behind AotW

Some of my Antietam boys are much better known for action elsewhere. One such celebrity was Henry Reed Rathbone (1 July 1837 – August 1911). He’s at the far left in this famous scene from 1865:

Currier & Ives–Assassination of President Lincoln (1865, US Library of Congress)

At the fatal shot

[i]nstantly, Major Rathbone sprang upon the assassin. Booth dropped the derringer, broke from Rathbone’s grasp, and lunged at him with a large knife. Rathbone parried the blow, but received a deep wound in his left arm above the elbow. Booth placed one hand on the balustrade, to the left of the center pillar, raised his other arm to strike at the advancing Rathbone, and vaulted over the railing. Rathbone again seized Booth but only caught his clothing…

The 21st Century has been getting in the way of the 19th around me, more’s the pity, as I have been blessed with showers of Antietam-related material recently. Two of these cloudbursts just coincided; Colonel William B. Goodrich of New York at the focus.

Fellow blogger and Antietam Ranger John David Hoptak kindly sent me his biography of the Colonel, freshly written for the Antietam Volunteer Newsletter, to fill a gap on AotW. It’s up now. It is very fine.

Goodrich has the unfortunate distinction of being the only Union Brigade Commander killed in action at Antietam. Formerly commanding the 60th New York Infantry, as senior Colonel he was put in charge of his Brigade in the XII Corps on 16 September, the day before the battle.

It was back in February that I first saw the Colonel’s face, however, courtesy of the first of a series of emails full of local newspaper lore and her own research from avid genealogist Connie Sterner. Connie is master of the North Country (NY) history site, which apparently began, as these things do, as a small project and got completely out of hand!

USMA Cadet Joseph Crain Audenried
(c. 1861, from an image at Gettysburg College)

Joseph Audenried (1839-1880) was fresh from the US Military Academy at West Point as the American Civil War began in the Spring of 1861. On graduation he was commissioned 1st Lieutenant in the 3rd US Cavalry, beginning a career that would last nearly twenty years til his death at age 41.

He was a staff officer with “Bull” Sumner at Antietam and Fredericksburg, US Grant at Vicksburg, and William Tecumseh Sherman to Atlanta and on the March to the Sea. He remained with Sherman for the rest of his life: later in the Indian Wars in the West and then on to Washington when Sherman became General-in-Chief of the US Army.