The 14th Connecticut monument is to the immediate left of the white monument.
Wearing a large bow tie and the hint of a smile, Samuel Huxham probably posed for this photo before he went off to war. (Photo: Middlesex County Historical Society) |
The memory of the death of his brother-in-law seven months earlier may have been on Samuel Huxham's mind as he crouched low behind a fence near Cemetery Ridge on the morning of July 3, 1863. A 25-year-old corporal in 14th Connecticut, Huxham and his Company B comrades were trading shots with pickets of the enemy, which held a portion of the Bliss farm 200 yards or so away. The regiment's main position was about 700 yards behind Huxham, along a loosely constructed low, stone wall on Cemetery Ridge (see interactive panoramas above). As Huxham rose from his position to squeeze off a shot, a sharpshooter's bullet tore through his head, killing the married father of a 1-year-old son instantly.
"(Huxham) had evidently become tired of lying flat upon the ground and firing through the lower rails," a 14th Connecticut regimental historian wrote, "and risen up to a kneeling position and was aiming through the middle rails of the fence, a risk the rebel sharp-shooters had quickly availed themselves of, and not unlikely the very one that had attracted Huxham's attention was the one that proved too quick for him and fired the fatal shot."
Recounted another veteran years after the battle: "Alone, far from all loved ones, fulfilling his oath of loyalty, the brave, faithful spirit passed from his body by the swift leaden messenger sped by a traitor's hand."
Carrie Huxham provided this birth certificate for her son as part of the documentation to secure a widow's pension after her husband's death. The registrar incorrectly noted that the couple had a daughter. (fold3.com) CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE. |
Huxham was from Middletown, Conn., a town that rose up from the banks of the Connecticut River and was the home of Wesleyan University, which supplied many students for the Union army. (One of them, 19-year-old lieutenant George Crosby, was killed at Antietam.) George Washington visited Middletown in 1789, writing in his diary that "while dinner was getting ready, I took a walk around the Town, from the heights of which the prospect is beautiful." A joiner, Huxham married Carrie S. Gibbons in the late summer of 1861, and the couple soon started a family. A son, Samuel Jr., was born on May 27, 1862, so the English immigrant must have agonized over the decision to enlist in the Union army on Aug. 8, 1862. On Sept. 17, 1862, a day after his first wedding anniversary, Samuel survived the bloodbath at Antietam.
For 24-year-old Carrie Huxham, the death of her husband was yet another terrible blow. Her brother Elijah Gibbons, the captain of Company B of the 14th Connecticut, was mortally wounded at Fredericksburg on Dec. 13, 1862. Because the Gibbons family did not have the financial means, his friends arranged for the return of the officer's body to Middletown, where he was buried in Mortimer Cemetery. In late July 1863, the body of Carrie's husband also was returned to Middletown, where after a service at the Baptist church on Main Street, he was buried in the same plot as his brother-in-law.
SOURCES:
-- Samuel Huxham's pension file, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., via Fold3.com
Middletown Constitution, Aug. 5, 1863
Page, Charles Davis, History of the Fourteenth Regiment, Connecticut Vol. Infantry, Meriden, Conn., 1906
Stevens, H.S., Address Delivered at the Dedication, Monument of the 14th Conn. Vol., Gettysburg, Penn., July 3rd, 1884, Middletown, Conn., 1884
My great-grandfather was a German immigrant who signed up for the 14th Connecticut in New York in January, 1863. From what little I can determine, it appears that he was in company C, was wounded at Spotsylvania, and having achieved the rank of Sergeant,was ho norably discharged at the Presidio in San Francisco in December 1865,shortly after the re-formed regiment arrived from New York by way of Panama. I am curious as to how big a contribution immigrants, particularly German and Irish,made to the 14th Connecticut during the Civil War.
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