Huntington Frothingham Wolcott

In 1865, the 19-year-old Wolcott enlisted in the Union Army, despite his family’s hesitance. Serving under General Sheridan, Wolcott survived the decisive battle of Five Forks in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, only to die from typhoid fever a few months later. Two years after Wolcott’s death, his stepmother commissioned this portrait bust from Richard Greenough, a Boston-born artist, who was the younger brother of the well-known sculptor Horatio Greenough. The artist’s neoclassical style, evoking an ideal past of virtue and nobility, is well suited to the inscription on the characteristically Victorian pedestal: “Dear Mamma you must let me go I feel so about it I think it would be sweet to die for my country.” The words—taken from a letter Wolcott wrote to his stepmother—echo a verse from the Roman poet Horace, while expressing the heartfelt sentiments of “honorable manhood” that pervaded Civil War correspondence.