behind AotW

Taken in New Orleans in 1867, this photograph was sold by J. Mountain Antiques of Ashburnham, MA. Pictured, left to right, are 1st Lt. Ballard S. Humphrey, Sgt. John B. Charlton (guidon, Battery K), Capt. William Montrose Graham, 2nd Lt. Charles King (son of Gen. Rufus King), 1st Lt. John J. Driscoll.

At Antietam, Humphrey was First Sergeant of Battery I and Graham was Captain of Battery K.

This fascinating map is found in the 1895 Annual Report to stockholders of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Company, Horace John Hayden, Second Vice President. It’s online as a PDF from Terry Link on his Canada Southern Railway (once part of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s 19th Century railroad empire) website.

Horace Hayden was two years out of Harvard and First Lieutenant of Battery L, 3rd United States Artillery at Antietam in 1862, but was rubbing shoulders with robber barons twenty years later.

Credited to Matthew Brady, this 1864 photograph is in the collection of the Library of Congress, and is labeled

Petersburg, Va., vicinity. Maj. Thomas T. Eckert (seated, left) and others of U.S. Military Telegraph Corps

Major Thomas Thompson Eckert was General McClellan’s chief of telegraphic operations on the Peninsula and Maryland Campaigns of 1862, later Chief of the Military Telegraph Office at the War Department and Assistant Secretary of War, and, much later, President then Chairman of the Western Union Telegraph Company, to 1910.