Seven score and ten years ago

Four months later, he took a bullet to the gut at Ball’s Bluff, a disastrous battle for the north, and the first cause for close grief here in Massachusetts. He spurned care, claiming others had a better shot at survival, and died in untold pain on Oct. 22, 1861. Governor John Andrew accompanied the body to the Putnams’ home at 13 Pemberton Square, near the John Adams Courthouse, home of the Supreme Judicial Court. Willie’s sister met them at the door. “Governor Andrew,” she said, “we thanked you when we got Willie’s commission. And we thank you now.” Andrew broke down in the doorway, and wept.

I’m married to a Civil War buff, and I’ve been to (and wept at) Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Antietam, and Spotsylvania. By all means, honor the fallen by heading south to a battlefield this year, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. (Note: one of the biggest reenactment celebrations is at Manassas July 21-24.) But also take a moment when you pass by the courthouse at Pemberton Square, or consider visiting the monument to the 54th Massachusetts on the Common this Memorial Day. Because the war upended Boston, too, and the soldiers who set out from here — as the three following books bear out.

I learned about Putnam in “Harvard’s Civil War: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry’’ by Richard F. Miller (University Press of New England, 2005). The Harvard in the title is a kind of shorthand. Yes, the 20th boasted lots of alums — like future Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Paul Joseph Revere, the midnight rider’s grandson — but also plenty of German and Irish immigrants, whalers from Nantucket, shoemakers from Pittsfield, and “street toughs” from Boston.