Cold Harbor: Deadly toll for Litchfield County, Connecticut

2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery fought here at Cold Harbor on June 1, 1864.  A monument to the 
regiment is in the background.

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On June 1, 1864. the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery suffered more than 300 casualties at the Battle of Cold Harbor, 10 miles northeast of the Rebel capital of Richmond. Later that night, regiment chaplain Winthrop Phelps jotted down a few lines to his wife in which he vividly described the horrendous experience, the Heavies' first major fighting of the Civil War.

"Pray for me," he wrote to Lucy Phelps,  "am not in a fit state of mind."

Most of the soldiers in the regiment were from Woodbury, New Milford, Harwinton, Litchfield and other small towns in Litchfield County, in northwestern Connecticut. On June 9, 1864, the Litchfield (Conn.) Enquirer, a weekly, published a staggering list of killed and wounded from Cold Harbor, "most of it kindly furnished us by friends of the gallant boys." During a visit to the Litchfield Historical Society, I photographed that list in the Enquirer with my iPhone and then crudely spliced it together to present it in its entirety below:

Gettysburg: 1st Massachusetts monument dedication

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

On July 1, 1886, battlefield photographer and Gettyysburg entrepreneur William Tipton took this image of 1st Massachusetts veterans at the dedication of their Gettysburg monument along Emmitsburg Road. During the battle on July 2, 1863, the 384-man regiment suffered 130 casualties, including 19 killed, in a fight that was described as a "perfect tornado of whizzing missiles." Corporal Nathaniel M. Allen, a 23-year-old watchmaker from Boston, earned the Medal of Honor when he recovered the regiment's colors from next to the body of a fallen sergeant William Kelren and retreated in a hail of bullets with that flag and the national colors, preventing their capture.

It's always interesting to explore Tipton images, which are often rich in detail. ...

... All the cool kids think photobombing is so 2014. But as this ahead-of-its-time horse shows, the fad dates to at least 1886. Perhaps the dour-looking animal belonged to Tipton. What a nag!  ...

... although in their mid-40s and 50s, these stern-faced 1st Massachusetts veterans don't look like a bunch you'd want to mess with. ...

... and how about those fancy hats and jackets these band members are wearing? Wonder if they were a tad uncomfortable on this summer day. ...

Nathaniel Allen

... hey, who is the tall man above with the gigantic, dark-black moustache? Could he be controversial Union general Dan Sickles himself? Or is it really Allen, who was awarded his Medal of Honor in 1899, a year before he died. (Although he didn't witness Allen's act of valor, Sickles supported the effort to get the corporal the Medal of Honor.) For comparison, at right is a post-war image of Allen and below is an 1886 image of Sickles (and generals Joseph Carr and Charles Graham) taken by Tipton at the Trostle Farm at Gettysburg, where he lost his right leg to artillery fire on July 2, 1863. Hmmm. Sickles was 66 in July 1886, and the man in the image above appears to be in his late 40s or early 50s. Advantage, Allen!

Sickles, who was instrumental in memorializing the battlefield with monuments, was not a big fan of Tipton, who had angered veterans by building an electric railway line for tourists through Devil's Den and commercializing the sacred ground.

On July 4, 1893, The New York Times 
reported  about a confrontation
 between Union vets, including 
Dan Sickles, and  photographer 
William Tipton.

While photographing a group of veterans after a New York State monument dedication at the national cemetery on July 3, 1893 with his "deadly camera," Tipton was ordered away by Sickles. The next day, while photographing the dedication of the New York State monument at Little Round Top, Tipton was involved in another confrontation with the one-legged general and other former Union veterans. When the photographer refused to move, the old soldiers put their hats over his camera, laid it on the ground and threatened to break it.

In a foreshadowing of life in the 21st century  -- hey, Alec Baldwin! -- Tipton got mad. And then he sued. "You will hear from me later!" he raged, according to a New York Times correspondent who was there. "You are having your fun now; I will have mine later!"

Retorted Sickles: "I think I have the right to determine whom I shall permit to photograph me. If an obnoxious person tries to take a snap shot photograph of me, I have a perfect right to object, and what is more, to order him away ... "

(Check out more Tipton images on my Pinterest page.)

Dan Sickles (center) during an 1886 visit to the Trostle Farm at Gettysburg, where he 
lost his leg to artillery fire.  (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Connecticut Memorial Day photo essay: Who were they?

We often get caught up in mind-numbing Civil War casualty figures. Six hundred and twenty-five thousand deaths overall. (Or were there really many, many more?) More than 23,000 casualties at Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the war. More than 50,000 casualties during three days at Gettysburg, nearly 32,000 in nearly two weeks of fighting at Spotsylvania Courthouse and more than 23,000 at Shiloh in two days.

And on and on ...

At my last stop Sunday afternoon during a 3 1/2-hour, five-cemetery tour in western Connecticut, I found a number I can really wrap my head around:

One.

As in one American flag and one red carnation placed on the grave of every Civil War veteran at Bantam Burying Ground in beautiful, rural Litchfield County. The flags I expected, but the red carnation on each veteran's gravestone in the un-mowed, older section of the cemetery was an especially nice touch. Here are snapshots of what I found Sunday, a day before Memorial Day:

... Even the cause of death is provided on 7th Connecticut Sergeant Seth W. Reynolds' marker in Warren Cemetery: a bullet wound to the lungs during the Battle of Pocotaligo (S.C.). The battle was a failed Union effort to sever the railroad connection to Charleston, S.C., on Oct. 22, 1862. "Among the incidents worthy of mention," according to a regimental history, "was the death of Sergeant Reynolds of Company A. He was mortally wounded in the fight, and his comrades carried him six weary miles to the landing, only to see him die after they reached there. He was a large, heavy man, and frequently said, 'Boys, this is too hard work for you. Leave me here.'; but they could not bear to leave him while life lasted." Reynolds died the next day. "I have fought a good fight," the quotation at the bottom of the 22-year-old soldier's marker reads ...

... 23-year-old Private Albert Beckwith of the 19th Connecticut (later 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery) died of typhoid fever on Jan. 1 or 2, 1863, in a 3rd Division hospital in Alexandria, Va. He left behind a wife named Eliza, whom he married on Oct. 9, 1860 in New Hartford, Conn., and a daughter named Mary Eliza, who was born on March 11, 1862. Eliza re-married in 1868. Whether Albert is buried under this marker in Old Neupag Cemetery or if the marker really is a cenotaph is unclear ...

... Only 22 years old, Private George L. Pendleton of 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery died of disease on Sept. 11, 1862 in Washington, where the regiment served in the defenses of the capital. During the Civil War, disease killed thousands in Washington, where encampments of soldiers turned the Potomac River into a cesspool. "Of all the detestable places Washington is first," lawyer and diarist George Templeton Shaw noted. "Crowd, heat, bad quarters, bad fair [fare], bad smells, mosquitos, and a plague of flies transcending everything within my experience... Beelzebub surely reigns here." Earlier in the war, Pendleton served with the 19th Connecticut. This marker is in Cornwall Cemetery. ...

... Perhaps looking for a great adventure, teenager John S. Richardson, who was born in Connecticut,  enlisted as a private in the 3rd Minnesota on Sept. 30, 1861, at Blue Earth County, Minn. Early in the war, the 3rd Minnesota served mostly in garrison duty -- first in Kentucky and then in Tennessee, where Richardson suffered an unknown injury and was discharged for disability on March 15. 1862. That may have been fortuitous because four months later Nathan Bedford Forrest captured nearly the entire regiment at Murfreesboro, Tenn., leading the third charge against the 3rd Minnesota himself. Only 18 years old, Richardson died a little more than four months later, on July 30, 1862, of an unknown cause. In front of his marker at Bantam Burying Ground were wild daisies, an old metal Grand Army of the Republic marker and a single red carnation ...

... 19-year-old Orlando Evans, a private in the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery,  died at Knight Hospital in New Haven of typhoid fever on Feb. 28, 1863, a little more than six months after he enlisted. Opened in 1862 to treat wounded soldiers, Knight Hospital dealt with 25,000 soldiers during the war. Orlando was the son of 41-year-old Rhoda and 53-year-old David Evans, a shoemaker who was "well thought of by all the people" in Torrington, Conn. I found Evans' weathered marker in an un-mowed section of 1st Ecclesiastical Cemetery in Torrington in the shade of a line of trees.

Then & Now: Memorial Day 1903 in Collinsville, Connecticut

THEN: A crowd gathers at Collinsville's Congregational Church shortly before a nearby
 Civil War memorial was dedicated on Memorial Day, May 30, 1903.
 (Photo courtesy Clifford T. Alderman/scanned by Peg Giles)

NOW: The church has changed little since 1903.

Four decades after more than 250 area men marched off to fight the Civil War, 4,000 people gathered in the village of Collinsville, Conn., to honor 39 of those soldiers whose bodies were believed to be buried in unknown graves in the South. On a Memorial Day afternoon, May 30, 1903, the Collinsville Brass Band performed on the small town green across from the Congregational Church, a clergyman offered a prayer, politicians delivered speeches and a choir sang "Aware, Put On Thy Strength" and "America" before a parade that included many veterans formed and the crowd walked up a steep hill to the town cemetery.

A rare ribbon from the Civil War monument 
dedication on May 30, 1903 in Collinsville, Conn.
(Courtesy Clifford T. Alderman)

In a corner of the terraced Village Cemetery overlooking the factory town where bayonets, axes and picks were made for the Union army during the war, a huge American flag draped a granite Civil War memorial. A large chorus sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" after the grandsons of two of the men listed on the monument removed the flag to reveal a large bronze plaque that included the names as well as the date and site of death of the Connecticut soldiers.

Before the war, many of those men, ranging in age from their late teens to early 40s, were employed as laborers and factory workers in the Collinsville area. George A. Tatro worked as a polisher, perhaps in the town's Collins Co. factory that supplied John Brown with pikes for his ill-fated slave rebellion in 1859 at Harpers Ferry, Va. A 27-year-old private in Company E of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, he was killed at Cold Harbor on June 1, 1864. Orrin Case, a 41-year-old 2nd lieutenant in the 31st U.S. Colored Infantry, was a lawyer from Collinsville. He was killed on Aug. 6, 1864 in Petersburg, Va.

Asa L Cook, a stone mason from Canton, was a corporal in Company E of the 16th Connecticut. When the Rebels captured Plymouth, N.C., on April 20, 1864, he was shot in the head and taken prisoner with nearly his entire regiment. Married to a woman named Julia and  father to a 9-year-old son named Walter, he died 19 days later. Another 16th Connecticut soldier, 19-year-old private Miles Shepard, died of pneumonia in a government hospital in  Knoxville, Md., on Nov. 12, 1862. His mother, who lived in nearby Simsbury, relied on Miles' support ever since her husband had died in 1854.

Asa Cook and Julia Gleason were married on Jan. 5, 1851. A corporal in the 16th Connecticut,
Asa died of a head wound at Plymouth, N.C., on May 9, 1864. (fold3.com)

Fittingly, three of the soldiers listed on the monument are grouped together. Apparently close friends, Martin Wadhams, Isaac Tuller and Henry Sexton, privates in their 20s in the 8th Connecticut, wrote and signed a thank-you note on patriotic stationery to a woman from Canton Center on Dec. 16, 1861. A member of a soldiers' aid society, Sophronia Barber had sent the three soldiers a care package that included mittens and socks.

"May the richest of Heavens blessing rest upon the ladies who so kindly remember us," read the letter from a camp in Annapolis, Md., "and we hope that this war soon be over and none of the Stars that now are emblazoned on the Flag of our Country be effaced and we be returned to our homes again and see our friends again in a free & united country, under the same old flag the heroes of the revolution fought under."

Within 10 months, each of the soldiers was dead.

Henry Sexton, Isaac Tuller and Martin Wadhams were comrades in the 8th Connecticut.

Delirious and frothing at the mouth, Sexton, a teacher, died of jaundice aboard a schooner in Annapolis Harbor on Jan. 7, 1862. "It took five of us to hold him and keep him from tearing his face with his hands," wrote his friend, Private Oliver Case of the 8th Connecticut. On May 12, 1862, a captain in the 8th Connecticut relayed the circumstances of the death of Tuller, who succumbed to typhoid fever on April 9, 1862 in New Bern, N.C., to his sister back in Connecticut.  "...You have lost a noble brother," Henry Hoyt wrote of Isaac, who worked as a clerk before he enlisted. "I have lost a man whose loss we all deeply feel. He was noble hearted and generous to a fault." A teamster in the 8th Connecticut, Wadhams was killed at the Battle of Antietam on Sept. 17, 1862.

Lawrence Gleason, a private in  the
1st Connecticut is buried in
Arlington National Cemetery.

Another soldier listed on the bronze plaque, 1st Connecticut Cavalry Private Lawrence Gleason, survived until the hostilities ended only to die of pneumonia in a Washington hospital on June 16, 1865. Before the war, Gleason was employed as a mule spinner in a textile mill in Providence, R.I., and much of his earnings helped support his widowed mother, Bridget, who immigrated to the United States from England with her son after her husband had died in Ireland in 1849. Perhaps enticed by a bounty offered in Connecticut, Gleason enlisted on Aug. 13, 1864.

Unlike his 38 other comrades on the Civil War memorial, Gleason does have a known grave. He's buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Grave No. 12502, under a weathered, pearl-white tombstone.

SOURCES: 

fold3.com, pension records for Lawrence Gleason, Asa Cook and Miles Shephard.

Hartford Courant, June 1, 1903, Page 9

1860 U.S. census

THEN: A chorus sang The Star-Spangled Banner after the flag that draped the memorial 
was removed at the 1903 Memorial Day ceremony.
  (Photo courtesy Clifford T. Alderman/scanned by Peg Giles)

NOW: The Civil War memorial in Collinsville, Conn., attracts little notice today. A bronze plaque
 lists the names of  39 Civil War soldiers from the area who died during the war.

THEN: At the end of the dedication ceremony, Taps was played. 
 (Photo courtesy Clifford T. Alderman/scanned by Peg Giles)

NOW: Collinsville Cemetery is also known as Huckleberry Hill Cemetery or Village Cemetery.

All-day Cold Harbor program in Litchfield, Connecticut

An all-day event in Litchfield, Conn., on Saturday will be held to honor 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery soldiers from Litchfield County towns who fought and died at the Battle of Cold Harbor on June 1, 1864. At the "Reverberations" program, I'll speak at 3 p.m. at American Legion Post 27, 418 Bantam Road in Litchfield about those soldiers. Check out the video trailer for my portion of the program above.

Major General John Sedgwick's death: 'Like an electric shock'

Veterans gather at John Sedgwick's monument at Spotsylvania Courthouse, perhaps on  May 12, 1887,
 the day it was  dedicated.  (Sedgwick monument images: 
Emerging Civil War blog  via Fredericksburg/Spotsylvania National Military Park.)

Early 20th- or late 19th-century image of Sedgwick monument.

An iron fence surrounded the Sedgwick monument in this late 19th- or early 20th-century view.
  That fence has long since been removed.)

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Shortly after a sharpshooter's bullet crashed into John Sedgwick's left cheek, killing him at Spotsylvania Courthouse (Va.) on the morning of May 9, 1864, word of the beloved major general's death spread "like an electric shock" throughout the Army of the Potomac. George Meade and other officers wept, and Ulysses Grant's aide-de-camp recalled years later that the only time he saw the general as upset was when he received a telegram that President Lincoln had been assassinated.

Martin T. McMahon, a lieutenant colonel in
 1864, said in a speech in 1892 that a "great
 loneliness fell  upon the hearts of all" after
 John Sedgwick's death.
(Library of Congress)

Perhaps the best description of Sedgwick's death came from Martin T. McMahon, the VI Corps chief of staff and close witness to the killing. After he was shot, Sedgwick toppled into the 26-year-old soldier and fell to the ground, blood spewing from just beneath his eye like a "little fountain."

"The same smile remained on his lips," McMahon recalled, "that he wore in the last moments of his mortal life."

Another witness, Lieutenant John G. Fisher of the 14th New Jersey, recalled decades later that after Sedgwick fell into the undergrowth, "blood spurted from the wound at least a foot and a half and saturated the bushes." Fisher even saved a souvenir of the gruesome incident, cutting down a bush upon which Sedgwick bled, letting it dry in the sun, slicing off a five-inch section that formed a "Y" and carving into it the date "May 9." After the war, he kept it on his mantle, "a reminder of the cold-blooded manner in which our gallant commander was killed." Four hours after the VI Corps leader was killed, Frederick T. Dent, Grant's aide-de-camp, plucked a violet from the spot where Sedgwick lay and saved it in a book.

At a Memorial Day event in 1892 at Sedgwick's grave in rural Cornwall Hollow, Conn., McMahon spoke of the reactions of men in the ranks in the immediate area of the general's death -- and later at VI Corps headquarters -- and of the love soldiers had for the 50-year-old officer.

"The men knelt still in the trenches," he said of the U.S. Army soldiers, "and their hearts were filled with great sorrow; but such was the force of discipline that not one wandered from his place, although all knew that a terrible blow had fallen on them, and the silence that follows a great tragedy descended on the woods of Spottsylvania on that morning of saddest memories."

John Sedgwick (second from right) and George Meade (tall man in foreground) in a photograph taken 
at Brandy Station, Va., in February 1864.  Meade wept upon hearing  news of Sedgwick's death. 
 (Library of Congress collection)

Regarding his visit to headquarters shortly afterward, McMahon said during his oration:

"When I reached general headquarters, in the tent of the Adjutant-General of the army, the much-beloved Seth Williams, I found Gen. Williams and Gen. [Henry] Hunt, the chief of artillery, and Col. [Edward] Platt, the Judge-Adocate General of the Army, and other veteran officers who had served through many years of warfare. As they saw me marked with blood, Gen. Williams started forward, and said but one word, 'Sedgwick?' I could not answer. Each one in that tent, old-gray bearded warriors, burst into tears, and for some minutes sobbed like children mourning a father."

Image believed to have been shot at Sedgwick
 monument dedication on May 12, 1887.

Sedgwick's body was taken to General Meade's headquarters, where a bower of evergreens was placed over the bier on which the general's body lay. Soldiers paid their respects until Sedgwick's remains were sent to Washington to be embalmed.

In flowery language common for the era, McMahon said at the 1892 Memorial Day event that Sedgwick was "modest as a girl, unassuming, gentle, just, pure in heart and in word, he endeared himself to the men who followed him, and was loved by all with a love surpassing the love of women.

"No picture that I can draw," he added, "can give to you who knew him not an adequate conception of how lovable he was."

The spot where Sedgwick was shot apparently remained unmarked until 1874, when Andrew Humphreys, the former Union general, placed a "rough boulder" on the site. Sixth Corps veterans who visited the battlefield over the next 13 years were dismayed that their former commander was not honored there, leading the Sedgwick Memorial Association to raise funds to purchase a monument and an acre upon which to place it.

On May 12, 1887, more than 300 VI Corps veterans, including Sedgwick successor Horatio Wright, returned to the site of their commander's death to dedicate a monument in his honor. It took the party more than three hours to make the short journey from Fredericksburg to Spotsylvania Courthouse because the roads, as they were in 1864, were "still detestable," according to this 1887 account of the event. Thousands from Spotsylvania County as well as Virginia governor Fitzhugh Lee, the former Rebel cavalry general, attended the dedication of the first formal monument on the Spotsylvania Courthouse battlefield.

"Those scenes and tragic activities of our young lives, once so familiar and so real," Vermont Gov. Samuel Pingree, a Union veteran, said during his short dedication speech, "are now beginning to seem like a dream of long ago."

SOURCES:

-- Gold, Theodore Sedgwick, Memorial Day Exercises in Memory of John Sedgwick, May 30, 1892, Cornwall, Conn., The Case, Lockwood and Brainard & Co., Hartford, Conn., 1892.

-- McMahon, Martin T, General John Sedgwick: An Address Delivered Before the Vermont Officers' Reunion Society, Nov. 11, 1880, Rutland, Vt., Tuttle and Co., Official State Printers, 1880.

-- Sedgwick Memorial Association; 6th Army Corps, Spottsylvania Court House, Va., May 11, 12 and 13, 1887, Dunlap & Clarke Printers, Philadelphia, 1887.

Veterans at the monument about 1888.

---

-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

Collector's Corner: 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery ribbon

The 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery suffered more than 300 casualties 
at the Battle of Cold Harbor on June 1, 1864.

Have something you would like to share for Collector's Corner? E-mail me.

This 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery regiment reunion ribbon, freshly added to my collection, was worn by a veteran at the unit's 60th reunion in Litchfield, Conn., on Sept. 11, 1925. Most of old soldiers were well into their 80s then, some perhaps even 90-plus years old. I hope someone will be able to identify the veteran pictured on the ribbon on Saturday when I am in Litchfield, where an all-day event will honor and remember soldiers from that area who served during the Civil War. Here's the schedule for Saturday's "Reverberations" program.

Beauty and tragedy at Northfield (Conn.) Cemetery

                     Civil War graves dot Northfield (Conn.) Cemetery in Litchfield County.

      Joseph Hubbard, a 2nd Connecticut Artillery private , survived the war, living until 54.

Old metal Grand Army of the Republic markers appear throughout the cemetery.

Wild flowers blanketed graves in Northfield Cemetery, putting a stunning exclamation point on a fabulous spring weekend in Litchfield County. During the Civil War, this beautiful area of Connecticut, known for its productive farms and bitter winters, was regularly rocked by tragedy as word of casualties arrived from the front. The remains of several area soldiers rest in this cemetery, not far from Northfield's Civil War memorial. Above the word Lincoln in raised letters on that brownstone monument are carved these words:

"THAT THE GENERATIONS TO COME / MIGHT KNOW THEM."

... From Litchfield, Conn., Walter Hale was "a finely proportioned, vigorous young man excelling in athletic sports," a newspaper wrote decades after the war, and was  "especially remembered by the older residents as a powerful and daring swimmer." The 18-year-old was a private in Company C of the 20th Connecticut, one of the regiments stunned by Stonewall Jackson's surprise attack at Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863. The son of Thomas and Mary Hale was killed the next day. ...

 Horace Hubbard was killed at Winchester (Va.)
(Photo: Northfield Historical Society)

... A married father of two young children, Horace Hubbard of Plymouth, Conn, enlisted as a sergeant on Aug. 11, 1862. "He felt it was the duty of every able-bodied man that could possibly go, to do so," according to a post-war newspaper account. Promoted to 2nd lieutenant in Company H of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery in March 1864, Hubbard survived the bloodbath at the Battle of Cold Harbor only to be killed in action at Winchester, Va., on Sept. 19, 1864. "His back was fearfully torn by a shell, and he lived but a short time," according to a regimental history. "He sent dying messages to his friends at home, and said he believed it was all for the best. 'Tell the boys of Company D, (in which he was formerly First Sergeant,) that I always meant to do right by them, and to forgive me if I have not.' " The 33-year-old soldier was buried where he fell on the battlefield, and after the war, his remains were recovered and re-buried in Northfield Cemetery. ...

A G.A.R. marker embedded 
next  to Camp's memorial.

A 22-year-old corporal in Company K of the 2nd Connecticut Artillery, Joseph Camp went missing at Cold Harbor, and was presumably killed. The grandson of the first pastor of Northfield's Congregational Church and the eldest son of the town's physician, he worked as a clerk in nearby Thomaston, Conn., before he enlisted on Christmas Eve 1863. Dr. D.B.W Camp traveled south to find Joseph's remains, but they were never found. "He sleeps in secret," the words on his marker in Northfield Cemetery read, "but his grave, unknown to man, is marked by God."

Gettysburg: Tipton image of 12th N.J.monument dedication

June 30, 1888: 12th New Jersey monument dedication at Hancock Avenue in Gettysburg.
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

Private William Hewitt, 12th New Jersey
(Author's collection)

Gettysburg-based photographer William Tipton, who also shot images of veterans at Antietam, photographed the 12th New Jersey monument dedication at Gettysburg shown above on June 30, 1888. An enlargement of the image (see below) reveals the words"12th Regt. N.J.V. Buck and Ball" on the sign on the tree in the background. The regiment was supplied with .69-caliber smoothbore muskets that fired a bullet and buckshot, devastating weapons at close range but poor weapons with which to hit a "Johnny" at long range. The "Buck and Ball" boys used those weapons to flush Rebels from the Bliss Farm on July 2, 1863 at Gettysburg.

Perhaps 12th New Jersey private William Hewitt, shown in the ambrotype at right, attended the Gettysburg event in 1888, although he may have received grief from his former comrades if he did. According to Hewitt's claim for a pension in 1876, he "was ruptured across the bowels" from carrying a heavy load to Gettysburg while on the march about July 1, 1863.. And in an amended claim in 1885, it was stated that Hewitt suffered from chronic diarrhea and piles that were contracted in July 1863, "the consequence of fatigue and overmarching" to Gettysburg. Hewitt missed the fighting.  He died at age 62 of a heart ailment on Aug. 24, 1894, in Clayton, N.J. and was buried in Park View Cemetery in Medford, N.J.

Veterans brought their wives and other family members to the dedication on June 30, 1888.

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150 years ago today: Major General John Sedgwick's funeral

John Sedgwick's grave marker stands out in the rural cemetery in Cornwall Hollow, Conn.

A sharpshooter's bullet through the left cheek killed Sedgwick at Spotsylvania Courthouse, Va.

Emblem for the VI Corps, which was commanded by Sedgwick in 1863-64, appears 
on the front of the marker.

An old metal Grand Army of the Republic marker at the base of Sedgwick's grave.

One hundred and fifty years today, hundreds of mourners gathered for the graveside service at a cemetery in Cornwall Hollow, Conn., for Union Major General John Sedgwick, who six days earlier had been killed by a sharpshooter at Spotsylvania Courthouse, Va. As his body was lowered into the grave, "a peal of thunder like the roar of distant artillery reverberated along the heavens, sounding his requiem and the tired soldier rested." In contrast to 1864, I was the only person in the cemetery this afternoon at 12:30 ET on a rainy day in northwestern Connecticut. For more on Sedgwick's funeral, click here.

Gettysburg: Death of 17th Connecticut Lt. Colonel Fowler

Gettysburg photographer William Tipton shot this image of the dedication of the
 17th Connecticut monument on July 1, 1884.  (CLICK ON ALL IMAGES TO ENLARGE.)

An enlargement of  image above shows many attendees gathered under a canopy next to monument.

In this circa 1885 William Tipton image, William Henry Noble (second from left), a colonel  in the
 17th Connecticut, appears with Henry Allen (third from right), a veteran and chairman 
of the 17th Connecticut monument committee. Henrietta Noble, William's daughter, is at left next 
to Allen's wife. The other men are unidentified.

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On July 1, 1884, 21 years after their lieutenant colonel was decapitated by enemy fire on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, 17th Connecticut veterans gathered with their families for their monument dedication yards from where the gruesome event occurred. Among the gray-haired veterans who sat beneath a canopy next to the monument on Barlow's Knoll were William Henry Noble, who had served as a 17th Connecticut colonel, and Connecticut governor Phineas Lounsbury, who served as a private in the regiment but had been discharged for disability in December 1862.

Lieutenant colonel Douglass Fowler was 
killed at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863.

Before the dedication, an American flag draped the white granite monument upon which were etched 35 names of 17th Connecticut soldiers who had died at Gettysburg. Near the top of the left front side appeared the name of Douglass Fowler, the 37-year-old officer from Norwalk, Conn., whose horrific death on the knoll had shocked his comrades decades earlier.

Directing his men while astride his white horse during the chaos of battle, Fowler was a prominent target as Rebels advanced through a strip of woods 100 yards or so in front of the regiment. (See interactive panoramas below.) "Soon after I had sent my wounded to the rear," Albert Peck, a 2nd lieutenant in the regiment, wrote 24 years after the battle, "the line officers gathered around Colonel Fowler and tried to persuade him to dismount during the battle, but he refused, fearing he might be deemed cowardly."

A short time later, the regiment was ordered to fall in, deploy for battle and charge.  "... our gallant boys advanced on the enemy with a will," Peck remembered. But as the Rebels closed on the outnumbered 17th Connecticut and the "din had reached the standard of a hell," according to a private, Fowler shouted a command and "the next instant he reeled from the saddle." (Hat tip to excellent 17th Connecticut blog.) Gunfire or canister sheered off the top of the lieutenant colonel's head, splattering his brains on his adjutant by his side.

On the 17th Connecticut monument on 
Barlow's Knoll, Douglas Fowler's name appears
 on a panel with seven other soldiers who died
 at Gettysburg. 

Decades after the battle, Edward Fowler, the officer's younger brother, wrote that an "unexploded cannester [sic] shot" struck Douglas and took his head off above the mouth, but he had not witnessed the terrible scene. A private in the 14th Connecticut, Edward had been discharged for disability in February 1863.

So intense was the fire on Barlow's Knoll that H. Whitney Chatfield, Fowler's adjutant, had a horse shot and killed from under him, bullet holes through his hat, haversack and the sleeve of his coat and his Revolutionary War-era sword shot apart. (Chatfield also did not survive the Civil War. He was killed at the Battle of Dunn's Lake in Florida on Feb. 5, 1865.)

"We were soon cut to pieces," Peck wrote, "and having no troops in our rear to support us, we fell back into the town." (Read 17th Connecticut Major Allen Brady's Gettysburg field report here, or if you have $16,000 to spare, purchase it here.)

Fowler's death compounded the tragedy for his family back in Connecticut. In 1855, Douglas' 23-year-old wife, Melissa Jane, died after the couple lost a daughter in infancy. Two of Fowler's brothers -- Henry and Richard -- also served as officers during the war. A lieutenant colonel in the 63rd New York, Henry suffered a severe wound at Antietam and was discharged from the army on July 4, 1863, a day after fighting at Gettysburg ended. Less than seven months before Gettysburg, on Dec. 13, 1862, 46-year-old Richard, a sergeant in the 27th Connecticut, was shot in the right leg and abdomen during a charge on Marye's Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg. His leg was amputated and he died five days later.

Despite repeated recovery efforts by his comrades, Fowler's remains were never found. According to accounts, his body was stripped of clothes by the Rebels and probably tossed into a trench. He may be buried at the national cemetery in Gettysburg under a stone without a name.

In 1885, survivors of his regiment placed a wooden flagpole on Barlow's Knoll to mark the spot where the widower was killed. Replaced by a metal pole decades later, it stands as a silent reminder of a terrible death that occurred there in the summer of 1863.

Lieutenant colonel Douglas Fowler's body was not recovered and returned to Connecticut.
 Perhaps his  remains rest today in the national cemetery in Gettysburg.

                    BARLOW'S KNOLL: The Rebels advanced from right to left.
      BARLOW'S KNOLL: The 17th Connecticut monument appears at the extreme right. 
                                    (Click at upper right for full-screen experience.)                                 

17th Connecticut monument on Barlow's Knoll, also known as Blocher's Knoll. There also is 
a monument for the regiment near East Cemetery Hill.

-- Have something to add (or correct) in this post? E-mail me here.

SOURCES:

-- Edward Fowler letter to his niece, 1920s, Gettysburg National Military Park.
-- Paynton, W.W., "From Virginia to Gettysburg And Back," Chapter 1st, typewritten copy, Gettysburg National Military Park.
-- Albert Peck letter to comrade, April 2, 1887, typewritten copy, Gettysburg National Military Park.
-- Phoenix, Stephen Whitney, The Whitney Family of Connecticut, and Its Affiliations, Volume 2, New York, privately printed, 1878.