behind AotW

Baltimore shipbuilder and pre-war militia officer Benjamin Louis Simpson (left) was Lieutenant Colonel and led the Purnell Legion in Maryland in 1862, and he had later service as Colonel of the 6-month 9th Maryland Infantry to February 1864.

The photograph is at the Maryland Historical Society, and is seen here as it was published in Roger D. Hunt’s Colonels in Blue: the Mid-Atlantic States (2007). The other officer is not identified.

County Donegal native Lieutenant James McKay Rorty was Ordnance Officer of the First Division, 2nd Army Corps (Brigadier General Israel B. Richardson) at Antietam. He was heroically and famously killed at Gettysburg in July 1862 while in command of Battery B, 1st New York Light Artillery – a remnant of the old Irish Brigade/2nd Artillery Battalion in which he’d originally been commissioned in 1861.

Equally famously, as a Private in the 69th New York Militia he’d been wounded and captured at First Bull Run on 21 July 1861 and held in a warehouse in Richmond, VA. On 18 September he and two other men, 1Sgt. William O’Donohue and Pvt. Peter Kelly, disguised themselves in civilian clothes and escaped. A week later they made it to the Potomac River and rafted out to Federal gunboats.

That’s the scene in the illustration above, from Frank Leslie’s Pictorial History of The War of 1861, posted online in company with a piece about Rorty from The Wild Geese.

The escapees are (probably) seen in the photograph below – left to right, Kelly, Rorty, O’Donohue – taken later, after all three were commissioned officers. It’s from owner Matt Regan and is online from Harry Smeltzer.

[updated February 2021]

The 22nd Massachusetts Infantry was in reserve with General Porter’s Fifth Army Corps at Antietam on 17 September 1862, and saw relatively light combat on the campaign, but three of their number died and were left in Maryland.

Milton Ingalls was a 20 year old shoemaker in Boston when he enlisted in August 1862.  As a new recruit for Company H, he joined the regiment in Washington DC just in time for the march into Maryland. He was wounded by gunshot about 14 September, just a month after enlisting, and was treated at a hospital in Frederick, MD. He recovered enough to rejoin his Company two weeks after the battle of Antietam, in camp in Pleasant Valley, near Brownsville, MD, but he …

... suddenly died October 24 after a few days illness. We performed our first burial service, stood guard over his remains at the hospital tent, made his rude coffin of cracker boxes, and late one afternoon marched to the hillside to bury him, the chaplain of the Second Maine officiating.

Chauncey Knowlton, a 21 year old blacksmith in Brunswick, Maine and George Davis, age 44, a mechanic in Lawrence, Massachusetts both enlisted in the fall of 1861 as the 22nd was first organized. They were not engaged at Antietam but crossed the Potomac River near Shepherdstown, VA with their regiment and others of the 5th Corps on 20 September in pursuit of Lee’s army. Both men were horribly wounded that morning – accidentally, by their own artillery fire from the Maryland side of the river.

Chauncey’s leg was shattered and amputated, but his wound was unfortunately neglected at a Sharpsburg area field hospital. After about two weeks he was sent to the hospital in the German Reformed Church in Sharpsburg, but the infection was too far advanced and doctors there couldn’t save him. He died on 13 October.

George, whose lower jaw was entirely torn off by a piece of shell, was treated at a field hospital near the hamlet of Porterstown, MD, where he had to be fed by syringe. He was admitted to an Army hospital in Frederick, MD, just over a week later, but died of his wound on 4 October.

All three of these men rest under ordinary Government stones in Antietam National Cemetery. Where I hope they will never be forgotten.

Captain William Jerald Le Moyne, Company B, 28th Massachusetts Infantry, was severely wounded in action at Fox’s Gap on South Mountain on 14 September 1862, probably while on picket duty that night. The wound disabled him for field service and he was discharged in October 1862.

He returned to his profession: stage actor in Boston and New York. He retired in 1901.

His watercolor self-portrait above, sent to actress Elizabeth Jane Phillips about 1880, is online thanks to Mary Glen Chitty.

Captain Charles F Walcott is a hero to those who study Massachusetts soldiers in the Civil War (or at least to me) because he wrote the Regimental History of the 21st Massachusetts Infantry (1882). In the preface he apologized for taking more than 15 years to complete the book while raising children and running a law practice in Boston.

A Harvard man, he’d adventured West during a “gap year” in 1857 before law school. He had travelled to Minnesota, “living with the Sioux and Winnebago”, went down the Mississippi to New Orleans and returned home by ship by way of Cuba.

Walcott was the original Captain of Company B of the 21st, commissioned in August 1861, and he commanded it on the Maryland Campaign of 1862 – at Fox’s Gap on South Mountain and right behind the 51st PA & 51st NY over Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam.

He left the 21st Massachusetts in April 1863 and married Anna Morrill Wyman in October.

He did a 90-day stint commanding a local militia unit in the Summer of 1864 then was appointed Lt Colonel (soon Colonel) of the new 61st Mass in September. He mustered out in June 1865.

In 1866 he was honored by brevet to Brigadier General of Volunteers.

He was a lawyer in Boston for the next 20 years and died at age 50 in 1887.

In about 1980 his grandson Dr. Charles F. Walcott (Harvard, Harvard Medical School) donated a box of Indian artifacts to the Cambridge (MA) Library, a few of which are identified as local to Massachusetts, collected by Dr. Walcott. The rest are apparently of unknown provenance. That collection is pictured online via Flickr.

“The only outlier to the Native American objects in the collection is a box containing two bullets and a minie ball from the Battle of Antietam” – actually 2 minie bullets and a musket ball or cannister shot, I think.

Although not documented, I can guess who first collected some of these objects, can’t you?

________

The late-1864 photo with his wife is at the Library of Congress (part of the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs).

George Milton Munroe was probably First Sergeant of Company G, 21st Massachusetts Infantry and “acting 2nd Lieutenant” at Antietam, where he took command of his Company when Lieutenant Charles H. Parker was wounded. He was himself wounded in the knee and arm in action there on 17 September 1862. He mustered out as First Lieutenant in November 1864.

His photograph is in the MOLLUS Massachusetts Collection, US Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA.

Lieutenant Evan Thomas commanded the consolidated Batteries A and C of the 4th United States Artillery on the Maryland Campaign.

He was the 3rd son of US Army Colonel and Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas (USMA 1823), and at the start of the War in April 1861 received a commission as 2nd Lieutenant, 4th United States Artillery. He was promoted to First Lieutenant in May. He was then just 17 years old.

He was assigned to Battery C which, due to a manpower shortage, was consolidated with Battery A in October 1861. He was in action with his battery on the Peninsula in mid-1862 and succeeded to command by order of seniority sometime after Captain Hazzard died of wounds in mid-August 1862. Evan had just celebrated his 19th birthday.

Here’s Lieutenant Thomas with a group of his fellow officers taken at Sharpsburg in September or October 1862, shortly after the battle of Antietam:

The caption on the picture is Lt. Rufus King, Lt. Alonzo Cushing, Lt. Evan Thomas and three other artillery officers in front of tent, Antietam, Md. (click to enlarge) There is no guide to who is who, but I have had some expert help working to identify them.

34 year old Fitchburg farmer William Sullivan Boynton was a Private in Company D, 21st Massachusetts Infantry when he was killed in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

He left a widow, Sophronia, and five children. Sophronia remarried almost immediately, in November 1862, but died just over a year later, soon after losing a pair of newborn twins. William’s photograph was contributed to his Findagrave memorial by user Karen.

William Columbus Hart, a Corporal of Company E, 15th North Carolina Infantry, was captured at Crampton’s Gap in September 1862. He returned to his Company and was a Sergeant by the end of 1863, and survived a wound at Spotsylvania in 1864 to surrender with General Lee at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865.

This early-war photograph of Hart was contributed to his Findagrave memorial by Sharon Shown.

[Looking over the cliff at the Shenandoah River, southwest edge of Harpers Ferry NHP near Chambers (Murphy) Farm. Imagine dragging artillery up that!]

I had a most excellent long weekend, last, on the Maryland Campaign Tour organized by David Woodbury (Woodbury Historical Tours) and guided by Tom Clemens. Too many highlights to list.

We tramped the ground around Harpers Ferry and on the South Mountain gaps, walked all over Antietam, and ended up in the rain under the bluffs on the (West) Virginia side of Boteler’s Ford near Shepherdstown. Every day brought new insights and views from new angles.

Thanks again to Dave and Tom, and to all my fellow stompers. What a great group of folks.

Here are a few more photos …

[Part of the tiny Civil War museum at the Gathland State Park at Crampton’s Gap, MD. Very nicely done]

[The “blogger’s gun” at the Visitors Center, Antietam National Battlefield]

[Detail of the Mary Locher cabin on the Alfred Poffenberger farm, Sharpsburg. Debris on the ground around it includes hardened chunks of the original horsehair-stiffened mud daub]

[View looking east toward the West Woods at Antietam from the Alfred Poffenberger farm. 15th Massachusetts monument in the background]