Rufus Y. Crockett was born around 1830 in Maine to Richard and Mary Crockett. His father died in 1846. By 1850, he was living with his brother Levi in Deer Isle, Maine, and he was working as a sailor. He moved to Augusta, Maine, in the 1850s and married Susan R. Longfellow around 1854. By 1860, he was working as a printer. He enlisted in the Union army on June 4, 1861, and mustered in as a corporal in Company B of the 3^rd Maine Infantry later that day. The regiment took part in the First Battle of Bull Run, the Peninsula campaign, the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Battle of Gettysburg.

 

In August 1862, he expressed frustration with the Union war effort and the country’s political leaders. He hoped that Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson would “clean out Washington for I dont consider it worth saving.” He remained devoted to the Union, writing that he “love[d] my country.” As “long as her Wars are conducted by fools,” however, he had ”little faith in fighting.” On September 2, 1863, he was promoted to 1^st lieutenant in Company K of the 81^st USCT Infantry. He was promoted to captain on July 1, 1864, and he resigned on October 15, 1864.

 

Crockett returned to Maine after leaving the army. The war, however, had apparently damaged his health. He applied for a federal pension in December 1864 and eventually secured one. He supported Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign for president in 1868, helping organize a “mass state convention” of Union soldiers in Portland that July. He championed Reconstruction, declaring that the “principles for which we fought during the rebellion have been faithfully regarded by the Union majority in Congress.” The “men who fought together to save the Republic from rebel domination, and sustained the Union cause at the ballot box of 1864,” he insisted, “will act together in 1868 and triumphantly elect the hero of Donelson, Vicksburg and Appomattox.”

 

By 1870, he was working as a sign painter in Augusta, and he owned $1,500 of real estate and $300 of personal property. They moved to Bath, Maine, sometime in the 1870s and adopted a daughter named Gertrude Howard. He joined the Grand Army of the Republic and attended at least one reunion. He died in Bath in 1884.

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