Antietam: Final resting places for New York soldiers

A cropped close-up of Alexander Gardner's image of graves of New York soldiers near
Burnside Bridge. Civil War photography expert William Frassanito first discovered
the names of the soldiers on their wooden headboards. (Library of Congress collection)
CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

Headstones for Private John Thompson and Corporal Michael Keefe
 in Antietam National Cemetery.

In Alexander Gardner's iconic image of temporary graves of 51st New York soldiers at the foot of a stone wall near Burnside Bridge, the names of four of the men can be read upon magnification on crude, wooden headboards. Sergeant George Loud of Company C (buried at the feet of the posed soldier), Private Edward Miller of Company H (three graves to the right of Loud), Private John Thompson of Company B (three graves to the right of Miller) and Corporal Michael Keefe of Company I (second grave to right of Thompson) were killed during the attack at the bridge.

 In October 1866, more than four years after the Battle of Antietam, the task of disinterring the Union dead on the field began. Perhaps that's when the remains of these four New York soldiers, probably just bones by that time, were discovered. By Sept. 17, 1867, their remains had been transferred to their final resting places in Antietam National Cemetery, which was dedicated that day with President Andrew Johnson in attendance. Soldiers in the national cemetery were originally buried under wooden headboards, which eventually deteriorated and were replaced with stone markers in the 1870s.

During a recent visit to the national cemetery, the gravestones of all four men were easily found in the same row in the large New York section, about 35 yards from the entrance. Whether they are actually buried under those markers, however, is anyone's guess. In a comparison of a circa 1866-67 stereoview of national cemetery markers to a similar modern image, Antietam photo expert Stephen Recker ("Rare Images of Antietam," Page 35) demonstrated that bodies are not buried directly under the markers indicated. At least two graves in the Connecticut section of the national cemetery do not hold the bodies that are noted on their markers. The remains of Private Oliver Case of the 8th Connecticut, killed near Harpers Ferry Road at Antietam, were recovered by his father and reburied in their hometown of Simsbury, Conn. Private Bridgeman Hollister of the 16th Connecticut, mortally wounded at Antietam, is actually buried in his hometown of Glastonbury, Conn.

Who's really buried under their markers at Antietam National Cemetery? And how many other markers in the cemetery are inaccurate? We'll probably never know.

Headstones for Sergeant George Loud and Private Edward Miller in 
Antietam National Cemetery. Loud was posthumously promoted
 to sergeant, Miller to corporal.

Antietam panoramas: 'For God's sake a drink of water!'

                                                         JOHN OTTO'S CORNFIELD:
                              Rebels attacked the 16th Connecticut here on Sept. 17, 1862.
                                       (Click on image for full-screen interactive panorama.)

After the major fighting stopped late in the afternoon of Sept. 17, 1862, the misery was only beginning for 16th Connecticut wounded who lay in John Otto's cornfield, no-man's land between the Rebel and Yankee armies at Antietam. Collapsing with gunshot wounds just 15 feet from the body of Company I captain John Drake, Private Bela Burr of Farmington, Conn., was unable to leave the field. His brother, Francis, who served with Bela in Company G, was severely wounded in the groin. Wounded six times, 18-year-old Private James Brooks, the son of a farmer from Stafford, Conn., stunningly clinged to life. Private John Loveland, a 23-year-old barber from Hartford, drifted in and out of consciousness as he lay wounded among the cornstalks. His fractured femur protruded two or three inches from his left leg.

16th Connecticut Private Bela Burr suffered two leg wounds in
John Otto's cornfield at the Battle of Antietam. (Connecticut State Library)

Hearing cries of Union wounded that night, one Rebel soldier apparently risked being shot by an enemy picket and crept into no-man's land with a canteen of water to quench Bela Burr's thirst. (2) For others who lay in Otto's field, there was little hope.
 
"...an awful stillness settled over the battlefield, broken only by the distant booming of artillery and the groans of the wounded around us," a 16th Connecticut soldier who had lain in Otto's field noted in The National Tribune decades after the war. "Once or twice some poor fellow, faint from loss of blood or consumed by raging thirst, would cry out piteously, 'Water! Water! For God's sake a drink of water!

"I shall never forget the long hours of that terrible night!" he continued. "The pain I was suffering, the home-sickness, the utter desolation of the situation! It seemed as if morning would never come." (1)

When morning arrived, help was nowhere to be found. Neither the Rebels nor Yankees had budged from the battlefield, but the armies weren't willing to begin another full-scale fight. As the temperature soared to 79 degrees on Sept. 18, the plight of the wounded was exacerbated.

"The sun rose higher and higher," the unnamed 16th Connecticut soldier noted, "pouring down such fierce heat we seemed in a furnace, for the standing corn shut off every breath of air. Our canteens were empty and our sufferings from thirst were terrible."

On the night of Sept. 18, the Confederate army retreated across the Potomac River into Virginia, abandoning the field to the Union army and its burial crews, who scoured the field the next morning. “Many (wounded) had crept out of the storm of battle and hidden under fences, or among rocks, or in thickets, and their strength failing, they could neither come forth or make known their situation," according to the 16th Connecticut regimental history. "Some of the badly wounded did not have any attention for several days.”

Late on the morning of Sept. 19, the Burr brothers, Loveland and Brooks were found alive and taken to field hospitals. Loveland and Brooks were eventually transferred to the German Reformed Church hospital in Sharpsburg. Brooks' 19th birthday passed there on Oct. 3, but he couldn't overcome his many wounds. He died at the little church on Main Street on Oct. 11. Loveland, who had his leg amputated, also died there in October when an artery in his leg disintegrated, spewing a gusher of blood. Francis Burr was eventually transferred to Crystal Spring Hospital near Keedysville, Md., but he died there on Dec. 11, 1862.

Bela Burr recovered in three hospitals and was discharged from the Union army in November 1863.

He died in a Hartford insane asylum in 1908.

Today, many who tramp John Otto's field, part of Antietam National Battlefield, have no knowledge of the pain and anguish Burr and his comrades endured there more than 151 years ago.

(1) The National Tribune, Oct. 1, 1888
(2) Banks, John, Connecticut Yankees at Antietam, Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2013

                                                         JOHN OTTO'S CORNFIELD:
                    Some wounded 16th Connecticut soldiers lay in this field for 40 hours.
                                     (Click on image for full-screen interactive panorama.)

Antietam: A deadly toll for Grafton, Massachusetts

A close-up of Jonathan's Stow's memorial in Old Oak Street 
Burial Ground in Grafton, Mass.

Jonathan Stow's right leg was amputated after 
Antietam. He died 14 days after the battle.
(Grafton Historical Society)

Fearful that he would be struck by one of the many artillery shells that whizzed near him every few seconds, Jonathan P. Stow lay on the battlefield with a grievous wound to his right leg. "Battle. Oh horrid battle," the 15th Massachusetts sergeant scrawled in pencil in his brown, leather-covered pocket diary as the fighting at the Battle of Antietam swirled about him.

"What sights I have seen." (1)

Indeed, what awful sights the 30-year-old farmer witnessed on Sept. 17, 1862, and for two weeks afterward.

Stow, who had been taken prisoner at the Battle of Ball's Bluff in October 1861 and was released months later, was from Grafton, a town of about 4,100 in the Blackstone Valley of central Massachusetts. At the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the town about 45 miles west of Boston churned out textiles and shoes in its mills and shops. (In fact, many men from central Massachusetts worked in a burgeoning shoemaking industry, including a 24-year-old private in the 15th Massachusetts from nearby West Brookfield named Justus Collins Wellington. He was killed at Antietam.) Grafton's manpower also fueled the army as more than 400 men from the town served the Union. Many were mustered into the 15th Massachusetts, including Harrison Clisbee, an 18-year-old carpenter; Alfred Snow, an 18-year-old shoemaker; Francis Marble, a 15-year-old shoemaker; Willie Morse, an 18-year-old machinist; and Edward Johnson, a 17-year-old clerk.

Stow's memorial in Old Oak Street 
Burial Ground.

A veteran regiment, the 15th Massachusetts suffered 325 casualties in barely 20 minutes when it was pummeled on three sides by the Rebels about 9:30 in the morning at Antietam. The fighting was so confusing among the old oaks and limestone outcroppings in the West Woods that the 59th New York, in its first battle of the war, fired into the backs of the 15th Massachusetts, undoubtedly causing many casualties.

"In less time than it takes to tell it," a private in the 15th Massachusetts wrote, "the ground was strewn with the bodies of the dead and wounded. In a moment all was confusion, it was every man for himself. We all run like a flock of sheep. The rebs ... mowed us down." (2) After a shell burst near him, Stow felt something damp on his face. He wiped away some blood and then noticed that the soldier next to him had the top half of his head blown off, his brains splashed into the face of another man. Amazingly, a 15th Massachusetts lieutenant may have escaped death when a bullet was blunted by a folded-up issue of Harpers Weekly, a popular Civil War newspaper. 

In 12 heart-rending entries in his diary from Sept. 17-Sept. 29, 1862, Stow wrote of his suffering ("acute, painful misery"); treatment by the Rebels ("show much kindness but devote much time to plundering dead bodies of our men") and his eventual rescue by comrades ("Oh good God, a whole line of our skirmishers are coming") after nearly two days on the battlefield. A doctor thought Stow was a "doubtful" case, but three days after Antietam, the soldier was given chloroform and his leg was amputated at the Susan Hoffman Farm. The large hospital at the farm became headquarters for the Sanitary Commission, a private relief agency that tended to sick and wounded soldiers.

Jonathan Stow died at the Susan Hoffman farm on Oct. 1, 1862. Privately owned,
 the farm looks much like it did during the Civil War.

After his amputation, Stow was placed in a barn near an 18-year-old, Irish-born private from Grafton named James Hughes. Many of the wounded begged for water; horrid sights were everywhere. "There are some dozen or more stumps near me," Stow wrote, a reference to amputated limbs.

Over the course of the next nine days, Stow witnessed the deaths of other wounded, including his fellow townsmen Hughes, who died at 4 p.m. on Sept. 26. "The nervous pains are killing two or three every night," the anguished man wrote in his diary. For Stow himself, his pain was nearly unbearable, but he was thankful for the doctor who treated him, calling him "earnest and too good a man." Although Stow had been adamant about not taking brandy, he acquiesced when he was told he would be dead in three days if he did not. Eleven days after the battle, the weather turned hot, making the stench from amputated limbs and decaying flesh even worse. That odor, Stow wrote, "is nearly as bad as the whole we have to contend."

Private Francis Marble, 17, died of his Antietam
 wounds  on Nov. 26, 1862, more than two months 
after the battle. He is buried in 
Riverside Cemetery in Grafton, Mass.

By Sept. 29, Stow's condition seemed to improve. Moved from the barn to a spot outside in the afternoon, he enjoyed soup, a biscuit and a tart supplied by a nurse. Stow also received four letters but noted that he was "so boozy," perhaps from brandy, that it took him a whole morning to read them. Stow wrote that a doctor dressed his stump "admirably" and that he was "quite comfortable if the quinine does not choke me to death." (Quinine, a drug made from tree bark, was used by Civil War doctors to treat fever.) Later that night, however, Stow had an urgent telegram sent to his father Jonathan back in Grafton:

"Dangerously wounded at Hoffman's hospital near Sharpsburg," it read. "Come instantly."

Two days later, Stow was dead.

Sadly, similar news rocked Grafton again and again and again.

Teenager Clisbee, a private, was killed in action at Antietam.  After his wounded arm was amputated, Private Snow died on Oct. 19, 1862 in Frederick, Md., a town that was described as "one vast hospital" after the battle. Private Morse died of his wounds on Dec. 30, 1862. Private Marble, wounded at Ball's Bluff in October 1861, died of his wounds in a hospital in Annapolis, Md., on Nov. 26, 1862. About a month shy of his 18th birthday, Private Johnson was also killed in action.

In all, 11 soldiers from Grafton died from wounds suffered at Antietam. On a memorial on the town green, their names appear with the names of 49 other soldiers from Grafton who perished during the Civil War, a stunning total for such a small community. Near the base of the old marble marker are these words:

"We died for our country."

(1) Copy of Jonathan Stow diary, Grafton (Mass.) Historical Society

(2) Bowen, Roland E. From Ball's Bluff to Gettysburg ... and Beyond. Gettysburg, Pa: Thomas Publications, 1994

Grafton's Civil War memorial includes the names of 11 soldiers who died from 
wounds suffered at the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862. The memorial
 was dedicated in 1867.

Antietam: Snavely Ford interactive panorama, photos

                                    Click on image for full-screen interactive panorama.

As Yankees struggled to dislodge Rebels from the bluffs above Antietam Creek and Burnside Bridge during the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862, two 8th Connecticut companies were sent upstream about a mile from the bridge to find a ford. At last across the waist-deep creek at Snavely Ford about 1 p.m., Private William Pratt of the 8th Connecticut and his comrades sought shelter under the crest of a hill, where they watched “the peculiar end over end movement of shells nearly spent” go over their heads during an artillery duel.

Famished, the private’s thoughts turned to food -- or lack thereof. “I think 4 crackers was all Uncle Sam furnished me that trying day,” recalled Pratt, who also remembered an officer in the regiment grinning at him with an ear of raw corn in his mouth, “a substitute for scanty rations or no rations at all.” (1)  Pratt, whose story is told in my book, "Connecticut Yankees at Antietam," was later wounded in the thigh near Harpers Ferry Road and briefly became a prisoner of war.

Private William Pratt of the 8th Connecticut
 crossed Antietam Creek at Snavely Ford. 
He was later wounded in the 
thigh and captured. 
(Connecticut State Library)

Last Friday morning, John Rogers and I traced the route that Pratt and his comrades in the 8th Connecticut took from Snavely Ford onto the battlefield at John Otto's farm. Heavily wooded today, the ground was much more open in 1862.

The 8th Connecticut and 16th Connecticut, frequent subjects on my blog, were part of General Isaac Rodman's division that crossed Antietam Creek at the ford. The Yankees were briefly harassed there by soldiers in the 50th Georgia, who fired on their enemy from the rocky high ground along the creek. Pratt and his comrades undoubtedly watched the artillery duel play out over their heads at the foot of that hill.

I joined Rogers, who chronicles the story of 8th Connecticut Private Oliver Case on his excellent blog, on a steep climb up to the crest, where the view of the creek was largely hidden by trees. A Southerner whose great-great grandfather served as a sergeant in the 22nd Georgia at Antietam, Rogers wondered how much Yankees and Rebel lead from that firefight 151 years ago  remained in the ground. We'll probably never find out. Most of the ground we covered Friday is National Park Service property and thus relic hunting there is strictly forbidden.

 The 1.8-mile Snavely Ford Trail, maintained by volunteers and the Park Service, is one of the hidden gems of Antietam. Put it on your must-see list the next time you visit the battlefield.

(1) Pratt, William MacLain, My Story of The War, unpublished manuscript, 1912

Part of General Isaac Rodman's division, the 8th and 16th Connecticut regiments crossed here at 
Snavely Ford about 1 p.m. on Sept. 17, 1862.
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

50th Georgia soldiers harassed the Yankees from this high ground along Antietam Creek,
 near Snavely Ford. A path along the creek allows modern-day visitors to survey the scene.
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Harpers Ferry panorama from Maryland Heights

                                     Click on image for full-screen interactive panorama.

During the Civil War, the imposing Maryland Heights, overlooking the strategic town of Harpers Ferry, Va., was bristling with Union guns and encampments. In the spring of 1862, Federal engineers installed a seven-gun Naval battery atop the Heights, a spectacular feat just for the effort that it took to haul the heavy weapons up the steep mountain that rises to 1,400 feet.

Evidence of  the Union army's stay atop Maryland Heights abounds even today, including the remains of a parapet for the Naval battery and a stone fort near the summit. After a serpentine, butt-kickin' 40-minute hike this afternoon,  I arrived at the Harpers Ferry overlook, a stone outcropping that offers a breathtaking view of the formal arsenal town at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers. Of course, the town is best known for the attempted slave revolt incited in October 1859 by John Brown, who was born in Torrington, Conn. Brown, a hero to some and a villain to others, was captured at Harpers Ferry and later hanged in nearby Charles Town. Below is an interactive panorama from town level; Maryland Heights may be seen at left.

Click on image for full-screen interactive panorama

Antietam panoramas: Where 14th Connecticut attacked

Click here for battlefield panoramas from Antietam, Cedar Mountain, Chickamauga, Gettysburg, Harris Farm, Manassas, Malvern Hill, Salem Church,  Spotsylvania Courthouse and more.

                                     Click on images for full-screen interactive panorama.
                                    

In the field at left during the Battle of Antietam, the 14th Connecticut traded shots with Rebels, who fought from an old country lane and beyond. The field was a planted with corn on Sept. 17, 1862.  The Confederates were only occasionally visible through the battle smoke as they blasted away at the Yankees from that old road, later known famously as Bloody Lane.

The 14th Connecticut monument at Antietam marks the
 regiment's farthest advance during the battle.

"Nothing daunted the Fourteenth men settled down to work expecting to stay, firing in the direction of the puffs of smoke or at anything indicating the presence of a reb." according to an 1891 account of the Connecticut regiment's attack. "And some of them really seemed to enjoy it. We recall one sergeant as repeatedly gravely engaged in loading his gun and then, rising and taking aim, firing; and each time there would come upon his face such a rapt expression of utter satisfaction as seemed almost seraphic. Of course many were entirely unused to handling firearms and there were more 'shots at a venture' that day in the regiment than it ever knew again, but each man did his best and bravest." Captain Elijah Gibbons of Company B warned his men to be careful handling their weapons, but that didn't prevent Private Robert Hubbard from being killed by friendly fire. (Another 14th Connecticut private, Thaddeus Lewis of Company A, was also killed by friendly fire at Antietam.)

On Oct. 11, 1894, more than 32 years after they fought in this field, veterans of the 14th Connecticut returned to the battlefield to dedicate a monument to their sacrifice. The regiment suffered 38 killed and mortally wounded and 88 wounded at Antietam. Speaker Julius Knowlton, a commissary sergeant in the 14th during the battle, addressed the crowd that included families of the old soldiers. "With reverent hearts we gather here to manifest our gratitude to the living actors of that day, and to mingle our tears with our praises of the dead, who by the sacrifices of their lives did all men could to bring the heritage of peace and unity," he said.

And later Knowlton eloquently added:

"These tons of granite, wrought in graceful lines, with marvelous skill, will stand through varying vicissitudes of storm and sunshine, telling the grim story of men of every clime, and, methinks, that the warm light of every September noon will awaken in this New England stone a soul that will go out and testify to the unmarked dead o'er all these fields that a grateful people has not forgot, and never will forget, the suffering or the valor of those who stood by the Union in those days."

Antietam: Remembering the fallen

Henry Aldrich, a private in the 16th Connecticut, is buried in 
Antietam National Cemetery.

Henry Aldrich, a 41-year-old blacksmith from Bristol, Conn., was killed at the Battle of Antietam 151 years ago today. He left behind a wife and four children. Aldrich, killed in John Otto's cornfield, is buried in the Connecticut section of Antietam National Cemetery. More than 200 men and boys from the state were killed or died from effects of wounds suffered at Antietam. Here's my downloadable Excel spreadsheet of Connecticut Antietam deaths. It includes regiment, hometown, place of burial, family information and more.

Antietam: Alexander Gardner's images of death

Enlargement of Alexander Gardner image of Rebel soldiers gathered for burial
at Battle of Antietam.  (Library of Congress collection)
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Enlargement of Gardner image of dead Rebel soldiers along Hagerstown Pike.
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

This enlargement of a Gardner image shows Confederate dead gathered for burial
 on the D.R. Miller farm. (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

This enlargement of a Gardner image shows body of a young Rebel soldier next to the freshly dug
grave of Lieutenant John Clark of the 7th Michigan
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.) 

In October 1862, at Mathew Brady's photo gallery on Broadway in New York, Americans first laid eyes on images of the dead of Civil War. The photographs, taken by Brady employee Alexander Gardner in the days after the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, were horrifying ... and mesmerizing. "You will see hushed, reverend

In this Alexander Gardner image, Rebel dead, probably soldiers
 from Louisiana,  lay along Hagerstown Pike. The second photo
 above is an enlargement of the dead Rebel at left.

groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men's eyes," a New York Times reporter eloquently wrote of the patrons at Brady's gallery. "It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever. But so it is."

Gardner's photographs included many images of Confederate dead, some grotesquely deformed from their wounds or from exposure to the elements, laying along Hagerstown Pike, in Bloody Lane, on the Joseph Sherrick farm and on other parts of the battlefield. In one especially awful photograph, more than 20 dead Rebel soldiers were gathered for burial. The most poignant image showed a dead Rebel, probably only a teenager, next to the freshly dug grave of a Union lieutenant. So great is the detail in the image that the name on the wooden headboard can be read: "J A Clark, 7th Mich."

The son of Lovonia and Thomas Clark, Lieutenant John Clark, in his early 20s, was from Ida Township, Mich. (This detail was first revealed in William Frassanito's excellent 1978 book, "Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day.") To my knowledge, none of the Confederate soldiers in any of Gardner's images was ever identified. The first four photos in this post are enlargements of Gardner photographs taken at Antietam, each revealing remarkable detail. High-quality Antietam images in TIF format may be found on the Library of Congress photographs site, a terrific resource for those who aim to uncover secrets of Civil War images.

Interactive panoramas: John Sedgwick's grave, monument

                                    Click on images for full-screen interactive panorama.

John Sedgwick
(Library of Congress collection)

Fondly called "Uncle John" by his soldiers, Union Major General John Sedgwick was wounded in the wrist, leg and shoulder at the Battle of Antietam. He recovered from those wounds at his home in Cornwall Hollow, a speck on the map in rural Connecticut, about an hour northwest of Hartford. (No cell phone service for me in Cornwall Hollow!)

Sedgwick met his demise at Spotsylvania Courthouse, Va., on May 9, 1864, famously telling soldiers that Rebels "couldn't hit an elephant at that distance" moments before a sharpshooter's bullet smashed through the 50-year-old officer's left cheek and killed him instantly. If there's a Civil War Quote Hall of Fame somewhere, that one must be in it. Posts with photos of Sedgwick's grave and memorial also appear here and here on my blog. With the 151st anniversary of Antietam coming Tuesday, I took time out for a short trip this afternoon to Cornwall Hollow to shoot the interactive panoramas above of Sedgwick's grave in Cornwall Hollow Cemetery and at the nearby memorial for the general.

John Sedgwick was buried here on May 15, 1864, six days after he was killed.

VI Corps emblem on Major General John Sedgwick's gravestone in Cornwall Hollow, Conn.
Sedgwick took command of the VI Corps just before the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863.

This memorial to Sedgwick, dedicated  on Memorial Day 1900, is across the road from
 the cemetery where the general is buried in Cornwall Hollow, Conn.
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Antietam Up Close: Examining damage at Roulette farm

William Roulette lived here with his wife and five children in 1862.  Renowned Civil War
photographer Alexander Gardner took this image. (Library of Congress collection)
CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

On Sept. 19 or 20, 1862, days after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner set up his bulky camera equipment in a field on William Roulette's farm to shoot a stereoview of the farmer's house. At the top of this post is a glass plate of the right half of that image, available in .jpeg and TIFF formats on the Library of Congress Civil War site. Enlargements of the image reveal much detail, including the destruction wrought by the armies.

Broken fence rails may be seen near Roulette's house as well as in back of it in the field at the far left. Although damage from rifle and artillery fire is not apparent in the image of the farmhouse, accounts note that the house was struck many times. According to this 1891 account, "one huge shell tore through the west side, a little above the floor, and going through the parlor in an upward course passed through the ceiling and a wall beyond and fell harmless among a heap of rubbish it had created."

Roulette's house, shown here in an interactive panorama that I shot in the spring, and nearby barn were used as field hospitals during and after the battle. The rug in Roulette's parlor was so soaked with blood that it later had to be washed in nearby Antietam Creek.

Although his house and property were considerably damaged during the Battle of Antietam,
William Roulette was never compensated by the Federal government. This is an enlargement
of the Alexander Gardner image above.  (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

In an enlargement below, what appears to be overturned, white-washed wooden crates are in front of west side of Roulette's house. These may be the bee hives that are mentioned in many accounts of the battle. As the rookie 132nd Pennsylvania crossed this ground, the hives were overturned, perhaps by Confederate fire, causing great confusion as the enraged insects swarmed around the soldiers.

The Union army's II Corps, including the 14th Connecticut,  swept across Roulette's property to attack the center of the Rebels' line at nearby Bloody Lane. What may be farm animals, perhaps cows, appear in an enlargement at the very bottom of this post.

Roulette's property was stripped of anything that could be used to fuel the Union army, including livestock, so the enlargement may not show what I think. Months after the battle, Roulette submitted a lengthy itemized list to the U.S. government requesting compensation for damage the battle had caused to his property. One item found on the list: “Beehives + Bees = $8.00."

An enlargement of Gardner's image shows what may be Roulette's beehives, which were
overturned during the battle. The bees swarmed over soldiers in the 132nd Pennsylvania,
causing great confusion. 

In another enlargement of Gardner's image, broken fence rails, undoubtedly caused
 by soldiers, can be seen in the distance.  (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Antietam Up Close: The graves at Burnside Bridge

This enlargement of Gardner's image clearly shows another man, probably a soldier, on Burnside Bridge. 
The names of both men are lost to history.
(CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

On Sept. 21, 1862, famed Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner took this image  of a soldier near
 12 freshly dug graves at a stone wall near Burnside Bridge  at Antietam. (Library of Congress collection.)

In an enlargement of Gardner's image, the graves are easily seen. In his ground-breaking book,
Civil War photography expert William Frassanito first revealed the names of four of the
 51st New York soldiers buried at the wall. 

Another enlargement of Gardner's image shows the grave of a soldier in Company I  of the  51st New York, 
which stormed Burnside Bridge at 1 p.m. on Sept. 17, 1862. William Frassanito identified
 the soldier as Corporal Michael Keefe.

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One of my favorite Antietam images is the one at the top of this post by Alexander Gardner, whose haunting photograph graphically shows the terrible toll of war. On Sept. 21, 1862, four days after the Battle of Antietam, Gardner posed a soldier at a stone wall near the freshly dug graves of 12 of his comrades. Burnside Bridge, the scene of heavy fighting on the morning and early afternoon of the battle, appears in the background. The secrets of this image were long ago revealed by William Frassanito in his brilliant 1978 book, "Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America's Bloodiest Day." If the book is not on your Civil War bookshelf or in your Kindle, it ought to be. Get it here.

My favorite Antietam book.

A former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Frassanito did much of his photographic sleuthing with a magnifying glass, long before digital technology made such work a whole lot easier. Using a remarkably well-preserved original negative of Gardner's photograph, Frassanito determined from the writing scrawled on the wooden headboards that nine of the graves in the image were for soldiers in the 51st New York, who along with the 51st Pennsylvania and other units stormed the bridge and finally chased the Rebels from their perch across Antietam Creek.

Frassanito presumed that the three other graves were also for 51st New York soldiers. Profiled in June in the Washington Post, he was even able to decipher the names on four of the headboards: Sgt. George Loud of Company C (buried at the feet of the posed soldier); Private Edward Miller of Company H (three graves to the right of Loud); Private John Thompson of Company B (three graves to the right of Miller) and Corporal Michael Keefe of Company I (second grave to right of Thompson).

Using a digital copy of Gardner's image from the Library of Congress Civil War photography site, I was unable to read the names on the wooden headboards, but enlargements of the image reveal some pretty neat detail. Company I and NYV (New York Volunteers) are easily discernible on Keefe's wooden headboard, and another man, probably a soldier, can be seen on Burnside Bridge, over the right shoulder of the man posed in the foreground. The permanent graves of Loud, Miller, Thompson and Keefe are about a mile away, in the beautiful grounds of Antietam National Cemetery. Stop to think about those four men and their eight other comrades the next time you visit Burnside Bridge.

That's me, your humble blogger, posed at the approximate position of the soldier in Gardner's image.

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Before Antietam, nurse Maria Hall met the Lincolns

In this cropped enlargement of a photo taken at Smoketown Hospital, nurse Maria Hall tends 
to Union wounded  from the Battle of Antietam.  
 (Ely Collection, Edward G. Miner Library, Rochester, N.Y.)

One of the more compelling figures in the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam was a little-known nurse named Maria Hall, whose story is told in my book, "Connecticut Yankees at Antietam." From a prominent Washington D.C. family, Maria (pronounced Mar-EYE-Ah)  rushed to the battlefield from the capital after the fighting was over to help tend to some of the thousands of wounded. A veteran nurse by September 1862, Hall soon was put in charge of a ward at Smoketown Hospital, one of two large tent hospitals near the battlefield. (Crystal Spring hospital near Keedysville was the other.) Many Union wounded later recalled  the loving care received from the 26-year-old nurse. "With untiring perseverance she dealt out to the poor, wounded soldier the delicacies that he could relish, and which, by Government regulations, he could not get," wrote 78th New York Sergeant Thomas Grenan, who had suffered a gunshot wound to his jaw. During a visit to Smoketown in January 1863, more than four months after the battle, an Indianapolis Weekly Sentinel reporter noticed these words written in Hall's honor in a tent in her ward:

Maria Hall cared for President Lincoln's son Tad, 8, after his
 11-year-old son Willie died of typhus. (Photo: Courtesy Powers family)

To Miss Hall, our benefactress:
Your tender care of wounded men
Speaks loud of sympathy
For us on whom misfortune fell
In strife for liberty
Angel spirits revive the hopes
In many an aching heart.
And you, in human form, each day
Do act an angel's part.
Be thanked for it, and do believe
That, in our future days,
Our greatful heart remembers you,
And for your welfare prays.

Hall cared for hundreds of patients at Smoketown until it was disbanded in May 1863, but none was more high-profile than the little boy she cared for seven months before Antietam. On Feb. 21, 1862, one day after President Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie died of typhus, Hall was asked to go to the White House to help care for the president's youngest son, Tad. Dorothea Dix, the superintendent of army nurses, had recommended Hall. In a letter dated March 27, 1862 -- a transcript of which was graciously given to me by Maria's great-grandchild -- Hall wrote of that momentous day.

 "You may imagine my surprise therefore when (Dix) said "I have a carriage waiting, I wish to take you to the President's," Hall wrote to her friend. "This was the day but one after the death of little Willie, and 'Taddie' was then very ill; Mrs. Lincoln was sick with watching and grief. Such a request (came) from Miss Dix and under all the circumstances I could not refuse to go, thinking that she wanted me only for one night, but when fairly in for it, I found that she expected me to stay until the child was better."

The carriage ride to the White House, Hall wrote, was especially nerve-wracking.

Abraham Lincoln and his son, Tad, in a photograph taken by Alexander Gardner in 1865.
 (Library of Congress collection)

"Picture the pent up excitement with which I rode along Pennsylvania Avenue with D.L. Dix, and in through the gate leading to the entrance where always heretofore I had gone with the gay throng of the nation to greet the President, mid the gayety (sic) and glitter of fashion and pleasure," she wrote. "Now all was silent and in subdued sadness. I saw the bell handle shrouded with crepe and thought how mysteriously death enters upon the heels of pleasure and revelry."

Maria Hall wasn't an admirer of Mary Lincoln, seen here in
 an 1861  photo taken by Mathew Brady.  
(Library of Congress collection)

After entering the White House, Hall was escorted into Mrs, Lincoln's bedroom. The young nurse wasn't a big fan of Mary Lincoln's, writing in a letter to her friend before Willie died that the president's wife was "not of sufficient dignity of character to fill the post at the White House in any time." During Hall's nearly week-long experience at the White House, the grief-stricken Mary Lincoln was sick in bed most of the time. "I doubt not but I saw the best there is in her," Hall wrote. "She is very impulsive, gay and totally undisciplined." The nurse, however, was a huge admirer of the president.

"But what a rare chance I had of seeing 'Uncle Abe,'" Hall wrote her friend, "and let me tell you that I love him and am proud of him more than ever. He is honest, pure-hearted as the sun is bright; his devotion to his child was beautiful; he was only too kind and indulgent for the chlld's good ..." Hall thought "Taddie" was a "spoiled child and quite ungoverned." The president, she observed, would bring his work to Tad's room and sit for hours just to please his son.

"In this way I saw him sign nearly two hundred commissions for army officers," she wrote her friend, "and also my dear he gave me his autograph. Many a cozy chat I had with him before an open fire of wood, and it will be an experience to remember and tell to the youngsters of future years how I saw Old Abe in his child's sick room ... and in his child's bed take care of him if he were a tender woman."

After the Civil War, Hall moved to Connecticut, married a twice-married man named Lucas Richards in 1872 and reared two daughters and a son in a large house in Unionville, 15 miles west of Hartford. Hall, who often spoke to schoolchildren in Unionville about working in the White House, died in West Hartford, Conn., on July 20, 1912 at age 76.

In a letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant published three days after her death, Maria's passing was mourned.

"It will be something for the boys and girls who are now in high school to remember that they have seen and talked with a woman who had the privilege of knowing Abraham Lincoln in every-day life," C.M.H. wrote. (She is) one of the few Civil war nurses, who have lived up to this time."

Antietam: Wounds as 'large as a silver half dollar'

In a cabinet card image probably taken in the 1880s, Alonzo Maynard shows the effects of  wounds
 he suffered at an attack at Burnside Bridge during the Battle of Antietam. His wounds 
were highlighted in red by an unknown person,  perhaps a Grand Army of the Republic member. 
  (Photo: New England Civil War Museum, Rockville, Conn.)  

At the Battle of Antietam, more than 200 men and boys from Connecticut were killed or died from effects of wounds or other causes. Sometimes, the grievously wounded may have envied the dead. An 18-year-old private in the 11th Connecticut, Alonzo Maynard was shot four times during the attack at Burnside Bridge on the morning of Sept. 17, 1862. The entrance of some of the wounds, he said after the war, were as "large as a silver half dollar." Maynard was so terribly wounded that surgeons did not immediately tend to him because they figured he was a

Matt Reardon

lost cause.

But the teenager not only survived the Civil War, he lived until he was 63, dying on March 20, 1907. Maynard's post-war life was a great struggle, however, and he sometimes prayed that death would deliver him from the suffering caused by his battlefield wounds. His story may have gone untold were it not for Matt Reardon, who last spring shared the cabinet card image above of Maynard from the excellent collection at the New England Civil War Museum in Rockville, Conn.

Reardon, a passionate Civil War historian and executive director at the museum, has a direct connection to the war. His great-great-great grandfather, a private in the 8th Connecticut, survived Antietam and later imprisonment in a Rebel POW camp in Andersonville, Ga. Maynard's story, told in more detail in my recently released book "Connecticut Yankees at Antietam," is not unique. Many men returned from the war with grievous wounds, including Corporal Richard Jobes of the 16th Connecticut, who lost his left forearm to amputation after he was shot in John Otto's cornfield at Antietam. Other soldiers lost their minds. At least two soldiers in the 16th Connecticut who survived the horror of Antietam later died in Connecticut mental hospitals.

To learn more about Connecticut's Antietam soldiers, attend Civil War Day on Saturday at the Middlesex County Historical Society in Middletown, Conn., where I will appear with copies of my book available for purchase. Here's more on the book here and a Hartford Courant story here.

Alonzo Maynard was shot in the attack at Burnside Bridge, shown here in a photo probably
 taken by renowned battlefield photographer William Tipton in the 1890s. 
(Connecticut State Library)  CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

Antietam: 'Shot through the head and died instantly'

Killed at Antietam, 8th Connecticut Private Thomas Mason was buried in
 East Cemetery in Litchfield, Conn.

In a three-page letter home to his friends three days after the Battle of Antietam, Sergeant Seth Plumb described in detail the deaths of two soldiers from his hometown of Litchfield, Conn. Like Plumb, George Booth and Thomas Mason served in the 8th Connecticut, which advanced farther than any other regiment on the Union left flank at Antietam before it was turned back with heavy losses near Harpers Ferry Road. A member of the regiment's color guard, Booth died from a wound in the right arm and side about 3 a.m. on Sept. 18, 1862, the day after the battle. The end came much more quickly for Mason, who was "shot through the head and died instantly," according to Plumb. (Click here for my downloadable Excel spreadsheet of Connecticut Antietam deaths.)

In a letter to friends, 8th Connecticut Sergeant Seth Plumb wrote of the death of Thomas Mason.
 (Litchfield Historical Society) CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

At 41 years old, Mason was 16 years older than the average Civil War soldier, but he wasn't even the oldest soldier in the regiment. Claiming he was 44 when he enlisted, 54-year-old Private Peter Mann of Enfield, who was mortally wounded in the groin at Antietam, was by far the oldest. In details gleaned from Mason's Civil War pension record and the 1860 Federal census, we know that he was married and employed as a day laborer before the war. A 7-year-old child named George, perhaps the Masons' son, lived with Thomas and Mary Mason in 1860, but there's no mention of him in pension records. Perhaps George died shortly before or after the Civil War began in April 1861. Thomas and Mary were married on May 3, 1847 in a ceremony in Litchfield, once described as a town of "hard, active, reading, thinking, intelligent men who may probably be set forth as a pattern of the finest community on earth."  Founded in 1719, Litchfeld was home to the first law school in the United States.

In June 1860, the Federal census taker noted that there were three persons in the
 Mason household: Thomas, Mary and a 7-year-old boy named George. The value
 of Mason's real estate was $700; his personal estate was valued at $100.
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Mason was mustered into the 8th Connecticut, a three-year regiment, as a private in Company E on Sept. 25, 1861. Less than a month after her husband was killed, Mary applied for a Civil War widow's pension, and in February 1863, she was granted $8 a month. When she died on Dec. 13, 1893, Mary's monthly pension check was $12, a pittance for losing her husband on a western Maryland battlefield. Only 37 years old when Thomas died, she never remarried. Mason was buried in Litchfield's East Cemetery, not far from the final resting places in the town's West Cemetery for Booth and Plumb, who also was killed during the Civil War.

I placed this penny, Lincoln side up, atop Mason's gravestone to honor the soldier.