behind AotW

Here are DeWitt Clinton Smith and his family in an ambrotype photograph probably taken as he prepared to leave his home in Minnesota for the war in the east.

He’d married Melissa R. Shepard (1827-1905) in Michigan in 1847 – they were both from his hometown of Barre, NY – and their son Eugene Adelbert Smith (1850-1914) was born in Somerset, MI, where DeWitt was a Daguerrean photographer. They moved to Hennepin County, MN in 1857 and by the time the war came in 1861 he had worked as a farmer, newspaperman, shoe salesman, county land registrar, and school teacher, and was concurrently a county commissioner and postmaster.

He was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant of Company D, First Minnesota Infantry in April 1861, and was Captain of his Company when he was seriously wounded in the hip at Antietam in September 1862. The bullet lodged in his pelvis and was never removed. Disabled for further service in the field, he sought appointment as an army paymaster, a largely clerical, non-combat job. He had the support of nearly all the officers of his regiment, who sent an impressive petition to President Lincoln on his behalf in January 1863:

Nothing happened quickly, though, so in October 1863 Smith resigned his commission and returned to Minnesota.

Finally, in April 1864, an appointment as Additional Paymaster and Major, US Volunteers came through for Smith, and he went to St Louis, MO. Unfortunately, 6 months later he was killed by Confederate “guerrillas” while returning by steamboat from making Army payments in Memphis in October 1864:

The picture at the top, as Melissa R. Smith, Eugene Adelbert Smith and DeWitt Clinton Smith, family portrait, copyprint of ambrotype, may be found online from the Minnesota Historical Society.

Melissa re-married 20 years later in Minnesota – a dentist named Lent Bristol Bradley (1820-1900) who had 3 grown children of his own.

The Lincoln petition is among the Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1861-1870 at the National Archives, online from fold3. Among the signers was Captain William F. Russell of Company L, who commanded the 2nd Company of Minnesota Sharpshooters at Antietam.

The story about his death on the Mississippi is from the St. Paul Daily Press of 10 December 1864, also online from the Minnesota Historical Society.

The other officer with Smith on the Belle was Abraham Beeler (born MD, 1822) of Illinois. He’d been First Lieutenant and Quartermaster of the 38th Illinois Infantry from August 1861 to March 1863 and was appointed Additional Paymaster and Major, US Volunteers in March 1864. There’s a fine photograph of him on his memorial; thanks to Tony Fazzini for the pointer to that.

This serious face belongs to William H Blair, a lawyer from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. He was Captain of Company G, 51st Pennsylvania Infantry and led them with “great gallantry in storming and taking Antietam Bridge 17 September 1862 under Maj. Gen. Burnside.”

He was afterward Colonel of the 6-month 179th Pennsylvania Infantry regiment to mid-1863 and was brevetted Brigadier General of Volunteers by President Johnson in 1866.

This excellent photograph is in the Scott D Hann Collection. Thanks to Scott for sharing it to the General’s memorial page at Findagrave.

It’s a shame about the condition of this daguerrotype – but at least we can get a hint about what Dr. Robert T Royston looked like before the war. A physician of some 10 years experience, he enlisted in the 8th Alabama Infantry as a Private in May 1861, but quickly became the regiment’s Surgeon. He treated wounded soldiers on the field at Sharpsburg, at least until the Confederate Army returned to Virginia on the night 18 – 19 September 1862.

This item is in the collection of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, who shared it online.

At 18 years old, in March 1862, Thomas Calvin McBryde left his parents’ small farm at Snow Hill in Wilcox County, AL to enlist in the Cedar Creek Guards, who soon after became Company C of the 44th Alabama Infantry.

He survived a slight wound at Sharpsburg in September 1862 and a couple of serious illnesses through the war to be surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April 1865.

After the war he was a store clerk, bookkeeper, Justice of the Peace, and finally, in his late 80s and early 90s, a railroad watchman at Dalton, GA, as seen in this stunning photograph, which was contributed to his Findagrave memorial by Stephen Gilliland in 2013.

In October 1861 Walter S Smith (1845-1919), not quite 16, enlisted with his father, 40 year old Punxsutawney tinsmith Steele Semple Williams, in Company F of the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry; Walter as a Musician, Steele as a Sergeant.

Walter survived the war, mustering out as a Sergeant in July 1865.

His father, though, was seriously wounded at Antietam in September 1862 and discharged in February 1863. He died, possibly due to his Antietam wounds, a year later, in February 1864.

That photograph of the Williams was shared by a descendant to the FamilySearch database in 2017.

Big thanks to John Banks for the nudge to look into Steele Williams.

PHOTOGRAPH 166. Case of Recovery after a Penetrating Gunshot Wound of the Ascending Colon.

Colonel Edward W Hincks, commanding the 19th Massachusetts Infantry, was severely wounded at about noon on 17 September 1862 at Antietam. He was hit by a bullet that went through his right forearm, then through his body, exiting very near his spine.

A gunshot through the abdomen was almost invariably fatal in that era, but Hincks survived to serve through the war as a Brigadier General of Volunteers, and afterward, to retirement in 1870, as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Regular Army.

Here he is, in his Colonel’s uniform, with his wife* in a photograph taken in Boston, probably before his Antietam experience.

* I’m guessing this picture was taken about May 1861 when he was appointed Colonel, but almost certainly before March 1863 when he was promoted to Brigadier General. In which case, the woman in the picture is probably his first wife, Ann Rebecca “Annie” Dow (c. 1838-August 1862, m. 1855). The Library of Congress identifies her as his second wife Elizabeth Pierce Nichols (1842-1890), but she married Edward in Cambridge in September 1863 – long after he was appointed Brigadier General. I’ve asked the archivists at the Library of Congress if there’s any more information about that identification. I’ll update you if I hear.

Below is his medical case history in a page posted to the back of that photograph at the top of the page, its text largely taken from the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. The original narrative in the MSHWR, though, says all that damage was made by one bullet.

Both the case history and the photograph at the top are from Volume 4 of Photographs of Surgical Cases and Specimens published by the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army sometime after 1870. It’s online from the Internet Archive.

The photograph of General Hincks and his wife is from the Library of Congress.

Tompion: a plug pushed into the muzzle of a rifle to keep out dirt and water.

This example, probably for an English-made Enfield model of 1853, made of brass and cork, was sold by the Horse Soldier in Gettysburg.

The soldier’s culpable negligence in failing to remove the tompion before firing, resulted sometimes in the bursting of the piece; sometimes in the projection of the tompion with sufficient force to penetrate, within short range, a man’s body; almost always, unfortunately, in more injury to others then to himself. The following is one of those cases …

Private George Meyers of the 13th New Jersey Infantry was accidentally wounded by one of his comrades’ tompion at Antietam on 17 September 1862 and he died in a hospital in Philadelphia about a month afterward.

Here are the woodcut illustrations which accompany the description of Private Meyer’s somewhat unusual case in the Army Surgeon General’s Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1870-1883).

It occurs to me that the outcome might not have been much different if the man in the rank behind poor George had removed his tompion …

17 year old farm boy Thomas E Sims enlisted as a Private in the Orange Guards – Company G of the 27th North Carolina Infantry – in March 1862. Which is probably when this photograph was taken.

He survived the terrible combat at Sharpsburg in September that year but was mortally wounded in a little known skirmish at Gary’s Farm near Richmond, VA on 15 June 1864. Captain John Sloan of Company B later described the action there:

Our brigade, as yet, in the swamps of the Chickahominy, was almost daily employed in skirmishes with the enemy’s cavalry. On the 15th of June we came across a large force of cavalry at Gary’s farm. They had met a small force of our cavalry and had been driving them. When we arrived they dismounted and sent their horses to the rear, formed their lines and showed fight. After a sharp struggle their lines gave way, and we pursued them some distance through the woods. Their sharpshooters were armed with seven shooters, and they used them against us on our advance with telling effect. When they reached their horses they quickly remounted and were soon beyond our reach.

Young Thomas was taken to the Camp Winder hospital in Richmond and died there the next day, 19 years old.

This compelling photograph of him is from the Vanatos Archive, shared to his memorial on Findagrave.

John A Sloan’s narrative, based on his wartime notes, was published in his Reminiscences of the Guilford Grays, Co. B, 27th N.C. Regiment (1883).

In 1882 one-legged Sharpsburg veteran Willie Thomas Patterson was appointed Bursar of the University of North Carolina, and served in that post for most of the rest of his life, to 1909.

He was raised the 5th of 7 children by wealthy parents James Newton (1806-1865) and Lucy Hawkins Couch Patterson (1808-1848) on their large plantation at Durhamville in Orange County (now Durham, Durham County), North Carolina.

He was of the 5th generation on the place, all born in North Carolina. His great-great-grandfather John B Patterson (1717-1787) first owned and farmed there before 1770, followed by John Tapley Patterson (c. 1743-1781), who had slaves working the land by 1781, then Mann Patterson (1772-1835), his grandfather.

John B Patterson

In 1850 Willie’s father James owned 63 slaves, the second largest number in the county, and by 1860 had 112, 6 of them in trust for his children. The US Census that year reported the value of those people at $77,000 (equivalent to about $3 million in 2024). His real estate holdings were worth $26,500, by way of comparison.

Soon after the start of the war in 1861, 20 year old Willie and his orphaned cousin James Newton Faucette, who lived with the Pattersons, enlisted in the Orange Guards, who became Company G of the 27th North Carolina Infantry. They first saw combat together at Newberne, NC in March 1862.

Willie was seriously wounded in the leg at Sharpsburg in September 1862, captured there, and lost his leg to amputation. He returned home in 1864.

His life was very different after the war: in 1870 he was an unemployed “cripple” living with his brother John, a physician in Chapel Hill, though by 1880 he was a bookkeeper in Durham making his own way. He never married.

His picture here from University President Kemp P. Battle’s History of the University of North Carolina (Vol. II, 1907), online from the Internet Archive.

Family details from genealogies and the Population and Slave Schedules of the 1850 and 1860 US Census.

The 1968 photo of the Patterson Plantation house, now called Holly Rock Farm, is online from Open Orange; original by the Durham Herald Sun.

The portrait of John B Patterson is of unknown provenance, shared to the FamilySearch database by Glen Robert Cary.

John Tapley Patterson’s 1781 will is also in that database.

Samuel Hodgman was First Lieutenant of Company I of the 7th Michigan Infantry at Antietam on 17 September 1862. He was wounded in both legs there and spent more than two months in hospitals recovering.

He wrote his father Moses (1804-1881), back in Michigan, from the US Army General Hospital in West Philadelphia, PA on 17 November 1862 with the latest news, including the recent history and whereabouts of many of the men of his Company.

This is fabulous material. See a list of his men …