I recently read "The Civil War: The Nantucket Experience" by Miller & Mooney. It includes selections from the memoirs of Josiah Murphey. Murphey enlisted as a replacement for the 20th Reg, (CO I) in 1862. From Nantucket he was sent to Camp Cameron for two weeks of training before being sent to the seat of war. He estimated the number of soldiers to be between four & five thousand. The day before he left the number was three thousand recruits, and that is the greatest number I have seen, but even this number would have been augmented by camp staff and civilian visitors. No matter how you count the population of the small camp it was still a very high percentage of the entire island of Nantucket at that time. The dense population and wide range of nationalities presents made the camp a "hard place." His other observations include, how at that time of high bounty jumping, the camp guard was there to keep recruits in the camp, not to keep intruders out. He also described how every morning you could see several hundred men washing themselves in the Tannery Brook.
DAN SULLIVAN
DAN SULLIVAN
