behind AotW

This is Captain John Almy Tompkins who commanded Battery A of the First Rhode Island Light Artillery in the Maryland Campaign of September 1862. This photograph accompanied a display of his uniform frock coat and accouterments at the Antietam National Battlefield Museum, Sharpsburg.

Near the Dunker Church at Antietam on the 17th

Colonel Oakford … told us we had better limber our guns and save them. If we had attempted it we would have lost them before they could have been limbered. Instead of that we stopped the charge and drove the rebels back in disorder. The Mumma house and barn in our rear was on fire and at one time looked as if it would ignite our caissons, and some of them on the left of the battery had to be moved.

We were engaged about four hours and twenty minutes and expended over twelve hundred rounds of ammunition including every round of canister we had in our ammunition chests …

Private Thomas Harding Chilton, 11th Mississippi Infantry – a distant relative of General R.E. Lee’s chief of staff Robert H Chilton – was wounded at Sharpsburg in September 1862 and captured at Petersburg, VA in April 1865. Son of a physician, he had a long career in the drug business after the war and was in banking and insurance later in life.

Chilton’s photograph is from James Harvey Mathes’ The Old Guard in Gray (1897).

Lewis Taylor Fant was a student at the University of Mississippi (Class of 1862) at the start of the war and enlisted in Company A – the University Greys – 11th Mississippi Infantry in October 1861. A Corporal, he was mortally wounded during skirmishing at Sharpsburg on the evening of 16 September 1862. His leg was amputated and he was captured in Shepherdstown, VA about 19 September, but he was soon after paroled and sent to a hospital in Richmond, VA.

While walking on crutches there he fell and opened an artery, dying of blood loss on 26 December 1862. He was 20 years old.

The magnificent stained glass seen here is the University Greys memorial window in Ventress Hall at the University of Mississippi. It was made by the Tiffany Glass Company in New York and installed in 1891 [plaque text]. This photograph from UM Photography Services.

David Allen Russell graduated from West Point in 1845 and was a 40 year old US Army Captain with 15 years of service at the start of the Civil War. In January 1862 he accepted a Volunteer commission as Colonel of the 7th Massachusetts Infantry and he commanded them on the Maryland Campaign. He was appointed Brigadier General in November 1862 and led a Brigade in the 6th Army Corps. He was killed in action while in command of a Division, at Opeqon, near Winchester, VA on 19 September 1864.

His photograph is at the Library of Congress.

Among the more than 150 casualties in the 2nd Mississippi Infantry at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862 were all three field officers, wounded – Major John Alan Blair, Lieutenant Colonel David W. Humphreys, and Colonel John Marshall Stone – leaving 2nd Lieutenant William C Moody of Company B in command of the remnant of the regiment at the end of the day.

Blair was a lawyer in Tishomingo County and enlisted as a Private in Company K in April 1861. He was soon after appointed Sergeant Major and was elected Major during the Army reorganization of April 1862. He was Lieutenant Colonel after Gettysburg and was twice captured, at Gettysburg in July 1863 and at Hatcher’s Run, VA in February 1865. He survived the prisons at Point Lookout, MD and Johnson’s Island, OH to resume his law practice, in Tupelo after the war.

His profile and tribute above are from Dunbar Rowland’s Mississippi: Comprising sketches … (Vol. III, 1907). His photograph below is from the frontpiece of an annotated typescript of his 1864-65 diary, published in his namesake’s 1949 Masters Thesis.

Thanks so much Sharon Murray and Susan Hearn Kirstein for your help with Myron E. Billings, what a fascinating man. He’d been wounded by shrapnel in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862 and had a considerable war record afterward.

But here’s something about his troubles later in life …

In December 1887, by then age 51, he was involved in a violent altercation with his former law partner Willis S. Kingsley (1862-1887), probably because he thought Kingsley was having an affair with his wife. There was also talk that Billings was trying to extort money from Kingsley. Both men were shot with the same revolver and Kingsley died.

There were no other eyewitnesses and Billings said Kingsley had shot him, then committed suicide, but he was charged with murder and convicted, in the 2nd degree, on 25 April 1888. He appealed the conviction, and was again convicted on retrial in Black Hawk County.

He appealed to the State Supreme Court in October 1889 and the next year his convictions were reversed, the Iowa Supreme Court ruling:

… But two shots were fired, being about four and one half seconds apart, both of which were from the revolver found by the side of the deceased; and but two balls were ever discovered, one in the head of the deceased and the other in the back of defendant. The deceased was a man of good physique, in the vigor of his physical manhood, and capable of preventing a deadly assault with a revolver placed against his face. Held, that the undisputed facts in the case being inconsistent with murder, but consistent with suicide, the burden was upon the state to overcome the presumptions arising from such facts with affirmative proof of the guilt of the defendant, and that the state having failed to do this, a verdict of murder in the second degree was erroneous.

Charles T. Widstrand (1843-1898) came to Minnesota from Sweden in 1855 and was a 17 year old printer in Minneapolis when the war began. He enlisted for 90 days in the First Minnesota in April 1861, then joined the 2nd Company, Minnesota Sharpshooters in December.

He was seriously wounded in the thigh at Antietam, recovered and returned to duty, but left the Company in January 1864 to enlist as a Hospital Steward in the Regular Army.

He married in 1867 but was divorced, with no children, and left the Army in 1872.

He seems to have broken down by the time he was 50 years old. He lived in the Minnesota Soldier’s Home on-and-off from 1893 to 1897. Unfortunately, he was expelled in April 1897 for being drunk – having alcohol on the premises was strictly against the rules. He reported he was “destitute and living on charity” in December that year, but could not gain readmittance to the Home.

Two months later he was found dead in his room at the Bijou Hotel on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis where he’d been living for 5 or 6 months. His death was probably due to an excess of alcohol or laudanum according to the newspaper account.

It seems a sad, lonely end for “an old soldier”. RIP.

Norwegian-born Private Endre Iverson “Andrew” Lockrem of the 2nd Company, Minnesota Sharpshooters was wounded by two gunshots, left on the field, and captured at Antietam in September 1862. He was discharged for disability in February 1863 and went home to his farm in Northfield, MN. He married fellow Norwegian Anna Halvorsdatter in 1864 and they had 7 children together.

Above are Endre and Anna, possibly on the occasion of their wedding. A younger Anna, below, in a haunting photograph, I would guess of about 1860.

Here are all 9 Lockrems in about 1885. All three photographs here were kindly contributed to Endre and Anna’s Findagrave memorials by Mark Daley.

[updated February 2021].

David B Dudley, First Sergeant of Company K, First Minnesota Infantry was mortally wounded in the shoulder in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862. He died at a US Army hospital in Frederick, MD on 6 October.

His photograph here is from the Winona County Old Settlers’ Association, online thanks to Chuck Barden and Wayne Jorgenson on their First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment website.

Captain Melvin Brewer led his Company – “L” of the First Michigan Cavalry – as Headquarters Escort to General Mansfield’s (later Williams’) 12th Army Corps on the Maryland Campaign of 1862. He was appointed Lieutenant Colonel of the 7th Michigan Cavalry in June 1864 but was mortally wounded at Winchester, VA on 19 September and died there on 25 September 1864.

His carte de visite as Lt. Colonel of the 7th Cavalry is in the State Archives of Michigan, Lansing.