behind AotW

On the right is a photograph of then-Lieutenant William H Williamson of the 7th Tennessee Infantry. As a Captain he led his Company at Sharpsburg. He was promoted to Major but lost his right arm at Gettysburg and was a prisoner for the rest of the war. In January 1873, by then a circuit court judge, he married General John Hunt Morgan’s widow Martha O.”Mattie” Ready. That’s her with her first husband at the left.

Williamson’s photograph is from the Loewentheil family collection as published in William Thomas Venner’s The 7th Tennessee Infantry in the Civil War (2013). The Morgans’ image accompanied a piece about Mattie by Shirley Farris Jones in The Murfreesboro Post of 26 December 2008. An original carte-de-visite of the scene is at Duke University among their Special Collections.