behind AotW

A new project: to identify the men in this Alexander Gardner photograph taken at Harrison’s Landing, VA in August 1862. Of special interest to me are those officers who were on the Maryland Campaign a month later (touch picture to enlarge).

#1 – Lt. James Harrison Wilson
#2 – Lt. Charles Edward Hazlett (’61)*
#4 – Lt. Nicholas Bowen?
#6 – Capt. William Graham Jones
#7 – Lt. Alexander Cummings McWhorter Pennington, Jr.
#9 – Lt. John Moulder Wilson
#10 – Lt. Alanson Merwin Randol
#11 – Capt. Josiah Holcomb Kellogg

There is obviously more work to do here.

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This image is part of the left half of a stereo photograph, displayed online by the Library of Congress, from their Civil War Photographs collection.

Other men of the Class of 1860 who may be in the picture above and were at Antietam, are:

– John Newman Andrews
– Daniel Darius Lynn
– James Porter Martin

Members of the Class of 1860 who were at/near Harrison’s Landing in August 1862, but perhaps not on the Maryland Campaign, are also candidates to be in the photograph:

– Lt. Horace Porter
– Lt. Sam A. Foster
– Lt. Alfred T. Smith

Math is not my strength, but if these six men are in the photograph, we’ve got names for 13 14. Unfortunately, I have not yet found wartime photographs to identify the six five remaining. Please let me know if you can help.

Alexander James Dallas III was at Antietam in 1862, a Captain in the Second Battalion, 12th United States Infantry. He was from a prominent family, as you might guess from these Gilbert Stuart portraits of his grandparents Alexander James Dallas (the First, 1759-1817) and Arabella Maria Smith Dallas (1761-1837). They were “one of the more fashionable couples in Philadelphia during Washington’s administration.”

Alexander I was later President James Madison’s Secretary of the Treasury and was briefly acting Secretary of War and of State.

Captain Dallas’ father Alexander II (1791–1844) was a US Navy Commander, and his mother was the former Henrietta Constantia Meade (1801-1831), older sister of George Gordon Meade. Another son of Alexander I was George Mifflin Dallas (1792-1864), James K Polk’s Vice President.

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Alexander I’s original portrait is at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Arabella’s is at Mount Vernon.

This would have been a familiar view for Stephen H Bogardus and his sons Stephen and Eliphalet (!) who worked together in the family’s saddle and harness shop about a block east on Main Street across from the Gregory House Hotel.

Stephen H Bogardus, Jr. enlisted in April 1861 in the 5th New York Infantry – the famous Duryée’s Zouaves – was promoted to Sergeant by October 1861 then commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in the Purnell Legion of Maryland, with whom he saw action at Antietam, where he was at least slightly wounded. He mustered out with the Legion in October 1864 and was briefly Captain of a Company he raised in Poughkeepsie, part of the 192nd New York Infantry, in 1865.

He was a Lieutenant in the Regular Army after the war, to 1871, then briefly back in the leather business in Poughkeepsie. By 1880 and for the rest of his life he was a railroad man with the Santa Fe in New Mexico Territory.

Here’s a fine photograph of him supplied to his memorial by the late Brian Pohanka, taken sometime after he was brevetted Major in 1865 for his war service.

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Notes

The street scene above and the location of the Bogardus shop are from Edmund Platt’s The Eagle’s History of Poughkeepsie: from the earliest settlements, 1683 to 1905 (1905), which is online from the Internet Archive.

The Eagle refers to the local newspaper in which Stephen, Sr. was a frequent advertiser in 1860. Stephen, Jr. wrote often to the Eagle during the war, and those letters were edited and published in 2002 by Joel Craig as Dear Eagle: The Civil War Correspondence of Stephen H. Bogardus, Jr. to the Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle.

The Bogardus’ occupation from the 1860 US Census.

Eliphalet P Bogardus (1834-1929) was probably named for his uncle Eliphalet Price Bogardus, who died at age 13 in 1827. Eliphalet and his father were still in business together as S.H. Bogardus & Son in Poughkeepsie to at least 1872.