behind AotW

Here’s Sergeant Lester Edwin Forrest Spofford after he lost his left arm to a wound and resulting amputation at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

You’d have thought that would have been enough of war for 18 year old Forrest, but it wasn’t. He was appointed Sergeant Major of the 8th Connecticut Infantry in January 1863 and he returned to serve with them to May of 1864, when he was wounded again. In the other arm.

After recovering from that wound he attempted to reenlist, but was turned away by a medical board and discharged at the end of his original term of enlistment on 20 September 1864.

This fine photograph is from the Buck Zaidel Collection, and was published in Military Images in Spring 2015 and featured in Longley & Zaidel’s Heroes for All Time: Connecticut Civil War Soldiers Tell Their Stories (2015).