behind AotW

We’ve just passed another milestone in the collection of Campaign participants at Antietam on the Web – now over 23,000 individuals in the database.

#23,000 is Private Clay Esshom of Company A, 14th Indiana Infantry, who survived a fearful gunshot through his body in combat at Antietam on 17 September 1862 – then a month shy of his 20th birthday. He was afterward a successful farmer and stockman near his boyhood home in Monroe County, Iowa to his death at age 59 in 1902.

Here’s his simple stone in Lovilia, IA; Findagrave photo thanks to the late Pat Kiser.

Our rations were out Sunday. Monday and Tuesday we had nothing but water …

Just about sunset, a cow came feeding in front of our lines. Gen. [G.T.] Anderson ordered her killed and divided among the brigade. Soon had my little piece broiled over the coals, and ate it with the blood running out, without either salt or bread. Just whetted my appetite with nothing more to be had. How long, oh how long before we get something to eat? While we are all so hungry you don’t hear any complaints among the men, all knowing that rations are not to be had, being so far from our line of communication, all of our supplies coming from Virginia. No foraging allowed by Gen. Lee on the enemy’s country. What a contrast between our invasion and that of the enemy, who take everything as they go.

– William H Andrews, First Sergeant, Company M, First Georgia Infantry (Regulars) at Sharpsburg on Tuesday, 16 September 1862

Here’s Sergeant Andrews many years later, probably as he looked as he wrote his memoirs, source of the quote above.

Thanks to Kevin Whitehead for sharing the photo of his 3x great-grandfather and for the lead to William’s memoirs. They were published in Footprints of a Regiment: a Recollection of the 1st Georgia Regulars, 1861-1865 (1992), edits and notes by Richard M. McMurry.

Behold a receipt for an English Saddle & Equipments purchased by Sharpsburg veteran Major, soon to be Lieutenant Colonel Henry A Rogers of the 13th North Carolina Infantry in Richmond, VA in July 1863. It was $125.

For reference, due to wartime shortages and inflation, bacon cost $1.25/pound and flour was $28/barrel in Richmond, four times their pre-war prices. And his pay was $130/month for May and June 1863, while still a Captain. It would rise to $150/month as a Major and $170 as a Lieutenant Colonel.

Rogers’ saddle was probably made in the Ordnance Harness Shops at Clarksville, VA, but may instead have literally been English-made and came through the blockade from England.

The W.S. Downer seen on the receipt is Major William S Downer, Superintendent of Armories at the Richmond Arsenal, the organization responsible, among other things, for issuing horse equipment of all kinds. M S K = Military Storekeeper. Downer, by the way, had been a clerk at the US Army’s arsenal at Harpers Ferry, VA in 1860.

Here’s Henry Rogers at about the time of his purchase, in a portrait of unknown provenance from the Chancellorsville Vistor Center.

The receipt above is among Rogers’ Compiled Service Records, now in the National Archives. I got my copy from fold3, a subscription service.