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CHAPTER FIVE

I Never Knew What War Meant till Today

ANTIETAM, SEPTEMBER 1862

The battle was coming; the men knew it. All day, off and on, they’d heard the boom of distant artillery. They had made camp in the rolling hills of western Maryland, just outside the town of Sharpsburg, and more and more troops kept arriving. Officers strode back and forth, looking tense; clerks were hunched over field desks, rapidly writing orders.

Connecticut’s raw 16th Regiment came into camp toward the end of the day, joining the other regiments in their brigade. Furtively, the 16th’s soldiers studied the dusty veterans who lounged around trading battle stories and smoking their pipes. The 16th had left Hartford just nineteen days earlier. They’d had almost no training. “It was little more than a crowd of earnest Connecticut boys,” wrote one soldier.¹ But there was no time left.

The day’s march had been a hard one, and the boys were hungry. The supply wagons hadn’t caught up with them yet, so some of them stripped a nearby cornfield, roasting the ears over fires built from fence rails. They’d hardly finished eating when they were hustled into ranks: their brigade was moving to the front.

They marched through the gathering darkness “into a meadow which lay between two hills,” wrote Lt. B. G. Blakeslee. “While getting into this position we could plainly see the rebel gunners load and fire, some of the shells coming quite near us … we were within a few rods of the enemy, and orders were given in a whisper; we were ordered to make no noise and to rest on our arms; for thirty minutes the utmost quiet prevailed. A musket was accidentally discharged; in a second the troops were on their feet, with arms at a ‘ready,’ and as they stood peering into the darkness ahead you could hear both lines of battle spring to arms for miles.”²

On the day he turned sixteen, Wells Bingham (left) enlisted in Connecticut’s 16th Regiment, along with his seventeen-year-old brother John (right). Less than three weeks after leaving Connecticut, the woefully inexperienced soldiers found themselves hurled into the chaos of battle near a meandering creek in western Maryland.

“[W]hat a queer sound it was,” wrote Pvt. William Relyea, “that rising of the hosts. Like the rushing of a strong wind that preceeds the storm, welling in fierceness and receeding in the distance … What a peculiar sensation it left upon our hearts, a dread and a fear of you knew not what … every nerve as you bend forward peering into the darkness before you, is strained to the utmost, and the heart beats loudly at the mystery of it all, yet we stood up manfully with the rest, though our blanching faces were kindly hidden by the darkness.”³

For Relyea and the other rookies of the 16th Connecticut, sleep was virtually impossible that night. But even with their minds running wild with anxiety, none of them could have imagined what tomorrow’s battle would bring. Those who survived would never look at life in the same way again.

SEPTEMBER 17, 1862, SHARPSBURG, MARYLAND

Minutes after sunrise, men were dying. In a pastoral landscape of cornfields, apple orchards, farmhouses, and woodlots, the bloodiest day in American history had begun. It would end with over 22,000 Americans dead, wounded, or missing.

Robert E. Lee had had the audacity to march his Rebels north into Maryland. He felt, mistakenly, that Maryland would support the Southern cause, and expected men there to flock to his army. From here, the Confederates posed a real threat to Washington. McClellan had to hurry his Union troops north to block them.

Lee had massed his Rebel troops—about 36,000 soldiers—on the west side of Antietam Creek, with the Potomac River at their backs. Meanwhile, McClellan had been gathering his Union troops on the east side of the creek.

The day before the battle, McClellan sent some 8,600 Union soldiers across the creek with Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, who maneuvered them to the north of Stonewall Jackson’s position. That night in the rain more Union troops, under Gen. J. K. F. Mansfield, followed Hooker across the creek.

At dawn, Union artillery opened on the Rebels, slicing into Stonewall Jackson’s forces. “Fighting Joe” Hooker marched his infantry south toward the Confederate line, pulling up before a great cornfield from which bayonets protruded. Union artillery raked the field, and Hooker reported: “In the time I am writing every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they stood in their ranks a few moments before.”⁴

The blue-coated infantry moved forward again, pushing Jackson’s Rebels back. Lee hustled reinforcements forward, and a little after seven o’clock, Hooker called for support. General Mansfield, waiting in the rear with his 12th Corps, swiftly advanced to reinforce the wavering Union forces.

The white-bearded Mansfield, fifty-eight, projected an air of alertness and experience to the roughly 8,000 men he commanded. Fifteen years earlier, in the Mexican War, Mansfield had been severely wounded and brevetted three separate times for his actions in battle. One of his Mexican War subordinates, John Pope, said that Mansfield “pervaded all places of danger, and everywhere put himself in the forefront of the battle … I never yet have seen a man so regardless of his personal safety or so eager to imperil it.”⁵

Antietam, Sharpsburg and Vicinity Constructed and Engraved to Illustrate “The War with the South,” by Charles Sholl, 1864.

A native of Middletown, Gen. Joseph K. F. Mansfield had served in the army since age eighteen, when he had graduated from West Point. At the outset of the war, Mansfield had capably protected the capital as commander of the Department of Washington—but he yearned for a field command. In September of 1862, Mansfield got his wish, taking charge of the Union army’s 12th Corps. “Although he appeared like a calm and dignified old gentleman when he took command of the corps two days before,” said one of his men, “he was the personification of vigor, dash and enthusiasm” in battle. (John Mead Gould, Joseph K. F. Mansfield, Brigadier General of the U.S. Army, A Narrative of Events Connected with His Mortal Wounding at Antietam, Sharpsburg, Maryland, September 17, 1862, p. 29.)

Today was no different. “The General was moving around the field continually,” wrote one of his men. “He seemed to be everywhere.”⁶ Mansfield rode rapidly back and forth, positioning his troops, then watching from the high ground the overall movement of the battle.

One of his regiments, the 10th Maine, was now firing into a wooded area where Confederates were using trees and woodpiles as cover. Mansfield had received a report that Hooker’s troops held the woods; when he saw the 10th Maine loading and firing,

Mansfield at once came galloping down the hill and passed through the scattered men of the right companies, shouting “Cease firing, you are firing into our own men!” He rode very rapidly …

Captain Jordan now ran forward … and insisted that Gen. Mansfield should “Look and see.” He and Sergt. Burnham pointed out particular men of the enemy, who were not 50 yards away, that were then aiming their rifles at us and at him … he was convinced, and remarked, “Yes, you are right.”⁷

Mansfield had ridden into “a most perilous position—where the bullets and missiles were flying like hail, and where no one upon a horse could survive. It seemed as if the very depths of Pandemonia had sent her furies,” wrote Surgeon P. H. Flood of the 107th New York.⁸ A conspicuous target, the general immediately drew the fire of Confederates in the woods before him. One of the 10th Maine soldiers watched as his commander moved off: “He then turned his horse and … attempted to go through [a broken fence], but the horse, which … appeared to be wounded, refused to step into the traplike mass of rails and rubbish, or to jump over. The General thereupon promptly dismounted and led the horse … as he dismounted his coat blew open, and I saw that blood was streaming down the right side of his vest.”⁹ A minié ball had pierced Mansfield’s lung. As blood soaked his chest, soldiers slung him in a blanket and carried him to the rear. He would die the following morning.

While General Mansfield was borne to the rear, the fight continued to rage back and forth, with first the Federal, then the Confederate forces dominating. Both sides suffered appalling casualties. By nine in the morning, a lull had set in at the northern end of the battlefield, while the battle had ignited farther south.

Just before he left Washington to join McClellan’s command, General Mansfield wrote a hurried note to his twenty-two-year-old son Sam, who had just graduated from West Point. “You must purchase a horse … fill your pockets with sandwiches and follow me.” (Letter from J. K. F. Mansfield to Samuel M. Mansfield, September 12, 1862; courtesy of the Middlesex County Historical Society.) Arriving in Maryland after the battle, Sam found that instead of acting as his father’s aide, he was escorting the general’s coffin home to Middletown. The younger Mansfield went on to serve as colonel of Connecticut’s 24th Regiment.

THE 14TH CONNECTICUT

I never prayed more fervently for darkness.

About eight o’clock that morning, Cornwall native general John Sedgwick had forded Antietam Creek with about 5,500 troops. At the center of Sedgwick’s line marched the men of Connecticut’s 14th Regiment, who had left Hartford less than a month before. How green were they? Frederick Burr Hawley of Bridgeport wrote peevishly in his journal, “Immediately after crossing [Antietam Creek], we come into a ploughed lot, our feet being wet, get covered with mud, some gets in my shoes & chafes my feet.”¹⁰

Minutes later, Hawley and his 14th comrades had more than chafed feet to worry about. Sedgwick rapidly moved his forces toward the center of the battlefield, and into the East Woods.

The order was given to form line of battle, shells were bursting about them, tearing off huge branches of trees while shot were cutting the air with their sharp shriek.

This order to form line of battle was perhaps the supreme moment of their experience, as there shot through the minds of the men the thought of the loved ones at home; the terrible possibilities of the engagement made vivid by the ghastly scenes through which they had already passed at South Mountain; some indeed would be wounded, some slain outright; there must inevitably be suffering and death: and as they looked at the familiar faces of their comrades, they wondered who it would be.¹¹

***

“These may be my last words,” Samuel Willard wrote to his wife; “if so, they are these: I have full faith in Jesus Christ, my Savior; I do not regret that I have fallen in defence of my country; I have loved you truly and know that you have loved me … If my body should ever reach home, let there be no ceremony; I ask no higher honor than to die for my country.” (Samuel Willard, as quoted in Samuel Irenaeus Prime, The Power of Prayer, pp. 408–11.)

“I cannot sing the old songs. Or, the late Home of a Union Soldier,” ran the title of a touching print published in 1868. A downcast woman standing at the piano wiped away a tear. Over her shoulder lingered a faint image of her lost soldier husband.

When the 14th Regiment had left Connecticut for the South, Madison’s Samuel Willard, a captain in Company G, carried a small diary in his pocket. Here the thirty-two-year-old penciled thoughts and experiences that he later copied into letters to his wife Margaret. Now, about to enter battle, the realization struck him that he might meet death at any moment.

In the midst of the booming of Union and Confederate artillery, as the 14th Regiment prepared to advance, he added, “The battle has commenced, one man killed within 20 rods of me, by a shell … God save my men, God save me, God save the United States of America. God bless you my own dear wife, and may we meet at last in heaven where there will be no war.”¹²

Captain Willard fell in battle that day, shot through the head. His brother-in-law, Pvt. John Bradley, stayed with him while he died on the field.

Long after the Civil War, a Connecticut woman described a scene from her childhood. One day, in the early twentieth century, she was playing the piano for her grandmother in her home in Madison. When she performed an old Civil War song called “Tenting on the Old Camp Grounds,” her grandmother “threw her apron over her face and broke into shuddering sobs. It wasn’t until she cried and asked me never to play that song again, that I realized what the war had done to her,” said Margaret Shepard.¹³ Her grandmother was Margaret Willard, widow of Captain Samuel Willard. Some four decades earlier, the war had taken her husband and two of her three brothers.

***

The 14th soldiers now moved forward on the double-quick, scrambling over fences and leaping ditches amid the shriek of artillery shells and the whiz of musket balls. Raw as they were, the 14th men were bold-spirited, plucky. As the regiment advanced through fields and farms, Company A made its way through an apple orchard, and a couple of daredevils stopped—under fire—to pick apples. (One, a young Bridgeport sergeant named William B. Hincks, would later win the Medal of Honor for his intrepid actions in battle.)¹⁴

Meanwhile, at the other end of the 14th Regiment’s line, Company B had to skirt several obstacles in its way, which caused it to split off from the rest of the regiment. Their captain, thirty-year-old Elijah Gibbons, was no greenhorn, having previously served in Connecticut’s 4th Infantry. Seeing his company veering away, Gibbons quickly adjusted its position, leading the men between a farmhouse and barn on the Roulette farm. Sheltered by the buildings there, Confederate sharp-shooters had been peppering the regiment with musket fire.

“Captain Gibbons … finding the farm-house occupied by a large force of the enemy, ordered his company to advance and fire, scattering them and driving a portion of them into the cellar, where, by closing the door, a large number of them were captured.”¹⁵ Just minutes into its first battle, the 14th Connecticut already had a tidy package of Rebel prisoners to its credit.

Reunited, the regiment advanced into a cornfield “where the musket Balls & Cannon Balls are whizzing & tearing dreadfully,” wrote Frederick Burr Hawley in his journal. Tall stalks of corn hid the 14th soldiers from the enemy’s view but also made it impossible for them to see. “Our men fire in confusion & keep up a fire for a short time amid cries from Officers to ‘Stop that’ ‘there is a Delaware Reg in front of us.’”¹⁶

In front of the 14th Connecticut was the 1st Delaware Regiment; beyond that, a ravine and then another cornfield, filled with Confederates. It was about 9:30 a.m. Sgt. Benjamin Hirst of Rockville described his view of the chaos:

[A] voley tore through our ranks killing and wounding quite a number. The Regiment was thrown in some confusion and most of the Boys fell on their Bellies, firing indiscrimately and i am sorry to think wounding some of our men … i saw the whole of this at a glance and roard like a mad Bull for our men to cease firing until they could see the rebs. They finally crawled back a few yards and staid there …

i carried Wilkie [James Wilkie, wounded] from the front to the rear. i then came back to the front, and got a splendid view of the Rebels in a piece of corn opposite to ours. there was just 4 of our own Company and a few men of a Delaware Regiment giving them fits and i was just in the humour to join in, until i fired 13 rounds into their midst … seeing our colours falling further back we backed out to our Company, who were all lying on their faces expecting the Rebels were going to charge on us.¹⁷

From the edge of the cornfield, the 14th men fired across at the Confederates, while the Delaware regiment pressed ahead toward an old road that farm wagons had worn down until it was sunken into the ground. This sunken road, later known as Bloody Lane, now sheltered enemy soldiers who, in their first musket volley, took down about a third of the Delaware regiment. The Delaware line “seemed to melt under the enemy’s fire and breaking many of the men ran through the ranks of the Fourteenth toward the rear,” wrote one of the Nutmeggers.¹⁸ The fleeing soldiers unnerved the Connecticut boys; a few joined the rout, and their lieutenant colonel had all he could do to rally the rest.

Then it was the 14th’s turn to advance toward the Rebels waiting in the sunken road. “Forward!” came the order, and the jumpy men emerged from the cornfield and into “a smashing fire full in the face.”¹⁹ The vicious fire quickly drove them back. “We advance & fall back, without doing much if any good,” wrote a frustrated Fred Hawley; “we see men hit all around us & some are reported killed we remain flat on our faces on the ground for 1½ hours.”²⁰

Near noon, the 14th fell back and reformed. Sgt. Benjamin Hirst recalled:

we were then moved further to the left in front to support one of our Batterys, in getting to which position, we as a Regiment were complimented for the coolness displayed in marching under fire. we were then Faced behind a stone wall just as the Rebels broke through the place lately occupied by us, but the 2nd line of Batle soon settled them, and we were again moved further to the front, during which a shell dropt in our midst killing 3 and wounding four of our Company.

I had just told the men to close up, and had got a couple of files ahead when it came to us with a whiz and the job was done, Sam Burrows, and Gross were covered with blood, and Albert Towne had his Haversack shot away without hurting him … we closed up like Veterans and moved on as if nothing had happened. we came under the shelter of a hill behind which the 81st pa were lying, in their front was one of our Batterys with every horse killed. they stood up and gave us 3 cheers as we took position along side of them.²¹

***

Reconciling a soldier’s death was—is—never easy. In the Civil War, the most difficult losses to accept were those like Robert Hubbard’s.

Hubbard, thirty-one, was the eldest son in a Middletown farming family. In the summer of 1862, Robert wrote to his younger brother, Josiah, who had moved west to settle Kansas with a group of Connecticut abolitionists determined to keep the new territory from becoming a slave state. Robert asked his brother to return to Connecticut to care for their elderly parents—their father was seventy-seven years old—and their younger sisters.

Robert himself was joining Connecticut’s 14th Regiment. “I feel as if I could never forgive myself if this government should be overthrown and I had no weapon in its defense,” Robert explained to Josiah.²² Coincidentally, Josiah had sent a similar letter to Robert, announcing that he had joined a Kansas cavalry unit. The brothers’ letters crossed in the mail.

In the early afternoon of September 17, 1862, the 14th Connecticut moved from the cornfield near Bloody Lane through Roulette’s farm to a battery it was to guard. With Rebel artillery shells flying overhead, the 14th troops rapidly obeyed an order to lie down in the plowed field where they were positioned. Fred Hawley wrote: “we lay close to the ground the shell & cannon balls flying all around us often wounding and killing some one. These missels as they fly near us have a most hateful spiteful sing to them. They sound as if they meant evil.”²³

Robert Hubbard

The 14th Connecticut passed through William Roulette’s farm twice. To farmers like Robert Hubbard, the bucolic surroundings would have held a sense of familiarity, but the screaming shells, smoke, and corpses of soldiers and horses transformed the tranquil farm scene into something horrific. The farmhouse became a bloody field hospital where surgeons cut and bandaged. Later, hundreds of bodies were buried on the Roulette grounds.

Flattened into the dirt, the 14th men waited for their next orders. Then above the shriek of the shells came an officer’s voice: they were moving. As the men rose from the field, “a rifle in Co. B was accidentally discharged, and we saw one of our members, one of the best men in the company, Robert Hubbard lying upon the ground writhing in the agony of a mortal wound.”²⁴

Their captain directed some of his men to carry Robert to the rear. Hubbard died while the battle continued. His friends buried him beside the corncrib on Roulette’s farm.

On the day the 14th Regiment left Connecticut for the South, Hubbard had written to his mother, “If I should never return, my short life may have been of greater service to my family, my country and the cause of freedom than a life spent at home devoted to self.”²⁵ In December of 1862, Robert’s sister wrote to William Roulette, who owned the farm where her brother was buried. The Maryland farmer had a coffin made for the Connecticut farmer, and sent Robert’s remains north. In a graveyard near their farm, the Hubbards laid him to rest.

Robert’s brother Josiah would survive the war and return to the farm in Middletown. Here, five years after the Battle of Antietam, Josiah’s first son, Robert, would be born.

***

DAY’S END

It was a baffling afternoon for the men of the 14th Connecticut: they seemed to be marching all around the battlefield—shells exploding everywhere, bullets whizzing by—yet their own guns were quiet. Leaving the battery they’d been sent to guard, the Nutmeggers took up a new position, when the order came once again to lie down: “the enemy had seen us and at once commenced shelling us. It was very trying to have to lie inactive under fire and listen to the hideous howling of the shell varied only by their crash in exploding and occasionally the shriek of some one who was struck. I lay closer to the ground than ever before in my life, although it was a plowed field and an exceedingly dirty place, and I never prayed more fervently for darkness than then.”²⁶

Nightfall brought a blessed end to the shelling. “As most of us threw away our Coats & Blankets which were in the way when we first entered the fight we are now without any covering & are compelled to sleep on the damp cold ground,” wrote Fred Hawley. He seemed unable to take in the enormity of what he had just passed through. “We feel very tired & hungry having ate nothing since morning & many threw away their Haversacks so Hard tack is scarce.” Exhausted, scared, and hungry, the boys of the 14th lay down on the ground to sleep.²⁷

Sleep didn’t come easily. Henry Stevens, the 14th’s chaplain, wrote: “All that night through and the following day and night they heard the dreadful groans and cries of the wounded and dying wretches in Bloody Lane just over the hill calling for water or help, or to have taken off others who, dead, were lying across or upon their tortured and helpless bodies, or for death to release them from their anguish … but they were powerless to render the assistance their hearts longed to give.”²⁸

George E. Stannard was the youngest child of widow Roxanna Stannard of Clinton. He was about twenty-three when he wrote this letter to his mother:²⁹

Keatyville MD September 20, 1862

Dear Mother

I take great pleasure in writing to you once more we have had a battle and a hard one but I am all right but our rgmt was badly cut up we formed a line of battle and charged through the corn on double quick the boys behaved like heros

a good many of our boys went down Pendleton was shot through the breast and arm Luit. Sherman in the arm John Parks through the leg he will die John Hurd in the arm twice George Doane in the knee Lewellin Dibble in the foot and a good many more not so bad and after we came out of the corn we were marched up through a narrow lane onto a hill between 2 cross fires and there our loved capt [Samuel Willard] fell with a shot through the brain he never spoke his body was sent home today Horace Stevens is missing but I think he is dead for the men that buried the dead in that part of the field say that they buried one of Co. G’s men and he is the only one not accounted for I don’t know how many men our rgmt lost altogether but it was enough

after the capt was killed we charged across the hill to the left and were ordered to report to Col Brooks and he ordered us to support the left wing we drove across the field amid such a storm of shot and shell, grape and canister and rifle balls as I never want to see again we marched on to the left of the Irish Brigade they received us with such cheers and yells as only an Irishman can give they told us afterwards that they thought we were the regulars we came up in such style

after we had succeded in turning the devils we had a very easy time most too much so we were ordered to lie down flat on our faces and not move and we did not feel much inclinde to move I tell you for the shell from thier baterrys were flying all around us … after a minute a Liut was lying about ten feet from me and he stuck up his head to speak to his Capt and a shell came along and took the top of his head off I went to him and three of his Co helped carry him off the field as we were getting over a fence a round shot came and saved us the trouble for it knocked it all down

just as we got back an orderly came along and said that Gen Richardson was killed Gen Morris sung out who will go and bring him off and four of us started and it was a race but we got him he was not dead but badly wounded in the breast we carried him to the hospital

after that we laid 36 hours on the plowed ground behind a little knoll but that night after the battle I never shall forget the groans and sreiks of the wounded curces and shell mixed up promiscous it was awful I can assure you but I cant write any more for we are going to move some where I am all right only hit once and that was with a spent ball in the leg it stung a little

GES

The battle’s final stage would begin at the southern end of the battlefield with the command of Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside. Among the roughly 8,500 Union soldiers in Burnside’s 9th Corps were three Connecticut regiments: the 8th, 11th, and 16th Connecticut Volunteers.

11TH CONNECTICUT REGIMENT

I can speak of time no more.30

That morning, General Burnside separated the 11th Connecticut from the rest of the 9th Corps. Burnside was friendly with the 11th’s colonel, twenty-five-year-old Henry Walter Kingsbury; years earlier, he had been young Kingsbury’s guardian. So when McClellan ordered Burnside to send his troops across Antietam Creek to attack Lee’s right flank, Burnside turned to Kingsbury to help him gain control of a stone bridge spanning the stream. Across this bridge, just twelve feet wide, Burnside intended to march his troops—but first he had to clear out the Confederates who held it.

Nathan Mayer, the 11th’s assistant surgeon, dismounted from his horse and took off his sword, canteen, haversack, and blanket. Taking his pocket surgical kit, he directed the stretcher-bearers to follow him, and fell in behind the soldiers.

Colonel Kingsbury had ordered Companies A and B to deploy as skirmishers, under Capt. John Griswold. While the remainder of the regiment was to storm the bridge, Griswold’s men would scramble down the banks on either side of the bridge and wade the fifty feet across Antietam Creek. Holding their muskets over their heads and pushing through chest-deep water, the skirmishers would move straight into a hurricane of bullets from the two Georgia regiments hidden on the opposite side of the creek. It was no wonder they hesitated. Then Captain John Griswold leaped into the stream at the head of his men.

The 11th’s colonel, Henry Walter Kingsbury, was just twenty-five years old. A West Point graduate, Kingsbury would need all of his training for the assault on the bridge. His 440 men had to move down a slope and across an open field exposed to Confederate artillery fire and a hail of bullets from two Georgian infantry regiments sheltered behind trees and stone walls on the far side of the creek.

Captain John Griswold, twenty-five, came from an old Connecticut family of some prominence. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather had served as governors of Connecticut. John, the baby of his family, had been just two when his father died, but he hadn’t grown up coddled and protected in his wealthy home in Lyme. As a boy he went off to boarding school, then on to Yale where he studied civil engineering as well as the classics. Instead of becoming a lawyer or merchant as did many of the Griswold men, John became a surveyor in Kansas, where bloody conflicts raged continually between abolitionists and pro-slavery settlers. Adventure and fortune soon lured him even farther from home: in 1860 “he sailed from New London for Honolulu, to engage in business [and] remained for six months, with a single Kanaka companion, on a Guano island in the Pacific, of which it was important to claim possession. He was at length taken off by a company of Chinamen and carried to San Francisco. At the outbreak of the rebellion, he hastened home and entered the national service.” (Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale College Deceased from July, 1859, to July, 1870, pp. 106–7.)

Within the regiment, Surgeon Mayer observed, Captain Griswold gained the admiration of many. “He was a great-hearted gentleman, well born, liberally educated, and wonderfully retentive of all the studies in ancient and modern literature … but, more than this, his character was trained, and his heart disciplined.” As the 11th Regiment traveled through the South, recounted Mayer, “We quoted Horace, and discussed questions of moral philosophy.” No matter the hardships they endured—hunger, exhaustion, cold or heat—John Griswold “would preserve the same cheerfulness of demeanor, and never forget the least of those courtesies which make life in refined circles run in such an even course … whoever approached him felt that he had entered a circle of refinement. Nor was this intended for equals alone. He was particular in extending the same courtesies to the soldiers under his command.”³¹

Now as bullets flew around him, John Griswold splashed through the Antietam Creek toward the enemy. Mayer wrote:

In the middle of the creek a ball penetrated his body. He reached the opposite side and lay down to die. Meanwhile we had reached the bridge and formed. The 12th Ohio was on our left and lay behind the rail fence firing at the wooded steep [bank] opposite, from which a brisk fire was returned. Hither I hastened with four men and a stretcher and in the face of both fires climbed over the fence, forded the creek and bore off the body.³²

We took him into a low shed near the bank, and laid him on the straw … he was ashy pale, so much had he suffered.

“Doctor,” he said, “pardon the trouble I give you; but I am mortally wounded, I believe.” I examined. The bullet had passed through the body in the region of the stomach. “You are, captain,” I replied. “Then let me die quickly, and without pain, if you can,” he rejoined …

Seeing through the door of the shed the blue water flash in the sunshine, he repeated the first lines of one of those gems of Horace we had so often admired:—

O Fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro, Dulci digno mero, non sine floribus.

[O spring of Bandusia, clearer than glass,

Worthy of sweet wine and flowers, too] …

The end came soon. Gen. Burnside called. The sufferer told him … “I am happy, general … I die as I have ever wished to die,—for my country.”

“Tell my mother,” he said to a comrade, “that I died at the head of my company.” Tears rolled down Burnside’s cheeks, as, delicately trying to suppress all symptoms of his pain, the philosophic and heroic spirit calmly passed away.³³

John’s family brought his body home to Old Lyme and buried him in the Griswolds’ peaceful family cemetery with his famous ancestors. Rising from his grave is an elegant stone obelisk carved with John’s last words and a laurel wreath encircling a soldier’s cap. In the distance the sun flashes off the Black Hall River that flows alongside the burying ground.

In fifteen minutes’ fighting near the bridge, the 11th Connecticut had suffered over 130 casualties. “Col. Kingsbury was active, inciting his soldiers to the charge by his gallant bearing and the inspiration of his voice. Many men fell. The colonel was a special mark; and he was soon shot in the foot, and immediately thereafter in the leg; when he was at last prevailed upon to leave the field … The men were still fighting; now falling back, and again charging on the bridge.”³⁴

Dr. Mayer “worked at dressing wounds and amputations until my head ached … men with the most frightful hurts were brought, carried, and dragged into the garden of the farm house” that was acting as a field hospital.³⁵

Colonel Kingsbury would not survive. While his men carried him from the field, one ball in his foot and another in his leg, he took a bullet in the shoulder and then a fourth in the abdomen, a mortal wound. At the field hospital, a surgeon gave him morphine, and General Burnside came to his side. Kingsbury held on through the night and into the following day. “The colonel has opened his eyes, and given me the sweetest smile, and then closed them forever,” wrote Dr. Nathan Mayer. “He made us all better and nobler.”³⁶

Griswold’s last words were inscribed on his monument: “Tell my Mother that I died at the head of my Company,” and “I die, as I have ever wished to die, for my country.” A writer for the Hartford Daily Courant declared, “We have never seen a monument more strikingly beautiful; more earnestly expressive.” (Hartford Daily Courant, August 5, 1863.)

Among the scores of wounded at Antietam was nineteen-year-old Alonzo Maynard of Stafford, shot again and again and again. Nearly twenty-five years after the battle, Maynard would describe what he had gone through that humid September day in 1862 as his regiment tried to take Burnside’s Bridge. “At Antietam I was shot through the right lung and shoulder with four balls, splintering the ribs in front, breaking collar-bone twice, destroying shoulder-joint, passing through lung, striking the spine and knocking off four ribs, breaking shoulder-blade in three or four pieces, splintering spine badly and breaking one vertebra. Thirteen pieces of bone came out of the wounds. My right lung is gone—torn in pieces and came out of wounds. There are 16 separate wounds through right breast and shoulder. Some of them were as large as a silver half dollar. I was confined to my bed five years. When I was wounded the doctors said there was no help for me, and it was several days before they dressed my wounds. I had a strong constitution and Yankee grit.” (National Tribune, May 27, 1886.) Yankee grit. And a New Englander’s gift for understatement.

This image from long after the war was used by the Committee on Invalid Pensions as part of a bill in the House of Representatives to increase Maynard’s pension. (Retouching in red emphasized the scars and sores.) The committee declared, “The evidence in this case discloses that the man has suffered terribly … Large burrowing abscesses frequently form upon the chest.” (Report of the Committee on Invalid Pensions, to whom was referred the bill [H.R. 3478] to increase the pension of Alonzo Maynard.) Despite his wounds, Alonzo Maynard married, had a son, and lived for more than four decades after the Battle of Antietam.

Hours later, other units were able to secure the bridge, and Union troops finally crossed the Antietam to attack the Rebels. While the battle ignited on the west side of the creek, the men of the 11th searched for their wounded friends, and began to bury their dead.

8TH CONNECTICUT REGIMENT

The men fought like Tigeres.

While the 11th Regiment battled it out at the bridge, the other units in their brigade—the 8th Connecticut, 16th Connecticut, and 4th Rhode Island—were doing what soldiers always do: they were waiting.

“[W]e were in line ready for work before sunrise,” wrote a lieutenant in the 8th; “the shot & shell flew around us like fun but there was not much fun about it as we soon found out it struck in our ranks & took one file completely out killing both of the men composing that file & a Sergeant of another Company who was in the rear & badly wounding another.”³⁷

The fallen sergeant was a Hartford silversmith named George Marsh. “He was ill, but determined to be at his post,” wrote a comrade, “and there he died.”³⁸

Once the enemy battery had the range on them, the Union soldiers were sitting ducks. The shells “came thick & fast but … there was no reply from our side we wondered at this thus it went on they using their artillery on us continually … Yet not a man in regit. stirred excepting ambulance corps who attended to wounded.”³⁹

The 8th’s colonel, Edward Harland, who was commanding the brigade, directed the troops to move to a safer position. As the three regiments moved off, the Rebel artillery again tried to find their range. “[O]ur men would instinctively stoop and hesitate when the shells burst around them,” said Jacob Eaton. “Our Chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Morris, … passed up and down the lines, exclaiming after each explosion, ‘Never mind, boys! Come on; no one is hurt.’”⁴⁰

“The Charge across the Burnside Bridge, Antietam,” drawn by Edwin Forbes.

Finally the troops reached comparative safety. To the north, Rebel fire made the stone bridge still impassable. How would Burnside get his troops to the other side of the creek? Colonel Harland sent two companies south to search for a place to ford Antietam Creek. Leading them was a trusted officer, Captain Charles Upham of the 8th Connecticut.

Six months before Antietam, Charlie Upham had taken a bullet in the shoulder in the Battle of Newbern, North Carolina. The wound never healed, but he refused to let it stop him. Now Upham, twenty-three, led his own company and another down the steep banks of the winding Antietam Creek, until they found a fording place.

The troops would face a sharp, slippery ascent up the far banks. While a Union battery, supported by the 8th Connecticut, distracted the Rebel artillery on the other side, Harland began to send his troops splashing across Antietam Creek. It was about one in the afternoon. A mile or so north of them, Union soldiers finally broke through Rebel fire to cross the stone bridge. Burnside’s troops, by bridge and by ford, were across; now they could come together for a united attack on the rebels.

An eighteen-year-old sergeant in the 8th Connecticut, Forrest Spofford was wounded in the left arm at Antietam. After a surgeon amputated, Spofford returned to his regiment, serving another two years. Later in the war, Spofford suffered a battle wound to his other arm, but again survived. After the war, he would serve as a one-armed librarian in Norwich.

But troops to the north needed ammunition, and each brigade had to move into position. The Georgian infantry regiments that had defended the bridge continued to harass the Union troops. Confederate artillery shelled Harland’s brigade again, but “We lay down & let them work,” remembered Wolcott Marsh.⁴¹

Finally, at about four o’clock, the order came to advance on the enemy. The delay would prove devastating.

The hiatus had allowed the Confederates to bring up forces from other parts of the battlefield, and re-form their lines in anticipation of Burnside’s attack. It also brought the arrival of over 2,000 Rebel soldiers under A. P. Hill. That humid day Hill’s men had rapidly marched the seventeen miles from Harper’s Ferry, many falling out from exhaustion. Now those who remained came down the road at the double-quick, just in time to turn the tide for the South.

The 1st Brigade of the Union’s 9th Corps advanced up the hill into a barrage of artillery and musketry, and then Colonel Harland ordered his own brigade forward. At the head of the 8th Regiment was Lt. Col. Hiram Appelman.

Col. Appelman led the Eighth forward in steady step up the hill. Nearly the whole corps was now charging, and the advancing line stretched far away to the right. As they reached the crest, the rebel troops were but a few rods in front. The Union line halted, and poured in a telling volley, and again leaped forward; and the enemy broke and fled, halting and firing as they could. A storm of shot, shell, and musketry, was sweeping through the ranks of the Eighth, now on the extreme Union left …

Steadily forward moves the line, now marking every yard of advance with blood of fallen men. The rebels still fall back. The 1st Brigade wavers, and slowly retires in disorder. Wilcox’s division, too, is giving way farther to the right. Forward presses the Eighth, until the men can see the road whereby Lee must retreat. “The position is ours” they shout; and a “Hurrah” goes down the line.

But already many have observed an immense force moving straight up on the left flank. “Re-inforcements,” say some: but Gen. Harland knows better; and he rides rapidly to the rear to hurry forward regiments to meet this new rebel move … The Eighth is now alone clinging to the crest. Three batteries are turned on them, and the enemy’s infantry close in around …

Eleazur Ripley, a sailor from Windham, had joined the Union army days after the war began. Returning home after Bull Run, Ripley immediately reenlisted, joining the 8th Connecticut in which he quickly rose to be captain. At Antietam, Ripley’s regiment held an advanced position where Confederate artillery raked their ranks. As A. P. Hill’s Rebel infantry charged on their flank, the soldiers of the 8th Connecticut were decimated. Captain Ripley, his left arm shattered, stood among his men, refusing to leave the field until the 8th was ordered to withdraw. After undergoing an amputation, Ripley continued to serve, transferring into the Veterans Reserve Corps. Following the war, Ripley worked as a clerk in the Pension Bureau, serving his fellow veterans.

No re-inforcements come. Twenty men are falling every minute. Col. Appelman is borne to the rear. John McCall falls bleeding. Eaton totters, wounded, down the hill. Wait, bullet-riddled, staggers a few rods, and sinks. Ripley stands with a shattered arm. Russell lies white and still. Morgan and Maine have fallen. Whitney Wilcox is dead. Men grow frantic. The wounded prop themselves behind the rude stone fence, and hurl leaden vengeance at the foe. Even the chaplain snatches the rifle and cartridge-box of a dead man, and fights for life.⁴²

***

Early in the fall of 1861, a Norwich teenager named Marvin Wait left Union College, where he was a student, to join Connecticut’s 8th Regiment. An intelligent, dedicated young man, he learned quickly; less than six months after enlisting, Private Wait of Company D had become 1st Lieutenant Wait.

Wait received orders to report to the Signal Corps in Burnside’s division, where he rapidly learned the use of signal flags. Using a spyglass and flags at the Battle of Roanoke Island, Wait had been able to transmit messages from General Burnside’s gunboat to his officers. At the Siege of Fort Macon, North Carolina, Marvin Wait and another officer, Lieutenant Andrews, took a position where they could see the Union shells as the artillerymen attempted to bombard the Confederate-held fort. Andrews’ official report explained:

The ten-inch shell were falling almost without exception more than three hundred yards beyond the Fort. Lieutenant Wait and myself continued to signal to the officer in charge until the correct range was obtained. The eight-inch shell were falling short—we signaled to the officer in charge of that battery with the same effect …

From the position of our batteries, it was impossible for the officers in charge to see how their shots fell, but owing to the observations made by Lieutenant Wait and myself, and signaled to them from time to time, an accurate range was obtained by all the batteries … After 12 m.. every shot fired from our batteries fell in or on the Fort. At 4 o’clock, P.M., a white flag appeared on the Fort.⁴³

The head of the Signal Corps presented a battle flag to Lieutenant Wait in recognition of his meritorious conduct that day.

Wait returned to the 8th Regiment a month before it marched with McClellan to Sharpsburg, Maryland. On the morning of the Battle of Antietam, it was just after seven when a Confederate cannonball bounded through the ranks of Company D. Three men were killed outright; a fourth wounded. Wait was so close that he was covered with dirt and blood.

As the 8th Regiment moved into line of battle later that day, one of the officers noticed the “determined fire of his eye” as nineteen-year-old Marvin Wait moved forward with his men.⁴⁴ As he raised his sword high in the advance, a bullet shattered his right arm, but Wait would not leave his troops. Shifting his sword to his left hand, he continued. “If Lieutenant Wait had only left the battle of his own accord when first hit in the arm, all would have been well, but he bravely stood to encourage his men still further by his own example,” wrote Captain Charles Coit.⁴⁵

Young Marvin Wait of Norwich (left) would not leave the field after being wounded. Hit by multiple bullets, he finally fell. Chaplain John M. Morris (right) carefully tucked the bleeding Wait into a sheltered spot behind a stone wall, and hurried off to find an ambulance for him.

In the minutes that followed, Wait was hit in the left arm, the abdomen, and the leg. He staggered, and went down. An enlisted man ran to his young lieutenant and began helping him to the rear, when the regiment’s chaplain appeared and took over.

Men were falling everywhere, and Major Ward was begging his soldiers to fall back, fall back before the regiment was annihilated. Lieutenant Wait died of his wounds before he reached a surgeon.

“A braver man than Marvin Wait never confronted a foe; a more generous heart never beat: a more unselfish patriot never fell,” wrote Lt. Jacob Eaton sadly.⁴⁶

The Waits had their only son’s body brought home, and they buried him in Yantic Cemetery in Norwich. Over his grave they set a white monument carved with spy glass and signal flags, and engraved “He died with his young fame about him for a shroud.”

***

Somehow, two regiments—the 16th Connecticut and 4th Rhode Island—hadn’t received (or understood) the order to advance. General Rodman, commanding the division, directed Colonel Harland to continue on with the 8th, while Rodman himself would race back to hurry on the other two regiments. But the two missing regiments never came up, and the 8th Connecticut found itself alone as it moved through a hurricane of bullets and shells coming from three sides. The men didn’t flinch for a moment.

Captain Wolcott Marsh, twenty-three, led the men of Company F, many of them farmers from rural communities like Plainfield, Canterbury, and Brooklyn. Writing to his wife just after the battle, Marsh wonderingly recorded their grit:

the order came for us to go forward which we did on a double quick as we came to the brow of hill & over it a terrible fire was concentrated upon our little band but on we pushed down the hill & up the top of next bullets came in terrible showers & from all sides of us