The regiment was saved. Furthermore, it was actually, if not legally, in the service of the United States. But there yet remained certain complex processes which had to be gone through with before the "U.S.V." should supplant the "M.V.M." By a pleasant legal fiction, it had to be assumed that the militia regiment which had set out for Fort Warren had been lost somewhere en route, and that it had become imperatively necessary to raise a new regiment to take its place in the volunteer service. All this, of course, was but the most utter rubbish—and rubbish which under easily supposable conditions might prove dangerous—yet the obsolete militia laws which Congress has left upon the statute books, unaltered for nearly a century, made its observance necessary. General Dalton therefore (Special Orders, No. 45, 29th April) gravely issued instructions for the formation of the new regiment, though oddly enough he neglected the matter of making inquiries as to what had become of the old one. These instructions were brief and to the point: "Colonel Charles Pfaff, having been designated to command a volunteer regiment of heavy artillery, under the call of the President of the United States, will cause the enrolment of such officers and men as may volunteer in such regiment, and will cause to be prepared the necessary papers for muster into service of such volunteers, by Major Carle A. Woodruff, commanding at Fort Warren."

This order meant two things for the officers of the First. It required a final and most careful revision of the battery rolls, and a last searching scrutiny by the medical officers of the physical condition of the rank and file. Of these two requirements, the first was by far the most important. Had the regiment been formed in line, and the order been given for volunteers to step to the front, there can be no question that the command would have responded to the last man. But it was exactly this sort of thing that the officers wished to avoid. The regiment was about to enter upon a two-years' term of service, and its officers felt it their duty to discourage the enlistment of all whose families or dependents would suffer undue hardship should that term prove necessary. It was felt that any public call for volunteers would place men in false positions—as such procedure actually did in many States—and it was decided quietly to inquire into the merits of each individual case, refusing such men as could not show that their entry into the service would not work material injury either to themselves or to others. By adhering to this rule, the regiment lost a small percentage of the strength with which it went out, but the drain was easily made good by draft from the eager recruits who had been left behind. Better still, the men rejected for these reasons were enabled to retain their self-respect, and they left for their homes with the sympathy and good-will of their late comrades.

The task of the two medical officers was a trying one. Day after day they labored at the monotonous physical examinations, until they practically became worn out. Including recruits drafted to fill the vacant places made by rejections for business and family reasons or physical deficiencies, they were obliged to pass upon the qualifications of nearly nine hundred officers and men. It should be recorded, to the credit of the battery commanders as recruiting officers, that rejections for physical causes were few and far between, the rigid examination finding but one officer and fifteen men—a surprisingly small number—unfit for duty. General sympathy was felt for those sent away by the surgeons, for without exception they were men whose desire to go out with the regiment was of the keenest.

But during all the uncertainty as to the final disposition of the regiment, as well as while the work of transferring it from the militia to the volunteer service was in progress, the garrison duty for which it had been so hastily summoned was not neglected for a moment. On the 27th of April, the day after the command reported at the fort, the batteries had been assigned to their fighting-stations, and steady drill at the guns had begun. The drill was no light matter; excluding the ceremonies of guard-mounting and evening parade, the regimental order called for four hours and a half daily of solid work at the heavy guns, and that work was performed with an energy never shown at the annual tours of instruction in time of peace. On the many days when weather conditions kept the men from the parapets, schools of instruction were held in quarters, for the study of guard duty, of army regulations, and other matters of the sort. By April 30th, the regimental signal corps, made up of twelve non-commissioned officers and thirty-six privates, under the signal officer with an assistant, had been fully organized, and was steadily employed in wig-wagging. On May 1st, the light regimental guard mounted during the first few days of the tour was replaced by a strong guard of two officers with fifty-seven non-commissioned officers and privates. From these, details were made for the patrol-boat crews, and reliefs were furnished for the chain of posts by which the island was surrounded.

With the assignment to gun-stations, the organization of the garrison on a fighting-basis stood completed. The two regular batteries—"C" (Schenck's) and "M" (Richmond's)—were stationed at the 10-inch, breech-loading, disappearing rifles mounted in Bastion B and in the Ravelin Battery; with them, for purposes of instruction, and to furnish reliefs if required, were four batteries of the volunteers, "A" (Bordman's), "C" (Nutter's), "I" (Williamson's), and "L" (Whiting's). To the 8-inch converted rifles on the eastern face of the fort, commanding the main ship channel, were assigned four more batteries of the First, "B" (Lombard's), "F" (Danforth's), "K" (Howes'), and "M" (Braley's). The 15-inch Rodman guns, mounted in barbette on Bastion A, were manned by "G" (Chick's) and "H" (Pratt's) Batteries. "E" Battery (Gibbs') was told off for the 8-inch converted rifles in the casemate battery of Bastion A, while "D" Battery (Frothingham's) was assigned to the machine-gun section, made up of Hotchkiss and Gatling guns.

Variety in artillery work certainly was not lacking, for the men of the regiment found themselves called upon to handle every type of ordnance, from the ponderous modern rifle, on its complex mount, to the spiteful Gatling, destined to spit its fire at prowling torpedo-boats or chance landing parties. Nor was the drill in the manual of the piece all that was required: attention had to be given to magazine-work, mechanical manoeuvres, and the use of cordage, while range and position finding were not neglected. "K" and "L" Batteries also obtained a chance to demonstrate their knowledge of the use of garrison-gin and sling-cart by moving from the fort to the pier certain spare 8-inch converted rifles, for shipment to other points on the coast—a task which they performed promptly and with credit to their earlier training in the handling of heavy weights. Infantry drill was not entirely neglected, and daily marching manoeuvres and setting-up exercises were relied upon to keep the men in form, while steadiness under arms was taught at each evening parade.

Meanwhile progress in the preparations for the muster of the regiment into the service of the United States had not been delayed. Colonel H. E. Converse, A.Q.M.G., assisted by Colonel F. B. Stevens, A.D.C., had been on duty at the post, representing the State in the final settlement of property accountability on the part of the battery commanders, and as the result of their labors the title to the arms and equipments of the regiment was passed to the general Government. The physical examinations had been concluded, and recruits had been received for all vacancies. Muster-rolls and all other papers were ready on Saturday, May 7th, and on the evening of that day Colonel Pfaff reported his command as prepared for the mustering-in ceremony. It was first proposed to have this take place on Sunday, but on second thought it was considered better to defer it until the following day—which, as it proved, resulted in giving to "K" Company, of the Second Massachusetts Infantry, the honor of being the first command in the State to complete its actual muster.

Contrary to the prevailing rule, Monday, the 9th of May, proved to be a sunny and pleasant day. Early in the morning, the regiment was formed in its battery streets, in readiness for its entry into the volunteer army. Promptly at eight o'clock, Major Carle A. Woodruff, Second United States Artillery, commanding the post, and with it the other defenses of Boston Harbor, took his station before regimental headquarters, in readiness for the ceremony. The regiment felt itself honored by his detail as its mustering-officer: a typical American soldier, he had received the brevets of captain, major, and lieutenant-colonel for gallant and meritorious services at Gettysburg, at Trevillian Station, and during the Civil War as a whole, while he also had been decorated with the medal of honor for distinguished gallantry in action at Newby's Cross Roads. He had been closely identified with the regiment since its change from the infantry to the artillery arm, and its officers held him in the warmest esteem.

It had been arranged that the batteries should be mustered in the order of the seniority of their captains, and thus the first command to march across the parade was "M" under veteran Captain Braley, who was responding for the second time to the call of his country in time of war. His appearance before the mustering officer was the signal for a round of applause from the group of staff officers gathered at headquarters. In a very few minutes both he and his command had ceased to be militiamen, and had become United States Volunteers—to be followed rapidly by the other eleven batteries of the regiment. As a matter of record, it was exactly 9.34 A.M. when Colonel Woodruff finished administering the oath to the field, staff, and non-commissioned staff officers, thus completing the muster of the regiment. Everything had moved with the regularity of clock-work, and in but little over an hour and a half more than seven hundred and fifty officers and men had answered to their names as called from the muster-rolls, and had sworn to serve the United States faithfully and well for the two years to come.

In this connection the statement made in the newspaper history of the Second Massachusetts Infantry must be corrected. It is but a minor point, of course, yet soldiers are wont to be jealously tenacious on minor points affecting their own records. "This regiment," writes the historian of the Second, "was the first to be mustered into the service of the United States, the first to leave Massachusetts, the first to invade Cuba—the first of our regiments to enter the actualities of war." As a strict matter of record, the Second Infantry was mobilized at Framingham on May 3rd, where it completed its muster-in (though "K" Company had been mustered on May 8th) on May 10th. The First Artillery entered the United States service as militia on April 26th, dating its pay-rolls from that day, and had been mustered complete before 10 o'clock in the forenoon of May 9th. It was the first militia regiment in the service; it became the first volunteer regiment in the service. In contending for this recognition it certainly does not seek to rob the Second of its hard-won laurels, for the First and Second, brigaded together for long years, always have been firm friends, though strong rivals. Chained in its posts along shore, the First yet watched with interest and admiration the career of the men from western Massachusetts, and in their trials and triumphs in far-away Cuba their hearts would have warmed could they have heard the verdict of their brethren of the First—"Well done, Second Massachusetts!"