September 17, 1862—The Battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day of the Civil War. In the intense conflict and its aftermath across the farm fields and woodlots near the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland, more than two hundred men from Connecticut died. Their grave sites are scattered throughout the Nutmeg State, from Willington to Madison and Brooklyn to Bristol. Author John Banks chronicles their mostly forgotten stories using diaries, pension records and soldiers' letters. Learn of Henry Adams, a twenty-two-year-old private from East Windsor who lay incapacitated in the cornfield for nearly two days before he was found; Private Horace Lay of Hartford, who died with his wife by his side in a small church that served as a hospital after the battle; and Captain Frederick Barber of Manchester, who survived a field operation only to die days later. Discover the stories of these and many more brave Yankees who fought in the fields of Antietam.
September 17, 1862—The Battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day of the Civil War. In the intense conflict and its aftermath across the farm fields and woodlots near the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland, more than two hundred men from Connecticut died. Their grave sites are scattered throughout the Nutmeg State, from Willington to Madison and Brooklyn to Bristol. Author John Banks chronicles their mostly forgotten stories using diaries, pension records and soldiers' letters. Learn of Henry Adams, a twenty-two-year-old private from East Windsor who lay incapacitated in the cornfield for nearly two days before he was found; Private Horace Lay of Hartford, who died with his wife by his side in a small church that served as a hospital after the battle; and Captain Frederick Barber of Manchester, who survived a field operation only to die days later. Discover the stories of these and many more brave Yankees who fought in the fields of Antietam.
Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
September 17, 1862—The Battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day of the Civil War. In the intense conflict and its aftermath across the farm fields and woodlots near the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland, more than two hundred men from Connecticut died. Their grave sites are scattered throughout the Nutmeg State, from Willington to Madison and Brooklyn to Bristol. Author John Banks chronicles their mostly forgotten stories using diaries, pension records and soldiers' letters. Learn of Henry Adams, a twenty-two-year-old private from East Windsor who lay incapacitated in the cornfield for nearly two days before he was found; Private Horace Lay of Hartford, who died with his wife by his side in a small church that served as a hospital after the battle; and Captain Frederick Barber of Manchester, who survived a field operation only to die days later. Discover the stories of these and many more brave Yankees who fought in the fields of Antietam.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609499518 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcadia Publishing SC |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2013 |
| Series: | Civil War Series |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Who Were They?
Why did I not die?"
"Why did I not die?"
Those five words almost jumped off the page from Henry Adams's handwritten postwar account of his awful, life-altering experience at the Battle of Antietam. Suffering from two bullet wounds in his right leg, the twenty-two-year-old private from East Windsor, Connecticut, lay incapacitated in what was left of a cornfield for nearly two days before he was discovered by comrades and carried to a nearby makeshift field hospital. Nearly seven months after Antietam, on April 1, 1863, Adams was finally discharged from the Union army because of disability and sent back home to Connecticut from a Maryland hospital.
"Was no April Fool day to me, when my mother and her cripple boy on crutches started 'Homeward Bound,'" the 16 Connecticut soldier bitterly recalled. "I received my discharge papers at Hagerstown [Maryland] and my full pay for doing ... nothing — except to be maimed for life and to draw a U.S. pension."
Yet Henry Adams was among the lucky soldiers from the four Connecticut regiments that fought at Antietam. He survived the bloodiest day of the Civil War — indeed the bloodiest day in American history — fought on September 17, 1862, in the farm fields and woodlots near the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland. More than two hundred men from Connecticut died as a result of the fighting. Scores of men and boys from the 8, 11, 14 and 16 Regiments returned to the state in wooden boxes, the remains of some recovered and brought home for re-burial by a Hartford undertaker/coffin maker who advertised his body retrieval services in the newspaper. In the weeks after Antietam, there were so many funerals in the state that the Hartford Courant lamented on October 13, 1862, "It is seldom that we are called upon to bury so many braves in so short a space of time."
And, of course, many never returned to Connecticut.
Horace Lay, a 16 Connecticut private from Hartford, died with his wife by his side in a small Maryland church that served as a hospital after the battle. After her husband, Henry, was killed at Antietam, Sarah Aldrich pleaded with the government to discharge her oldest son from the army so he could come home to support her and her three young children. A private in the 16 Connecticut from Bristol, Henry is buried under a small pearl-white marker ten steps from Lay's grave at Antietam National Cemetery in Sharpsburg. Forty-nine of their comrades who served at Antietam may also be buried on the beautiful, peaceful grounds.
Many Connecticut soldiers suffered — and many died — from ghastly wounds. Wounded in the right hip, 16 Connecticut captain Frederick Barber of Manchester underwent a grisly procedure on a bloody board-turned-operating-table in a barn behind the lines but died two days later. Bridgeman Hollister, a 16th Connecticut private from Glastonbury, took a bullet in the throat that first passed through the arm of a wounded tent mate whom he was helping carry from the battlefield. That man he was aiding, Private George Rich, recovered from wounds to his hip and arm and lived until he was seventy-three. But Hollister, who had lain on the battlefield for nearly two days until he was found, died after a "long and exhaustive suffering" a week after the battle.
Many of those wounded and killed were only teenagers. Alonzo Maynard, eighteen, survived four bullet wounds during the ill-fated attack at the Rohrbach Bridge, known famously after the battle as Burnside Bridge. A private in the 11 Connecticut from Ellington, he spent much of the rest of his life in agony. Eighteen-year-old Bela Burr, whose older brother was mortally wounded at Antietam, carried a painful reminder of one of his battlefield wounds for decades after the war: a lead slug in his left ankle. Shot in both legs, the private in the 16 Connecticut from Farmington also laid on the battlefield for more than forty hours before a burial crew found him and took him for medical treatment. James Brooks, an eighteen-year-old private in the 16 Connecticut from Stafford, suffered from six wounds and amazingly survived nearly a month before he died.
The carnage at Antietam was so awful that many Connecticut soldiers struggled with the unreality of it all. In a letter to his wife back in Berlin, Connecticut, George Bronson was horrified by the scene at Antietam Creek and Burnside Bridge, where thirty-seven men in his regiment were killed. "I do not know the name of the creek," wrote the 11 Connecticut hospital steward, "but I have named it the creek of death." Private Jacob Bauer of the 16 Connecticut, who saw another man from his town riddled with bullets and killed, also was stunned by the death and destruction. "If I get home again, and we get rich," he wrote his wife in Berlin, "I mean to take a journey with you here to Maryland & show you the Battleground & where I stood & where I fought. The ground looks rather desolate, but everywhere you notice places similar to graveyards only marble monuments are wanted, the heros rest side by side & only a plain board, marked with name, Reg Co. & date of death are the outside decoration."
Until the ends of their lives, Antietam was seared into the memories of Connecticut soldiers who fought there. Many, such as Richard Jobes of Suffield and William Pratt of Meriden, survived but were scarred physically. After he was shot in the left arm, Jobes, a corporal in the 16 Connecticut, walked a mile, crossing Burnside Bridge to a field hospital on a farm. On the night of the battle, he had his left forearm amputated, the first of two major surgeries he endured for the wound. After the Civil War, Jobes doggedly fought the government for an increase in his monthly pension. Pratt, a private in the 8 Connecticut, was bothered for the rest of his life by a bullet wound in his thigh and subsequent botched surgery performed by a Rebel hospital steward. (Of course, the battle rocked families back home, too. The wives of at least five Connecticut soldiers who died were pregnant, including 11 Connecticut colonel Henry Kingsbury's. At least two soldiers who died were engaged to be married.)
Other Antietam survivors may not have had physical wounds but were affected in other ways. John Burnham, a 16 Connecticut adjutant who oversaw the recovery of the wounded and burial of men from his regiment after the battle, was never the same after the war. "On leaving the army he was much debilitated and ... his disposition entirely changed; from a jovial, cheerful fellow, he became moody and depressed and silent," a friend wrote of him. Burnham suffered privations in three prisoner-of-war camps after his capture at Plymouth, North Carolina, in the spring of 1864, but the gruesome task of collecting bodies of his comrades and watching men die at Antietam undoubtedly took a toll. He died in a Connecticut insane asylum two decades after Antietam.
In the years after the Civil War, Antietam remained entrenched in the collective consciousness of the state. One of the first Civil War memorials in Connecticut, in West Cemetery in Bristol, was dedicated in 1867. The word "Antietam" in raised letters is featured on its north side. Similar memorials in other Connecticut towns, from Granby to Unionville to Stonington and Litchfield, also note the epic battle. When veterans of the Connecticut regiments that fought at Antietam met for major reunions, the events were usually held on the anniversary of the battle. Connecticut Antietam veterans from Hartford held an anniversary dinner on September 17 every year until 1932, when only five were still alive. To this day, one of the biggest events ever in Hartford was Battle Flag Day, a parade of more than eight thousand Connecticut Civil War veterans who proudly returned their battle-scarred regimental flags to the Hall of Flags in the new state Capitol Building. It was held before an estimated seventy thousand people, many waving flags, on September 17, 1879.
For veterans of the battle, painful memories of Antietam seemed fresh even decades later. At a twenty-ninth anniversary of the battle reunion, Frank Cheney, clutching the deed of ownership, drew a huge reaction when he told more than one hundred 16 Connecticut comrades of the purchase of ten acres of land at Antietam on which the regiment had shed so much blood. Cheney, a colonel in the 16 who was severely wounded in the battle, contributed a large sum to buy the property, with the intention of placing a monument there in the regiment's honor. "The effect was magnetic. The men arose and cheered for the colonel again, and again, and again," the Hartford Daily Times reported about the speech. "And many were touched almost to tears by this generous manifestation of his interest, and by the consciousness that the regiment held the sacred ground which drank the blood of their brothers, in ownership for all time to come."
Is there any wonder, then, that at the 1894 dedication of the Connecticut veterans' monuments at Antietam tears almost flowed like blood had thirty-two years earlier? The lead-up to the event and dedication day on October 11, 1894, were extensively covered in the Hartford Courant and Hartford Daily Times. On October 12, the Courant featured a lengthy, six-column article with an illustration of each monument, as well as partial transcripts of speeches veterans of each regiment gave at the dedications. "Antietam battlefield memories were refreshed on that memorable field yesterday by many Connecticut Union Veterans who lived again the days of the initiation into the realm of shot and shell and the carnage of battle," the Courant reported.
Perhaps the most poignant moment that Thursday afternoon came during a reading of an original poem by Nathan Mayer of Hartford. An assistant regimental surgeon in the 11 Connecticut at Antietam who was known to dole out morphine by having soldiers lick his hand, Mayer later served as chief surgeon for the 16 Connecticut. At the dedication of the 16 Connecticut monument, Mayer, a brilliant man, recited a long poem that eloquently summed up the veterans' experience at Antietam. In part, it read:
This brought us here — a thousand men With hearts on fire — but bare in ken Of warlike methods and of arms.
Such as they came from shops and farms,
From busy mart, from college halls.
From life 'tween close-set office walls,
They stood in line, undrilled, untrained.
Though shrapnel burst and bullets rained Beyond the broad brook's verdant banks,
Among the green corn's waving ranks,
They fill the gap! — Forward! — Advance! —
They send their lead down in the dance Of Death, who sweeps with crimson hand O'er the blue hills of Maryland.
And forward still I Stern duty placed Their brave and untried ranks. — Square faced Against the picked men of the South,
Against their batteries' belching mouth.
Against the fire-lined gray stone wall —
A living line to stand or fall —
They met their fate, this martyr band.
For Union and their Native Land!
As Mayer read his poem, many veterans in attendance wept.
Even 150 years later, Antietam still can stir emotions. At a Civil War commemoration at Bristol's West Cemetery on September 17, 2012, Marcia Eveland clutched the presentation sword that belonged to her great-great-great-uncle as a speaker recounted the sacrifices of the town's soldiers during the Great Rebellion. Eveland and her sister played with the sword when they were kids growing up in Bristol. An energetic woman with a pleasant laugh and smile, Eveland cried at the mention in the speech of her ancestor, Captain Newton S. Manross of the 16 Connecticut, who was killed at Antietam. "My mother's brother died of tuberculosis that he contracted at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II," she explained. "He was the uncle I never knew. And I had the same sense of Newton Spaulding Manross. He's always been in my life as a real presence. I mourn him as the uncle I never knew, too."
The purpose of this book is not to analyze or recount the tactics and strategy of the Battle of Antietam. Nor does it detail how Antietam was the catalyst for President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, the noblest achievement of the Civil War. Rather, it's an effort to answer one simple question:
Who were they?
Who were these people from Connecticut who survived, were maimed or died at Antietam?
Before the Civil War, they were farmers, teachers, laborers, blacksmiths, cigar makers — everyday people with everyday jobs. Some served in regiments with their cousins, nephews, brothers, brothers-in-law, sons and sons-in-law. One was a nineteen-year-old student at a Connecticut college who told his mother he believed it was his duty to enlist. Another was a brilliant professor and globetrotter who, six decades before it was built, envisioned one of the world's most impressive construction projects. One sixteen-year-old boy-soldier, a farmer's son, relayed the news of the death of his seventeen-year-old brother at Antietam to his father in a descriptive — and heart-rending — letter home. A nurse, who lived most of her life in the state, was fondly remembered even decades after the war for her kindly treatment of soldiers at an Antietam hospital after the battle. Some weren't cloaked in glory, however. In their first battle of the Civil War, many 16 Connecticut soldiers ran for the rear, including a teenager who deserted and fled to England.
Nearly all were citizen-soldiers.
From Willington in the north to Madison in the south to Brooklyn in the east and Bristol in the west, their grave sites are scattered throughout Connecticut. Like 11 Connecticut captain John Griswold's, some are marked by impressively carved memorials. Others are not. The plain gravestone of 16 Connecticut sergeant Rufus Chamberlain, worn by the elements, is in a small hillside cemetery bordered by a landfill. The stories of these mostly forgotten soldiers have been uncovered by mining diaries, pension records, soldiers' letters (including some found by a descendant stuffed in shoe boxes) and photographic albums at historical societies, colleges and libraries. In many cases, a photo is married to a story; in several cases, an image generously supplied by a soldier's descendant is used. Sadly, that's not always possible.
At the well-attended Connecticut Day commemoration at Antietam on April 21, 2012, Reverend John Schildt gave a speech in the Philip Pry barn, used as a field hospital during and after the battle. A prolific chronicler of the battle, Schildt, a longtime Sharpsburg-area resident, talked of a Connecticut officer who died at Antietam as being part of a "lost generation." One wonders, Schildt said, what that soldier could have accomplished in life had he not been killed there.
This book is a small attempt to chronicle the lives — and the deaths — of some of that "lost generation." And so here they are, the Connecticut Yankees at Antietam.
CHAPTER 2Private William Pratt, 8 Connecticut
"Chamber of Horrors"
Shortly after the sun peeked above the horizon on September 17, 1862, "some curious fools" in the 8 Connecticut climbed atop a knoll on Henry Rohrbach's farm to sneak a peek at their enemy, alerting Rebels on the far side of Antietam Creek. Suddenly, a twelve-pound solid shot burst from a cannon and crashed into the regiment's ranks, killing Corporal George Marsh of Hartford and two other soldiers, wounding four and splattering nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Marvin Wait with blood and dirt. The large mass of iron had plowed into the ground in front of the prone Marsh, missing him, but the massive concussion caused his death.
As twenty-four-year-old William Pratt hurriedly moved to a safer position with the rest of the 8 Connecticut, an officer noticed blood on the private's right hand, which was missing a small piece of flesh near the knuckle. "How it was done I never knew," recalled the soldier from Meriden, Connecticut. "A stray bullet, a piece of shell or other missile that for a time were numerous about our ears may have been the cause."
For Pratt, that morning was just the start of a nightmarish three days in which he was wounded, taken prisoner and clumsily operated on in a fetid, overcrowded barn filled with injured and dying men.
Born on December 12, 1837, William was the youngest of three children of Lydia and Julius Pratt, an astute businessman who was a pioneer in the making of cutlery and ivory combs. Julius Pratt & Co. even supplied John Quincy Adams with a solid ivory cane with heavy gold mountings after the then-congressman and former president argued in the House of Representatives for the right of free speech. An ardent abolitionist, Julius had no qualms about standing up to Southerners. When told on the eve of the rebellion that war would end his comb-making business in the South, he reportedly said, "If the South don't want my combs, on their heads be the consequences."
One of the wealthier families in Meriden, the Pratts could afford the finer things in life for William, who was sixteen years younger than his next-oldest sibling, Julius Jr. After he graduated with a degree in civil engineering from prestigious Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in 1857, William was sent by his father to South America to investigate prospects for the family's ivory business. Shortly after war broke out, William cut short his foreign excursion, returning home in May 1861 with "war fever," but his mother was adamant that he stay put. Fearing that his son would end up with a bullet in his head, William's father was equally adamant. But a little more than three weeks after Lydia died on April 22, 1862, William enlisted as a private in the 8th Connecticut, so upsetting Julius Sr. that he threatened his son with disinheritance and estrangement.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Connecticut Yankees at Antietam"
by .
Copyright © 2013 John Banks.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Who Were They? 13
"Chamber of Horrors" William Pratt 21
"Dreaded to See the Night Come" John Burnham 26
A Bible and a Journey Oliver Case 31
"Poor, Poor John Is No More" John Wells Bingham 41
A Daughter Named Antietarn Peter Mann 47
A Little Church on Main Street "Passed…to Better World" 51
"Sick at Heart" Edward Brewer 66
"God Alone Can Reward You" Maria Hall 70
"A Total Wreck" Richard Jobes 77
The Undertaker of Antietam William Roberts 82
"Father of the Company" Newton Manross 85
"Relieve a Mothers Hart" Henry Aldrich 93
"Maimed for Life" Henry Adams 97
"Only His Memory lives" Jarvis Blinn 100
"As Fine a Man as Ever Lived" Wadsworth Washburn 102
"A Peculiar and Poignant Sorrow" Marvin Wait 106
"Carry Your Bleeding Heart to Him" William Horton 110
Saving the Colors Charles Walker 113
"A Man of Great Bravery" Samuel Brown 116
"Regimental Rubbish" The Deserters 121
"16 Separate Wounds" Alonzo Maynard 124
"An Officer of Decided Capability" Nathaniel Hayden 128
"My Duty to Go" George Crosby 133
"Thirst of the Wounded" Bela Burr 138
"Sawn Off by the Chain Saw" Frederick Barber 144
"I Could Not Forgive Myself" Robert Hubbard 148
"Lay Down to Die" John Griswold 152
A Sense of Impending Doom Daniel Tarbox 156
"Sickened upon Hearing His Death" Charles Lewis 161
Notes 163
Bibliography 179
Index 187
About the Author 189