Captain William Covill, Jr of the First Minnesota Infantry was with his Company in action in the West Woods at Antietam on 17 September 1862, and later remembered
As I saw it the whole Division except our Regiment was broken into a mob, madly pressing to the rear followed closely by the enemies lines. Instantly on the breaking up of the 84th [82nd] N.Y. which was next on our left, Col Sully of our Regiment gave the order to about face and march to the rear, which we did double quickly, accompanied with a shower of cannister from a battery which had hurried up the pasture field …
By May 1863 he had been promoted to Colonel of the regiment and was seriously wounded leading them at Gettysburg in July. After mustering out he was elected to the state legislature, in November 1864, but left St. Paul to serve again in the field, as Colonel of the First Minnesota Heavy Artillery from April to July 1865. He was honored with the title of Brevet Brigadier General.
His photograph is in the collection of the US Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
At 80 years old – “four score” – Andrew H Embler sent his daughter this card for Christmas 1914.
Embler was Captain of Company E, 82nd New York Infantry, (2nd State Militia) at Antietam and was wounded in the combat there. He transferred to the 59th NY Infantry in July 1864 and was the Acting Commissary of the 2nd Division, 2nd Army Corps when he led a charge “at the head of 2 regiments” at the Boydton Plank Road, VA on 27 October 1864. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for that action.
He was an officer in the Connecticut National Guard after the war and was appointed Adjutant General (AG) of the CT Guard in 1890. That’s him in National Guard uniform in the small photograph to the right above.
While looking for something else, I came upon what may be the story of the first Confederate soldier killed on the Maryland Campaign of 1862. He was one of the earliest, certainly. [Update August 2025: Pvt Alfred Whitaker, 13th North Carolina, was killed in a skirmish on the Potomac on 5 September].
It happened on 8 September 1862, at Monocacy Junction near Frederick, MD, and probably did not involve gunfire.
On that date much of the Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) was in camp in and around Frederick, MD and Private Thomas Riley of the 6th Louisiana Infantry was part of a detail assigned to destroy the nearby railroad bridge across the Monocacy River. They succeeded in blowing it up, but Riley was killed in the process.
About a week later, after the ANV had moved on, the 14th New Jersey Infantry returned to their post at the bridge. In a somewhat gruesome postscript to our story, Sergeant Terrill of the 14th described what they found:
Everything looked desolate. The bridge destroyed, remnants of wagons, dead horses and mules lying around… It was raining hard and very muddy. Tents were pitched in a plowed field in regular order, guards were stationed around camp …
The rebels [had] left a squad of men to destroy the bridge; in the attempt one man was blown up and buried near the ruins, leaving his arms and head above ground. This was the first rebel the men had ever seen, and for some time was an object of curiosity to us; he lay exposed several days; at last his remains were taken up and decently interred by our men.
________
The picture at the top is a sketch by Alfred Waud of the railroad bridge as it looked in June or July 1863, after it had been rebuilt. The original is in the Library of Congress.
I have had a great time pulling a research “thread” this evening and thought both of my readers might like to share in the journey.
Looking into Sergeant John Martin Rushton (1837-1889) of the 7th South Carolina Infantry.
I started with Glen Swain’s excellent roster in The Bloody 7th (Broadfoot, 2014), based mostly on the Consolidated Service Records (CSRs) from the National Archives.
Those records say Rushton was wounded at Sharpsburg in 1862. In November – December 1864 he was in a hospital in Richmond, VA with a gunshot wound in the shoulder, then served as an attendant in another hospital there. He retired in March 1865, presumably for disability, and was paroled at Augusta, GA in May.
Nothing unusual here; it seemed like a typical soldier story until I looked at his gravesite on Findagrave, which refers to him as Dr. Rushton. Not so many enlisted men were later physicians, so I thought I’d find out when and where he trained.
A little digging online with various forms of his name, and up popped an announcement in the Richmond Dispatch that J.M. Rushton of Edgehill [sic], SC graduated from the Medical College in Richmond (now part of Virginia Commonwealth University).
In March 1865.
Oh-ho! Now we’re having fun: did our man attend medical school while still a soldier and patient/hospital aide in 1864-5?
That would be unusual.
Then I got really lucky. Thanks to the digital archives at VCU, I found an October 1864 letter John Rushton wrote to Levin Smith Joines, the Dean of the medical school. In it, he requested admission to the Winter 1864-65 course, noted he’d had previous training in Georgia 1860-61, and best of all, described what he’d been doing since Sharpsburg.
So, in contrast to the tale of the CSRs, it turns out he was furloughed home after he was wounded in the shoulder at Sharpsburg and I don’t think he ever returned to his unit. By January 1864 he had been judged disabled and was teaching school in Edgefield, SC.
He was admitted to the Medical College for the 1864-65 winter session and graduated in 1865. The day after he’d been “retired” in the Army records, coincidentally.
Long story short – I got to see part of the man’s story in his own hand, in real time. Rare, but very gratifying. And a lot more exciting than the basic and sometimes confused service records.
Lieutenant Joseph Lee Talbert was mortally wounded on Maryland Heights near Harpers Ferry on 13 September 1862, and died at Charles Town, VA (now West Virginia) on the 19th. His photograph is from the collection of Joe Matheson as published in Glen Allan Swain, Jr.’s The Bloody 7th (2014).
