behind AotW

The Reverend Jacob Eaton was a Congregational minister in Meriden, CT before the war and enlisted in the 8th Connecticut Infantry as a Private soldier in September 1861. He was appointed First Lieutenant in February 1862 – and probably sat for this photograph soon after.

He was wounded in the leg at Antietam in September 1862 and resigned his commission in October, but returned to the field as the Chaplain of the 7th Connecticut Infantry in 1864. He died of disease in Wilmington, NC in March 1865.

This fine photograph is in the collection of the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History in Hartford.

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.

Peter Mann married in his native Scotland in 1831, came to America in the next year or two, and had 10 children with his wife Isabella before she died in 1855. He married again, in 1857, Ann Martin Dyson, a woman who had also lost her spouse. They had a daughter Mary Agnes in 1858.

In September 1861 Peter, then a 54 year old weaver in Enfield, CT, enlisted as a Private in the 8th Connecticut Infantry. A year later he was terribly wounded in battle at Antietam, and died there on 27 September 1862. Four months later his widow Ann had their second daughter and named her Antietam Burnside Mann (1863-1943).

Antietam never married, but did not lack the company of children.

That’s her, back row at left, with her sister Mary Agnes Mann Richardson (1858-1929), back right, in about 1915. Mary Agnes’ oldest, Annie Elizabeth Richardson Breyer (b. 1877) is just in front of Antietam; Annie’s son Leland Eugene Breyer (1898) is top center. In front, left to right are 3 of Mary Agnes’ other daughters and a grand-daughter: Florence Richardson Goddu (1885), Inez Bingham (later Mansur, 1908), Inez Viola Richardson (later Allis, 1894), and Vera Antietam Richardson (later Huntley, 1895).

This lovely photograph was contributed to Antietam’s memorial by descendant Owen C Waggoner, Jr., who also identified all of those faces for us.

I’m guessing the date of the photograph from the apparent ages of the subjects, particularly Inez Bingham, who looks about 7.