behind AotW

Baltimore shipbuilder and pre-war militia officer Benjamin Louis Simpson (left) was Lieutenant Colonel and led the Purnell Legion in Maryland in 1862, and he had later service as Colonel of the 6-month 9th Maryland Infantry to February 1864.

The photograph is at the Maryland Historical Society, and is seen here as it was published in Roger D. Hunt’s Colonels in Blue: the Mid-Atlantic States (2007). The other officer is not identified.