behind AotW

While researching her 2014 book about the regiment, Dr Lesley Gordon compiled a roster after my own heart, including pre- and post-war details not usually found in military records. She shared a spreadsheet containing her data on her book’s page. I’ve posted a copy here in the event that page ever goes away.

Here’s how she describes it:

This database of men who served in the regiment originated with the state of Connecticut’s Adjutant Generals Office Reports from 1862, 1869, and 1889. As I accumulated more (and sometimes conflicting) information, I filled in gaps and made corrections (especially birth and death dates, and postwar occupations) from the biographical materials collected [by] Ira Forbes and George Whitney … Death and birth dates seemed to have had the greatest inconsistencies in the various sources, and I tried to confirm these by cross-checking the U.S. census, bound regimental records, pension records, obituaries, local histories, as well as a comprehensive unit roster compiled by Scott Holmes. Thus, readers should be alerted that some discrepancies still remain here …

There may be discrepancies or minor issues, but it’s fantastic that she posted this online for anyone to use; it’s a rare and beautiful thing. Huzzah, Dr Gordon!

And I wish I’d found this earlier. It would have saved me untold hours with its clues to some of the more elusive men of the 16th at Antietam.

Orators at many alumni gatherings have spoken of the gallantry of Lieutenant Samuel Hopkins Thompson, the young Civil War hero, who led his men to the charge at Antietam and died crying, “Form on me, boys, form on me.”

— Claude Moore Fuess in Phillips Academy, Andover in the Great War, a talk at Yale, New Haven, CT in 1919 [online]

Well, no, it probably didn’t happen that way.

A former Phillips Academy student, Samuel H Thompson, the First Lieutenant of Company H, 16th Connecticut Infantry died at home in Connecticut on 22 October 1862. He was 19 years old.

It’s not clear what killed him, though lots of literary and genealogical references – even his grave marker – attribute it directly to the battle of Antietam. His military record does not mention his being wounded in the combat there and he’s not on the usual hospital lists. An undocumented wound? An illness he caught on the Campaign?

Something of a mystery.

See also: his good friend and possibly romantic interest, best selling author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward.

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This photograph of his grave marker was contributed to his Find-a-grave memorial by Jim Bancroft.

This fine image is from the collection of John Claudius Buchanan‘s great-great-great-granddaughter Sarah Boye. Buchanan enrolled as First Lieutenant in 1861 and was promoted to Captain of Company D of the 8th Michigan Infantry on 1 September 1862.

20 years later he very succinctly described his part and that of his Company in the 1862 Maryland Campaign to his son Claude:

This is from Claude Robinson Buchanan’s 1882 diary, in which he recorded his father’s War Records. Transcription thanks to Sarah Boye. The original is in the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.