behind AotW

This post card depicting Robert Simpson Westbrook‘s place in Altoona, PA recently sold on eBay. It is likely that’s old Bob himself in the rocker out front.

Westbrook was an Antietam veteran who wrote the History of the 49th Pennsylvania Volunteers (1898). That volume is now online among many other Regimentals in the Antietam Institute’s Historical Research Center.

Sharpsburg veteran George Wise of Alexandria, VA published his History of the Seventeenth Virginia Infantry, C.S.A. in 1870, probably based on his wartime diary, and the more ambitious Campaigns and Battles of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1916.

His photograph is from his second book, and both volumes are online from the Internet Archive.

John Henry Ellsworth Whitney, Sergeant, Company B, 9th New York Infantry was seriously wounded in the pelvis during his regiment’s assault toward Sharpsburg on the afternoon of 17 September 1862, and was discharged, disabled, from a Frederick, MD hospital the following June.

An artist known particularly for wood engraving, he was magazine illustrator after the war. Here are some examples of his work from the 1880s. The first two, from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, are a finely-depicted monk and a self-portrait, “Artist at his Desk.”

He engraved this bullfight scene in 1880 and it was published in the Century Magazine in November 1883 (via GoogleBooks). This copy is online from Meisterdrucke Fine Art Prints in Villach, Austria. The original subject was drawn by Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903).