For years after the war, he remembered every detail of his service, looking up members of his old regiment if he happened to visit a city where they lived, addressing veterans’ gatherings and maintaining a close friendship with his old commander, Gen. Daniel E. Sickles.

Sickles, like Mark Twain, was an odd friend for a minister. One New England cavalry captain, Charles Francis Adams, described the general’s Civil War headquarters as “a combination of bar-room and a brothel.” A diplomat and Congressman before the war, Sickles’ escapades were legendary. He introduced a New York City prostitute to Queen Victoria. He achieved notoriety by gunning down his wife’s lover within sight of the White House. He pleaded temporary insanity and beat the charge of murder, resuming his Congressional seat and his marriage.

A Democrat, Sickles defended the property rights of slaveholders in Congress, but when the war began, he delivered a reluctant Tammany Hall to support it. Lincoln authorized him to organize a brigade. (After the Civil War, Sickles continued his incredible life, carrying on a well-publicized affair with the Queen of Spain and helping steal the presidential election of 1876 for the Republicans.)

Sickles named his brigade Excelsior -- “Ever Upward!”, New York’s state motto -- and Twichell became chaplain of one of its five regiments, the 71st New York State Volunteers.

The regiment was largely made up of Irish working-class Catholics from lower Manhattan, Democrats not much in sympathy with the war’s aims - an unusual flock for a Congregationalist from Connecticut. He wrote his father: “If you ask why I fixed upon this regiment, composed as it is of rough, wicked men, I answer, that was the very reason. I should not expect a revival, but I should expect to make some good impressions by treating with kindness a class of men who are little used to it.”

In June 1880, some Hartford women bent on similar kindness organized a charity bazaar in Hartford for the Union for Home Work, an institutional ancestor of the present-day Hartford Neighborhood Centers, Inc. They asked the reverend to contribute something to a paper they were publishing each day the bazaar ran.

Joe Twichell thought back to an incident on the Maryland side of the lower Potomac River in the spring of 1862.

About this time, Mark Twain wrote to his editor William Dean Howells about his frustration with Twichell’s writing ability. “There’s a man who can tell such things himself (by word of mouth) & has as sure an eye for detecting a thing that is before his eyes, as any man in the world perhaps -- then why in the nation can’t he report himself with a pen?”

But Twain probably had not seen the brief 1862 memorandum from which Twichell drew the story for the charity bazaar newspaper. The account was unguarded, youthful and expressive, with a student’s love of the flourish and the multisyllabic word. It was written by a flickering light in the Maryland camp in the heat of emotion, the same day it happened.

Chaplain Joe Twichell, of abolitionist Plantsville, Connecticut, had just witnessed a slave hunt sanctioned by the U.S. Army -- a hunt with a surprise ending.

“For several days, owing I suppose to the prevailing rumor that we are on the point of departure, slaves have been coming to us from every quarter -- some of them from quite a distance -- and have asked to accompany the Regiment,” Twichell wrote on March 26, 1862. “Many of them -- the most -- are fine looking, well-mannered men, and a number of the officers have taken them into employ as cooks, grooms &c. nearly all of them having been accustomed to cooking and the care of horses.”

General Hooker, the divisional commander, was from abolitionist Massachusetts and might be expected to look the other way, Twichell wrote. “Of Gen. Sickles,” because of his Democratic background, “there was some doubt.” The refugees were advised not to wander too far from camp.

“This afternoon at about 3 1/2 o’clock I was startled by the sharp report of a pistol, evidently discharged at but a few rods distance from the rear of my tent. Thereupon followed a clamor and a rush of soldiers to that quarter. On going out my eyes first encountered a company of some 15 horsemen -- civilians -- quite near the camp riding slowly along through the clearing made by our axes this last winter. Next, I saw a comely negro, much excited, hatless and nearly breathless, just reaching the crowd that has gathered, after an evidently hard run. He it was at whom the shot was fired by one of the mounted party.”

A corporal of the 71st called out to the man who had fired that if he took another shot “it would be to commit suicide.” The riders paused among the tree stumps in the clearing, then moved toward the camp, with an increasing crowd of hostile soldiers around them.

At the gate they presented a pass signed on behalf of Hooker giving nine of them free rein “to visit all the camps of his command in search of their property, and if found that they be allowed to take possession of the same without any interference whatever.” The major temporarily in command had to let them through.

“ In they came,” wrote Twichell -- “the oppressors, haughtily sitting their splendid horses -- looking for all the world as if bent on the noblest errand. In they came -- the rich lords of the soil -- gentlemen, Christians, I suppose -- proud -- honorable -- white -- while the animals whom they sought to bind and lead away fled in dismay to the kindlier forest, or hid in boxes and secret corners until the terror passed...

“ Perhaps it was my hatred of the business in great part that warped the justice of my eyes, but these negro catchers appeared to me the most repulsive set of men I ever saw. They had not even the common courtesy to look mean, but lifted up their heads and gazed aloft as if looking into heaven. It seemed to me as I stood at my tent door and saw them pass, that I could lift up my voice and denounce them in God’s name.”