a companion to Antietam on the Web
Captain Tyler Calhoun Jordan commanded his battery, the Bedford (VA) Light Artillery on the Maryland Campaign. After the war he was a lawyer in Dallas, TX and in 1871 founded the first bank in that city: T. C. Jordan & Company. His photograph was contributed to his Findagrave memorial by George Seitz.
Sergeant Angelo M Crapsey of the “Bucktails” – the 13th Pennsylvania Reserves. Eyewitness to the Maryland Campaign.
After fighting at Turner’s Gap on South Mountain on 14 September he wrote a friend at home:
… It looked like a task to storm the mountain for it was very steep and more than one mile to the top of it. In we went. Company I was reserve awhile & the Rebels shelled us, wounding 3 of our men, 2 of which died that night. My right hand man was one to fall. Soon after this we were deployed & 3 with me were posted behind a rock wall. W Brewer & L Bard & Hero Bloom [Blom] were with me. The Rebels were behind a fence and rocks. Bard was wounded and Brewer helped him away & soon Bloom was shot by my side. He died that night. Northrop fell a few yards to the left. Maxson fell dead within a few feet of him.
Well it was close work. I only got my face and eyes full of bark for there was a tree just on the rock. That’s all of this …
Two days later, on the evening of the 16th, he and the Bucktails were at Antietam:
… Just as we emerged from a belt of woods into a plowed field, the Rebels fired across the field. We moved forward double quick & lie down behind a little knoll & commenced firing at the Rebels … It was soon dark. We kept firing so fast they could not stand it. My gun [a Sharps breechloader] was so hot I was afraid to load it but kept stuffing it and firing at the flash of their guns. We charged & drove them out of the woods … Col. McNeil was killed and Lt Ellison [Allison] also. I fired 70 times & was well satisfied to stop for the night.
(you can find something about all those names from the Bucktails’ page on AotW)
Crapsey was captured at Fredericksburg in December, was a prisoner at Libby in Richmond, was released and saw action again at Gettysburg, but was very ill afterward and was discharged for disability in October 1863.
He went home probably suffering from PTSD and attempted suicide twice. He succeeded in killing himself the third time, with a friend’s rifle, in August 1864. He was 21 years old.
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His picture from a photograph posted on Crapsey’s Findagrave page by Dennis Brandt, author of Pathway to Hell: A Tragedy of the American Civil War (U of Nebraska Press, 2008) – the tragedy was Crapsey.
Born in Germany, Johann Charles Bitterling lived in East Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe), PA before the war and enrolled as 2nd Lieutenant of Company F, 13th Pennsylvania Reserves in May 1861. He was killed in action at Turner’s Gap on South Mountain in Maryland on 14 September 1862. His photograph (of unknown provenance) is from a post by Ronald Rabenold on Cultured Carbon County.
2nd Lieutenant Samuel Jones Cloyd of the 12th Pennsylvania Reserves was seriously wounded at Antietam and lost his right arm to amputation soon after. He returned to his hometown, married late at age 56, had 4 sons, and died where he was born, in Orbisonia in Huntington County, PA at age 91 in 1925. This clipping from the Altoona Tribune of 21 March 1925 notes that he was the oldest man in the county at his death.
This page from Martin D. Hardin’s Twelfth Regiment Pennsylvania Reserve Volunteer Corps … (1890) describes the accidental death of Richard M Gustin in Elmira, NY in 1877. He was then 49 years old.
In 1860 he was a photographer – “Daguerrean Artist” – in Troy, Bradford County, PA. By June 1861 he was Captain of Company C of the 12th Pennsylvania Reserves, and he commanded the regiment as senior officer at Antietam. He was the Lieutenant Colonel of the regiment at muster-out in June 1864 and was brevetted Colonel in March 1865.
His photograph in Lieutenant Colonel’s uniform is from the frontpiece of Hardin’s history, which is online from the Internet Archive.