This impressive sculpted face belongs to Colonel Eliakim Sherrill, 126th New York Infantry. It’s from a bronze panel on his regiment’s monument at Gettysburg. It’s online from Steve A. Hawks on Stone Sentinels.

Colonel Sherrill was wounded in the jaw and captured at Harpers Ferry in September 1862 and was in command of his brigade at Gettysburg. He was mortally wounded there on 3 July 1863 and died the next day.

Major Henry A Cole led his battalion of the Potomac Home Brigade Cavalry in the breakout from Harpers Ferry on the night of 14-15 September 1862. His photograph is from C. Armour Newcomer’s Cole’s Cavalry: Three Years in the the Saddle in the Shenandoah Valley (1895), which is online from the Internet Archive.

A teacher and law student in in Claiborne Parish before the war, Lieutenant George Lovick Pierce Wren of Company G, 8th Louisiana Infantry was wounded in action at Sharpsburg in September 1862. He later wrote of his Company:

… we fought the destructive battle of Sharpsburg on the 17th. We carried only 18 men into this fight, many having been left behind on the forced march to reach this point in time, and when the wounded were borne from the field, only three of the company were left standing.

He was a teacher and planter after the war and served in the state legislature in the 1880s and 90s. His wartime photograph is of unknown provenance, and is online from the Louisiana Confederate Images Facebook page. His postwar photograph was posted online by family genealogist Scott Dickson.

Assistant Surgeon Hezekiah Ford Witherspoon of the 9th Louisiana Infantry was captured while tending to wounded troops after the battle of Sharpsburg in September 1862. He survived the war and was a doctor in Texas.

This great photograph of W.C. Fields includes Cora Witherspoon (1890-1957, finger wagging), a well-known stage and film actress of the 1910s-1940s. It’s a promotional shot taken on the set of their film The Bank Dick (1940). Some references say Cora’s father was a Confederate Assistant Surgeon, but that’s an apparent confusion between our Hezekiah and her father, Henry Edgeworth Witherspoon (1844-1898). It’s still a fine image.

Sergeant Johann Friederich “John” Spaeth of the First Louisiana Infantry was wounded and captured at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862 and his lower leg was amputated at a field hospital the next day. He survived to return to Ohio and died relatively young, age 43, in Cincinnati in 1879.

Pictured here is a page from Dr George J Fisher’s Report of Fifty-seven Cases of Amputations … after the Battle of Antietam from the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, January 1863. It’s an excellent, if gory reference for students of the battle. “John F Spath” is #13 in Table II.