behind AotW

Sergeant Ben Mell, of Cobb’s Legion was mortally wounded at Crampton’s Gap on 14 September 1862, left on the field, and captured. After about a week at a field hospital he was taken in by local citizen and “southern sympathizer” Thomas Sim Lee, a distant relative of Robert E. Lee. He was treated by local doctors and nursed by the Lee family, but he died of his wounds on 20 October.

Benn was son of Patrick Hues Mell, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Georgia, and he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1861 at the top of his class. His photograph is from Annie and Patrick Mell, Jr’s The Genealogy of the Mell Family in the Southern States (1897).

Hiram H Baxter died at age 87 and his hometown newspaper the Cass City Chronicle put his obituary on the front page [pdf]. He had enlisted as a Private in the 7th Michigan Infantry in August 1861 at age 23, and was wounded twice during the war – at Antietam in September 1862 and in the Wilderness, VA in May 1864.

Private William Almas, 7th Michigan Infantry, wounded in the knee at Antietam. From Ontario, Canada, he had enlisted in Company G at age 16 (giving his age as 18) at Lapeer, Michigan in August 1861.

He was killed in action at Gettysburg on 3 July 1863 – just 18 years old.

B. Witcher’s battlefield map (detail, click for full)

The map above is centered on the eastern part of the Miller Cornfield near the East Woods at Sharpsburg on the morning of 17 September 1862. There has been heavy fighting here since dawn and, along with other regiments in action, the 6th Georgia Infantry has been nearly wiped out. It is between 8 and 9 in the morning.

Stephen Sears, in his classic Antietam book Landscape Turned Red (1983), wrote this dramatic vignette of that time and place:

Private B. H. Witcher of the 6th Georgia urged a comrade to stand fast with him, pointing to the neatly aligned ranks still lying to their right and left. They were all dead men, his companion yelled at him, and to prove it he fired a shot into a man on the ground a few yards away; the body did not twitch. Private Witcher was convinced and joined the retreat. 

Over the years since I first read it, I had forgotten Benjamin Witcher’s name, but not that story. Who could forget that imagery? Even in combat, the shock of shooting into one of your own mess-mates would have been horrendous.

At least three other well-known books on the battle have used this anecdote, too, citing Landscape as their source. If you’ve read any of the basic literature, then, you will have seen it, and you’d remember.

But I’ve just found it isn’t true. It didn’t happen that way.

Here are Richmond Oliver “Rich” Bennett and some of his large family more than 30 years after he was wounded in the finger at Sharpsburg in September 1862. He was a Corporal in Company M of the First Texas Infantry. He was wounded again and captured at Gettysburg in July 1863, and captured near Richmond, VA in October 1864. He finally went home to Trinity County, Texas in March 1865.

This family photograph was shared online by family genealogist Tom McCabe.

The camps of the volunteers of the Army of the Potomac were fertile ground for US Army recruiters in the weeks after Antietam. I’ve seen records for dozens (if not hundreds) of men who enlisted in Regular Army batteries and regiments and left their State units that Fall.

I’ve also read of many instances at Antietam and elsewhere of infantrymen temporarily manning artillery pieces when their crews were reduced by casualties during a fight.

But yesterday I came upon a case of a kind I’ve not seen before:

In June 1862, Private James Welch and his mates in Companies B and D of the 5th New York Cavalry were detailed wholesale to serve with Battery F, 4th United States Artillery. This was after the cavalrymen had “suffered terribly” at Front Royal, VA on 23 May.

Companies B and D were probably down to fewer than 30 men each, but still provided a substantial infusion of manpower for the battery.

Battery F was reorganized that June of 1862 and issued 6 12-pounder Napoleons to replace their old 6-pounders and 12-pounder howitzers. Private Welch and the others of the 5th New York manned those guns for the rest of the summer and were present, though in reserve, at Antietam in September. They returned as Companies again to their Cavalry regiment in October 1862.

Poof! Cavalry troopers into Regular artillerymen, and back again.

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The man who led me to this story was Irish-born James Welch, an 18 years old laborer in Chicopee, Massachusetts at the start of the war.  He enlisted in Springfield, MA in the 5th New York Cavalry in April 1861.

He reenlisted in late December 1863 and was given a reenlistment furlough as reward, but just 2 days before leaving for home, he was captured in a skirmish at Ely’s Ford on the Rapidan in Virginia. He was a prisoner on Belle Island, Richmond for about a month then sent to the infamous prison camp at Andersonville, GA in February 1864.

He died there of disease on 18 October 1864.

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The illustration of the badge of the 5th NY Cavalry from the cover of the regimental history Historic Records of the Fifth New York Cavalry written by their Chaplain Louis Beaudrye in 1865.

William Freeman Fox was in the lumber business and a forester for most of his life – and New York’s first State Superintendent of Forests (1891). His postwar photograph is in the Annual Report of the New York Forest, Fish and Game Commission (1909).

Captain Fox led Company C of the 107th New York Infantry at Antietam and was injured by an artillery explosion there in September 1862. He was wounded twice more – at Chancellorsville, VA in May 1863 and at Resaca, GA in May 1864, by then the Lieutenant Colonel of the Regiment.

Surgeon Truman Hoffman Squire, 89th New York Infantry, treated wounded soldiers on the field at Antietam on 17 September 1862 and was afterward in charge of the field hospital known as Locust Spring on the Geeting Farm, Keedysville, MD.

Dr Squire’s list of Cases of Gunshot fractured femurs at Battle of Antietam is online in an exhibit about him from curator Erin Doane at the Chemung County (NY) Historical Society.

Addendum – April 2024

My transcription of the list above; click his name to see more about that soldier.

*could find no soldier matching these 2 names

Malichiah Reeves was largely uneducated before the war but resumed schooling after and was ordained a minister in the Baptist Church in 1888. He served in churches in Henderson and Anderson Counties in Texas.

He was slightly wounded at Sharpsburg in September 1862 as an 18 year old Private in Company I of the First Texas Infantry, but survived that and was promoted to Sergeant in 1864.

This somewhat impressionistic copy of his post-war photograph was shared on his Findagrave memorial by great-grandson Rick Featherston.

32 year old Private Frederick Julius Watts of Company G, First Texas Infantry was seriously wounded in his right arm at Sharpsburg in September 1862 and captured. His arm was amputated and he was sent home to his farm in Anderson County, but he died there of tuberculosis not quite ten years after he lost his arm, at age 41, in April 1872.

The photograph of his gravesite was contributed to his Findagrave memorial by Deb Vondrasek.