I made my semi-annual pilgrimage to Sharpsburg last week, focused on the Antietam Institute‘s Spring Symposium. For much more about the 2023 Symposium itself, look for Facebook and other social media posts from the Institute and some of my fellow attendees.

I had some time while in the area, also, to get to the Antietam National Cemetery to find one of my guys, and to roam the Antietam battlefield to visit a few cannon.

I’ve found a fascinating description of the Smoketown Hospital as it was in January 1863 in a letter to an Indiana newspaper. I came upon it while looking into one of the many soldiers of the 27th Indiana Infantry wounded at Antietam, Private Thomas Mitchell Gaskins. 

The writer lists some of the patients, like Gaskins, and their status, which is immediately useful, but his description of the hospital facilities and staff are the most interesting pieces to me.

Here’s my transcription of the complete letter as published:

U.S. Hospital at Smoketown,
or Antietam, Jan. 15, 1863

Editors Sentinel: As the people of Indiana take a deep interest in the condition and treatment of our sick and wounded soldiers, enclosed I send you a short statement of what came under my own personal observation.

Behind the curtain

5 March 2008

Buried below the fold here on the blog are a number of fantastic discussions growing from older biographical posts. As site owner I can see these conversations as they happen, but I’m not sure either of our other readers notice. Hence this pop-up flag. That, and I’m not getting any writing of my own done …

Notable lately have been contributions from Morrisons and a Lewis. Look in comments more recently, too, for insights from descendents of Weisiger and Clark. Old mysteries solved, but new avenues opened as well, so please jump in if you can help.

The many of the Morrison Clan who have stopped in to add information have driven the comment count on last year’s piece on patriarch Robert Hall Morrison to first place all-time. I’m amazed by the rich detail these family historians have brought to the story, and recommend you get caught up if you’ve not been following the threads there.

Anne Morrison Garber also seeks help locating Morrison scholar Sarah Marie Eye’s new email address … anyone?

Enoch Lewis’ descendent Annie Lewis teases of connections to the US Military Academy at West Point in a new comment. Do please speak up if you know where that hint leads. Captain Lewis’ case is still a tangle of unanswered questions of politics and motivation to me.

Oh for more time to research …

Private soldiers

30 December 2007

Every so often I hear from descendants of soldiers who were at Sharpsburg in September 1862. Many ask why their ancestor is not already among those profiled on Antietam on the Web.

Well, the obvious–if selfish–answer is that it’s taken me about 12 years to get to approximately 1100 individuals. That these are something fewer than 1% of all those present on the Maryland Campaign suggests I may not have enough lifetime to get to them all.

A Connecticut Sergeant (unidentified)
unidentified Connecticut Sergeant (coll. Andy de Cusati)

The main reason I don’t have anything online about the vast majority of the troops is that I don’t know about them. To date I’ve been working through the senior officers, men commanding regiments and batteries, and “celebrities” like Medal of Honor recipients, post-War memoirists, prominent local civilians, and others who stood out from the crowd during and after the War. By definition these include very few of the ordinary soldiers who were the bulk of the participants.

I’ve been considering lately how I might import information about large numbers of soldiers in batches, but worry about introducing inaccuracies as a result. I know some units are well documented digitally (thanks to people like Steve Soper and Jim Studnicki, for example), but such information is not universally available. Date-specific rosters or muster reports are particularly spotty for Confederate units, which would make an apparent Federal bias in our database even worse.

I would still like to get more of the troops’ names and lives online, but don’t yet have a practical means. I’ll pick away at this problem as I can.

In the meantime, though, I’m taking advantage of the same family members who ask about their soldiers. Most have been very knowledgeable, and extremely generous in sharing with Antietam on the Web. Let me tell you about two such cases that came in just before Christmas …

2007 navel gazing

18 December 2007

Thompson's Navel (orange), A. Newton, 1915
Citrus sinensis (A. Newton, USDA, 1915)

Not known as an omphaloskeptic, I’ve nonetheless been meditating on some things that have been piling up in my blog ‘idea box’ over the last year. Grumpy little snippets about blogging and history. Things noted over the year. Pray humor me as I unburden myself in a collection of mini-posts here. Call it end-of-year housekeeping…

I’ve been looking into one of the artillery officers I mentioned last week, Captain Elijah Taft. I had nothing on him to begin with, and he’s still an enigma to me today.

5th Battery Monument at Gettysburgclick to see larger image
5th NY Battery monument, Gettysburg (New York at Gettysburg)

I prefer to bring you well-rounded posts when profiling the soldiers at Antietam, and usually I can give you something deeper than places and dates. In Captain Taft’s case, though, all I really have are some tantalizing hints to the man’s life. Questions with ties to facets of 19th Century American history I know too little about.

Perhaps you’ll pitch in?

Exodus from Harpers Ferry

23 September 2007

Huzzah! for Don Caughey (Crossed Sabers) who’s put together a great series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) on the Union Cavalry expedition out of the trap that was Harpers Ferry on the night of 14 – 15 September 1862. He’s done a really nice job in illuminating a poorly understood episode in the Maryland Campaign.

Maryland Heights (left) from Harpers Ferry, 1865click to see larger image
Maryland Heights (left) from Harpers Ferry, 1865 (J. Gardner, coll. Library of Congress)

As a kind of supplement to those posts, I’ve scanned some pictures of the prominent officers of that force. You know I like to see the faces.

I’ve also made an attempt at drafting a map of the route they took from the Ferry to Greencastle…

Morrison family ties

17 January 2007

R.H. Morrison
Rev. Robert Hall Morrison, DD (from Davidson College portrait)

The Reverend Doctor Morrison (1798-1889) was father-in-law to three Confederate general officers: D.H. Hill (m. Isabella S. Morrison 1848), Rufus C. Barringer (m. Eugenia 1854; she d. 1858, typhoid), and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (m. Mary Anna 1857).

I know of no other patriarch of that distinction.

Hard core students of the American Civil War already know that D.H. Hill and “Stonewall” Jackson were brothers-in-law, though not always happily so. Most will probably not have seen how wide that family net spreads.

William Price Craighill (1833-1909) may have been something of a prodigy as he entered the US Military Academy at West Point at age 16 in 1849.

duty honor country
W.P. Craighill, c. 1849

He graduated in 1853, ranked second in the class which included famous ACW Generals Sheridan and Hood, and was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was an instructor at West Point, and though from Virginia, stayed with the Union, seeing War service on fortifications and other engineering projects across the US. His long Army career peaked in 1895 when he was appointed Brigadier General and Chief of Engineers, US Army.

I bring Craighill to you in several contexts – a kind of 3-for-the-price-of-one post …

Instant digital history

15 December 2006

This afternoon, thanks to Google’s blogsearch, I came upon something I haven’t seen before: a DIY instant history website.

Wethersfield in the Civil War is apparently brand new from someone at the Wethersfield (Connecticut) Historical Society and looks like a transcription of the work of one Wes Christensen. The site is hosted on Blogger and currently contains 42 posts, almost all dated 14 December. Some are placeholder pages, so perhaps this is just the beginning, but it’s already a complete, if bare-bones, website.

Most of the posts are listings–for each Regiment or Battery–of the men from Wethersfield who served in the War. Some of these include summaries or anecdotes of the unit’s service. Included is a table of contents which links to all the posts.

16th Ct Inf monument at Antietam
16th CT at Antietam
from ANBP

Atypical is the lengthy introduction, which makes particular note of the 16th Connecticut Infantry, one of the many green regiments so badly hurt at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

Aspiring digital historians could take a lesson here. Do you want to get a lot of information up on the web in a hurry with the minimum technical investment and no cost? Consider basic free blogging like Blogger or WordPress. Quick and painless.

It would be a good way to get your feet wet, anyway.