Watch: Video 'trailer' for Men of Antietam talk

On Sept. 19, 1862, this headline screamed from the pages of the Hartford Courant.
Two days earlier, in the farm fields and woodlots of a small western Maryland town called Sharpsburg, four regiments of soldiers from Connecticut fought to preserve the Union. In the days after the battle, the Courant published the staggering lists of those killed and wounded in the 8th, 11th, 14th and 16th Connecticut. Four captains in the 16th Connecticut were killed, including a brilliant professor from Bristol named Newton Manross. Marvin Wait, a 19-year-old lieutenant in the 8th Connecticut from Norwich, was mortally wounded. He had hoped to become a lawyer, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. Another teenager, John Bingham, a private in the 16th Connecticut, died in a farmer's cornfield. In a letter home to his father back in Brooklyn, Conn., his brother, also a private in the regiment, broke that awful news to the family. John Griswold, a Yale graduate and an adventurer, was mortally wounded in Antietam Creek. As he lay dying, he told General Ambrose Burnside: "I die as I have ever wished to die, for my country." At the Avon (Conn.) Free Library on Saturday at 1 p.m., I'll talk about these four soldiers and six other men from Connecticut who were killed or mortally wounded on the bloodiest day in American history. Events begin at noon. Go here for more information and be sure to check out my video "trailer" above.

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FACES OF CIVIL WAR: Stories and photos of common soldiers who served during the war.
MORE ON ANTIETAM: Read my extensive thread on the battle and the men who fought there.

Antietam: Cedar Hill Cemetery photo journal

Samuel Thompson, a 19-year-old lieutenant in Company H of the 16th Connecticut, 
is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford. Mortally wounded at Antietam, he died at home.

Antietam-related history can be found nearly in my own back yard here in Connecticut.

In Greenwood Cemetery, just across the road from our house in Avon, rest the remains of 16th Connecticut private Austin Fuller, who served at Antietam. Captured at Plymouth, N.C., in 1864, Fuller was sent to the notorious rebel prisoner-of-war camp in Andersonville, Ga., and later paroled in "greatly emaciated" condition. The 23-year-old soldier died at home in Farmington, Conn., "suddenly and expectedly" on Jan. 8, 1865.

Buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery, Melancthon Storrs, a surgeon in
 the 8th Connecticut, amputated the right leg of 16th Connecticut 
captain Frederick Barber (above). Wounded at Antietam, Barber
 died on Sept. 20, 1862, three days after the battle.

In West Avon Cemetery, two miles over the hill from Banks manor, is the grave of Private Wallace Woodford of the 16th Connecticut. Wounded at Antietam, Woodford also was captured at Plymouth, N.C., in 1864 and sent to Andersonville. Tormented by his treatment by the rebels, Woodford found it difficult to talk about his prison experience. "When asleep he would throw his arms about, thinking he was in Andersonville .. endeavoring to obtain food," the Hartford Courant reported in January 1865. Like Fuller, the 22-year-old soldier from Avon died at home, on Jan. 10, 1865.

And down the road, in Unionville, a Civil War memorial funded by 16th Connecticut captain Nathaniel Hayden, who was wounded at Antietam, stands next to the First Church of Christ.

This morning, I drove about 20 minutes to the beautifully kept grounds of Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery, where 36 Connecticut men who fought at Antietam are buried. Cemetery sleuth and Antietam guru Mary Falvey, a friend of the blog, conducted a terrific two-hour tour for about 50 people. Mary tied up a lot of loose ends for me in my first visit to Cedar Hill, pointing out the final resting place of Antietam's unsung hero and other notables from the bloodiest day in American history. I especially enjoyed the stop at the grave of Melancthon Storrs (try saying that three times quickly.) A surgeon in the 8th Connecticut,  Storrs amputated the entire right leg of 16th Connecticut captain Frederick Barber, who suffered a bullet wound in the hip in farmer John Otto's 40-acre cornfield at Antietam.

"Oh, my God," Barber shouted as he was wounded. "I'm killed. Good bye, boys. You've lost your Captain. Farewell. Farewell." (1)

Two days after Storrs' grisly operation in a barn near the battlefield, Barber died of his wounds.

(1) 16th Connecticut private Wells Bingham's letter to his father, Sept. 20, 1862

After Antietam, 16th Connecticut adjutant John Burnham supervised the burial of the dead 
in his regiment on the battlefield.  Broken down physically and mentally, he died at  the 
Connecticut Hospital for the Insane on April 10, 1883. He is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery.

The final resting place of William H. Lockwood, who succeeded Newton Manross, the beloved
captain of Company K of the 16th Connecticut, after he was killed at Antietam.

Faces of the Civil War: John Manross

Brothers Eli and John Manross of Bristol, Conn. Their older brother, Newton,
  also served during the Civil War.  (Photo courtesy Bristol Public Library)

John Manross' brother, Newton, was killed at Antietam, a cannonball tearing off his left arm and exposing the beating heart of the 16th Connecticut captain to a private who never forgot the gruesome sight.

Another brother, Eli, a sergeant in the 5th Connecticut, suffered a wound during the Union army's disastrous defeat at Chancellorsville in May 1863 but survived the war.

For the youngest of eight brothers in the prominent family from Bristol, Conn., however, the Civil War was a different kind of hell.

Thirty-seven-year-old  Newton Manross, a captain in
 the 16th Connecticut, was killed at Antietam on
Sept. 17, 1862.

The rebellion apparently drove John Manross insane, finally killing him nearly seven months after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.

If you want to research Civil War soldiers, pension records are invaluable. Often a trove of legal documents and letters that can piece together a soldier's life and death, they are available at the National Archives in Washington and through web sites such as fold.com.

In the pension records for 15th Massachusetts private Justus Wellington, I discovered an affidavit from his sister noting that the young soldier lost all the money he intended to send home to his financially-strapped family when he swam the Potomac River under fire from rebels during the Battle of Ball's Bluff. A shoemaker from West Brookfield, Mass., Wellington was killed at Antietam.

In pension records for 16th Connecticut private Henry Aldrich, also killed at Antietam, I found the heart-rending letter his wife wrote to the pension board requesting that her oldest son be discharged from the army to support her and three young children back home in Bristol. "Relieve a Mothers hart and yo shall have a Mothers blessing," Sarah Aldrich pleaded.

The 48-page widow's pension file for John Manross -- a man once described as a "noted hunter" and a "famous ball player" (1) -- tells a similar, sad tale.

John was the son of  Maria and Elisha Manross, a War of 1812 veteran and a well-known clockmaker in Bristol, a manufacturing town about 20 miles southwest of Hartford. Employed in his father's clock-making business before the Civil War, John married a Maine woman, 21-year-old Lena Gale, on Nov. 12, 1860 in Farmington, Conn. The couple had one child, a girl named Juanita, who was born on Jan. 29, 1862.

John Manross' army disability discharge from Knight Hospital in New Haven, Conn. He was 
unfit for the Veterans Reserve Corps because of "insanity, disease contracted while in line of duty."

John, who stood 5-9 and had a dark complexion, blue eyes and dark hair, enlisted in the Union army on Jan. 28, 1864, mustering into Company B of the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery as a private the same day. (Eli and Newton enlisted in the summer of 1861 and 1862, respectively.)

Army life was a lousy experience for John almost from the start of his service. Sometime in early February 1864, he suffered in the barracks instead of on the battlefield when the top berth of a bunk and several soldiers fell on him, causing a severe head injury. Later that year, perhaps about the time of the momentous Battle of Cold Harbor near the Confederate capital of Richmond in June, Manross was a very sick man. The frequent marching of the Army of the Potomac and exposure to the elements wore down the young soldier.

Eli Manross' grave in Forestville Cemetery in Bristol, Conn.

"By reason of exposure and fatigue consequent upon the discharge of his duties he contracted a cold and fever which confined him in hospital for a long time," noted Captain William Lewis of Manross' Company B. "...he attempted to return to duty but was prevented by the state of his health and in my opinion his constitution was broken down and he (was) rendered unfit for any sort of labor." (2)

Manross eventually was sent to Knight Hospital in New Haven, Conn., a facility set up soon after the Civil War began to handle the massive number of war casualties. He was treated there for consumption, known  as tuberculosis today, and for "insanity," thought by doctors of the time to have been caused by fever.

On Jan. 31, 1865, Manross, a shell of the man who entered the service about a year earlier, was discharged from the hospital and the army because of "insanity and disease contracted while in the line of duty."

"Not fit for V.R. (Veterans Reserve) Corps," the discharge for disability document matter-of-factly noted. "Disability total. His friends are able and willing to take charge of him." How John's condition affected his marriage is unknown, but it undoubtedly did not make life easy for the couple. Lena's name is not mentioned in the discharge for disability document.

In a John Banks' blog tradition, I placed this penny on Newton Manross' grave today.

Nearly seven months after the Civil War ended, John Manross, a "faithful soldier" with "good habits," died in his hometown of Bristol. The physician who treated him had no doubt about the cause of death. "Have been acquainted with him for some fourteen years," Dr. Frank Whittemore noted, "and had no symptoms of insanity until he returned from the army (and) consider cause of disease fatigue consequent with army life." (3)

John Manross was only 28 years old.

Soon after her husband died, Lena Manross applied for a widow's pension, and in late 1865, she was granted $8 a month; an additional $2 a month was added for Juanita. Lena, who never remarried, lived out her days in Rhode Island. By the time she died at age 87 in 1926, her Civil War widow's pension paid her $50 a month.

John Manross is buried under a plain, gray marker in Bristol's Forestville Cemetery, not far from the shop where he and his brothers worked on their father's clocks and the house where the family once lived. Several paces to the left of John's marker are the final resting places for Newton and Eli.

(1) Commemorative Biographical Record of Hartford County, J.H. Beers & Co., 1901, Page 355
(2) Widow's pension file affidavit, Oct. 16, 1865.
(3) Widow's pension file affidavit, May 30, 1867

John Manross is buried in Forestville Cemetery in Bristol, a few steps from his brother, Newton,
who was killed at Antietam.

Faces of the Civil War: Captain Newton Manross

"A man of exceptional learning and scholarship," Newton Manross, a 37-year-old captain
in the 16th Connecticut, was killed at Antietam. (Photo: Bristol Historical Society)

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Even decades after the Civil War, the memory of the gruesome death of Newton Manross -- a brilliant, bookish globetrotter from Bristol -- was seared into the brains of two Connecticut soldiers.

A 37-year-old professor, Manross enlisted in the Union army on July 22, 1862, telling his wife Charlotte "you can better afford to have a country without a husband than a husband without a country." (1) On Aug. 24, he was commissioned captain of Company K of the 16th Connecticut, comprised of men from Hartford County towns such as Canton, Avon, Glastonbury, Granby and Bristol.

Manross was among the many 16th Connecticut 
casualties at Antietam listed in the 
Hartford Daily Courant on Sept. 23, 1862.

Less than a month later, Manross and the  16th Connecticut -- many of the men had never trained extensively with their weapons -- were thrown into the bloody chaos of the Battle of Antietam. As Manross led his company into action into a 40-acre cornfield that terrible Wednesday afternoon, he was blasted in the left shoulder by grapeshot.

"I often think of that day, Sept. 17, 1862, and helping Captain Manross into the fence corner," Lester Taylor, a private in Company H of the 16th Connecticut, wrote 39 years after the battle. "I could look down inside of him and see his heart beat, his left shoulder all shot off.

"When I first saw him, he was trying to get up," Taylor added, "so I went to him and helped him to his feet, being assisted by George Walbridge of H Company.  ... we helped him a little way to the left and laid him down. The only thing I remember him saying was: 'I am bleeding inwardly.' " (2)

Jasper Hamilton Bidwell, a private in the 16th Connecticut from Canton, recalled in 1909 a dazed and bleeding Manross resting on his right elbow, his head up.  After he gave the captain water, Bidwell heard Manross moan, "My poor wife!" Although accounts from the period differ, Manross likely died shortly after receiving the terrible wound. (3)

Among four captains in the 16th Connecticut killed or mortally wounded at Antietam, Manross was anything but your typical citizen-soldier.

Survivors of Company K of the 16th Connecticut placed 
a memorial  for Captain Newton Manross near his grave 
at Forestville Cemetery  in Bristol, Conn.

One of nine children of prominent Bristol clockmaker Elisha Manross and his wife Maria, Newton was inquisitive even as a teenager. Taking refuge from the rain during a fishing trip near his home, Manross discovered what he thought was a white stone on the floor of cavern. Upon closer inspection, the "stone" proved to be a skull of an Indian. Manross returned the next day, unearthed the entire skeleton of the Indian and took the skull to his father's shop, where it was used as a grotesque holder for small parts for clock movements. (4)

Highly educated, Manross graduated from Yale in 1850 with a degree in geology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Gottingen in Germany in 1852 and spent time in Europe exploring mines. Especially interested in mining engineering, he traveled the world in the decade before the Civil War, analyzing rocks and minerals in such far-flung places as Trinidad, Panama and Mexico.

Described as "a man of exceptional learning and scholarship," Manross received a patent in 1859 for a valve to retard and arrest the flow of gasses, and was so well regarded that his work frequently appeared in the prestigious American Journal of Science. (His obituary also appeared in the Journal in 1862.)

In 1861, before he enlisted in the Union army, Manross was named of acting professor of chemistry and philosophy at Amherst (Mass.) College. But like his brothers, Eli and John, he couldn't ignore the call of his country. (Eli, a sergeant in 5th Connecticut, was wounded at Chancellorsville in 1863; John, a private in the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery, was discharged from the army because of  insanity and disease in 1865.)

Newton Manross' occupation was listed as mechanic in the 1860 U.S. census. His family
 apparently employed three servants. (CLICK TO ENLARGE.)

"He was a man of great promise in science and rare nobility of character," an 1873 history of Amherst College noted about Newton Manross.  "A great favorite with officers and students, he stood up boldly for the Christian faith, and used all his influence for the highest good of the students and the prosperity of the Institution."

Manross clearly left a lasting impression on Bristol, a manufacturing town 20 miles southwest of Hartford.

Manross was killed near the 16th Connecticut monument at Antietam.
The regiment suffered 43 killed, 161 wounded and 204 captured
or missing in its first battle of the Civil War.

Nearly thirty years after Antietam, the Bristol Herald published a long, glowing front-page article about its favorite son under a headline that read: "Soldier, Scholar and Gentleman in All Positions in Life." The article included an account of how Manross helped rescue his stranded party in the South American interior by making a boat from trees and floating upriver to the coast. (5)

On May 9, 1902, a crowd that included many veterans of the 16th Connecticut and Manross' only child gathered for a maple tree-planting ceremony in the captain's honor in the Forestville section of Bristol, where he had lived and gone to grammar school. After schoolchildren sang "The Gladness of Nature" and the superintendent of schools gave a "brief but interesting" speech, an old soldier delivered an address in honor of his long-dead friend. (6)

"From this little district school to the great institution of learning with which he was connected he kept in mind the resolve to benefit the world by his life and example," said 65-year-old William Relyea, a private in the 16th Connecticut. "...Captain Manross' mind grew stronger and his mind was a delight to all who knew him.

"Such a man we honor here today by planting a tree in his memory," Relyea added. "He was a man beloved by all us soldiers in the Sixteenth. The day when he marched into camp at the head of his band of sturdy Bristol boys he put new life into the old Sixteenth, for they had realized they had not only a man of deep learning among them, but one who was patriotic and sincere to all."

Newton and Charlotte Manross are buried side-by-side in Forestville Cemetery in Bristol, not far from the house where he grew up. Several paces away, a monument in his memory was placed by survivors of Manross' Company K.

A contemporary marker replaced an older gravestone for Manross and his wife, Charlotte, who
died in 1874. "You can better afford to have a country without a husband," he told
his wife after he enlisted in 1862, "than a husband without a country."

In this photo taken in 1887, Civil War veterans from the Manross G.A.R. post gather by the
Newton Manross monument in Forestville Cemetery in Bristol, Conn. The monument was
placed there by survivors of Company K of the 16th Connecticut.
(Photo courtesy Bristol Historical Society via Tom LaPorte; CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE.)

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SOURCES

(1) History of the Sixteenth Connecticut Volunteers, B.F. Blakeslee, Hartford, The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co., 1875, Page 20.
(2) George Whitney Collection, Connecticut State Library.
(3) George Whitney Collection, Connecticut State Library.
(4) "Bristol, Connecticut, In The Olden Time New Cambridge, Which Includes Forestville," Hartford Printing Company, 1907, Pages 13-14.
(5) Bristol Herald, Aug, 11, 1892, Page 1.
(6) Hartford Courant, May 10, 1902, Page 15.