behind AotW

Emily Griswold and John Morris were probably engaged before he left New Haven for service as Chaplain with the 8th Connecticut Infantry in April 1862 and they married in December 1863, about three months after he returned home.

Emily was from a large and prominent Connecticut family, her father a successful farmer at Wethersfield, near Hartford.

Here she is in her wedding dress:

I think it’s safe to say her husband was not the same man she knew in New Haven in the Spring of 1862, fresh out of Yale Divinity School.

At Antietam, in particular, he’d been through some harrowing combat. He was with his regiment out in front of the Federal Ninth Army Corps in the advance above the Rohrbach (later Burnside) Bridge, nearly reaching the town of Sharpsburg by about 5 pm on 17 September 1862. Earlier in the day he assumed the typical Chaplain’s role of assisting wounded men to the rear, but by the end he’s picked up a rifle and “fights for life” himself.

Sadly, Emily became a young widow in 1873 when John died of tuberculosis at age 36.

These photographs are from the Cabinet Card Album of Mary Helena Griswold, wife of John Leslie Welles, now held by the Welles Family Association, Wethersfield; shared to the FamilySearch genealogical database by Barbara Mathews.