortable either, the sky pressing down on the horizon with a weight that has no eastern equivalent. The Northern Pacific Railroad had reached Aberdeen in 1880. The town had grown fast, the way Dakota towns grew in the 1880s — explosively, on speculation and optimism and the belief that the rainfall patterns of those particular years were normal rather than an anomalous wet cycle that was about to end. The Dakotas had been admitted to the Union in 1889, the year before Norman arrived, split into two states in a political compromise that gave the Republicans two Senate seats instead of one.
Norman Putnam was fifty-three when he got to Aberdeen. He had been farming since he came back from the war — Iowa black soil, good land, reliable harvests — and he had left it for the Dakota prairie, which was drier and harder and farther from everything he had started from. The frontier kept moving. He kept moving with it.
He was there for five years. He died on June 15, 1895, fifteen days past his fifty-eighth birthday. The cause of death is not recorded in the family records I have. He was buried at Riverside Cemetery in Aberdeen. His wife Julia — who had outlived her mother at six months old, her father in 1863, and now her husband in 1895 — survived him, as did their children. She lived on to 1913, dying in Tacoma, Washington, having moved west further still. The frontier did not run out for them the way it had for Norman; they lived on in a state that had only been admitted to the Union six years before he died.
“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.” —Samuel Johnson
The regimental history records the casualties clean: four hundred and twenty dead, the colonel and major both mortally wounded at Cedar Creek, losses at every engagement from May to October of 1864. What it does not record is what any individual man carried out the other side of them.
The census records Norman Putnam. The regimental history gives him a regiment and a campaign. The cemetery at Aberdeen gives him a grave.
He was from Bethany, New York, and he went to the war, and the Anthony Wayne Guard fought at every major battle of Grant’s 1864 campaign, and four hundred and twenty men in the regiment did not come home.
Norman Putnam came home.
He married Julia Stratton — daughter of my great-grandfather Joel — and through her he came to this family. She outlived him and moved west to Tacoma.
Norman Melvin Putnam. Bethany, Genesee County, New York. Spotsylvania. Cedar Creek. Melrose, Grundy County, Iowa. Aberdeen, Brown County, South Dakota.
He came home.
Norman Melvin Putnam (1837–1895) was born in Bethany, Genesee County, New York, and served in Company M of the 6th New York Heavy Artillery during the Civil War. The regiment fought in Grant’s 1864 Overland Campaign as infantry, sustaining heavy casualties at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Cedar Creek. After the war Norman settled in Melrose Township, Grundy County, Iowa (1870, 1880 federal censuses), and later in Aberdeen, Brown County, South Dakota, where he died June 15, 1895, and was buried at Riverside Cemetery. He married Julia Stratton, daughter of Francis Joel Stratton and his first wife Asenath Hawks. Julia’s half-brother was Frank Nelson Stratton, making Norman the author’s great-uncle by marriage. Julia Stratton Putnam died March 15, 1913, in Tacoma, Washington. Historical context drawn from the published regimental history of the 6th New York Heavy Artillery (Cyclopedia of Battles, 1908) and Bruce Catton’s Grant Takes Command (1968).
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
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