Author: Brian

  • Frank and Kate Manning

    Captain Franklin Manning was elected Captain of Company K of the 8th South Carolina Infantry in May 1862 and led them in action on Maryland Heights near Harpers Ferry on 13 September 1862. His right arm was shattered by a gunshot there and, disabled for the field, he was detailed to duty at Cheraw, SC for the rest of the war. He was a successful planter on the family plantation in Marlboro County after the war.

    He’s pictured here later in life with his wife Clarissa Ann “Kate” Covington on a page from W. H. Manning, Jr. and Edna Anderson Manning’s Our Kin (1958), online from the Hathi Trust.

  • Lt. Alfred A von Kleiser

    Alfred August von Kleiser was born in Baden-Württemberg (now in Germany), came to America before the war, and enrolled as 2nd Lieutenant of Battery A of the First Battalion, New York Artillery in July 1861. He was 19 years old. By Antietam he was First Lieutenant and commander of Battery B; their big 20-pounder Parrott rifled guns were posted on the high bluffs over the east bank of Antietam Creek on 17 September 1862. He survived the war and was a store keeper in Martinsburg, WV, but died relatively young, of tuberculosis, at age 40 in 1884.

    His picture here is from an albumen photograph of a group of four officers kindly shared by Ronald S. Coddington, from his collection.

  • Capt. Norwood P Hallowell

    This photograph of Captain Norwood P Hallowell is at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

    Hallowell was a Harvard rower, Class of 1861, and was Captain of Company D, 20th Massachusetts Infantry by Antietam, where he was wounded in the arm. He was Commissioned Lieutenant Colonel of the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry in May 1863 and took command after Colonel Shaw was killed at Fort Wagner in June.

    He resigned due to lingering effects of his Antietam wound in November 1863 and was afterward a wool broker in New York and Boston.

  • Philemon Tracy

    Philemon Tracy was a lawyer in Macon and editor of the Georgia Telegraph before the war. As Major of the 6th Georgia Infantry he was briefly in command at Sharpsburg when Lieutenant Colonel Newton was killed early on 17 September, but was himself hit in the thigh, quickly bled-out on the field, and died.

    His body was recovered by his uncle Judge Phineas Tracy of Batavia, NY, who passed him off as a Federal officer and got him buried in a cemetery in Batavia.

    This photograph was in a Johnston family album discovered by the staff of the Johnston-Felton-Hay House in Macon, GA, and was published in the Macon Magazine online.

  • Sgt Jack Franks and wife Jane R Wilhite

    Corporal John Wesley Franks, Company K, 7th South Carolina was promoted to Sergeant on 25 March 1862 but was reduced to Private on 13 May at the reorganization of the regiment, so the photograph of him – wearing those stripes – must have been taken in that brief span. He was mortally wounded my artillery fire at Antietam on 17 September and died the next day.

    That’s his wife Jane R Wilhite. She may have died about 1860, or shortly after her husband in 1862. In either case that left their son Lewis (7) and daughter Alice (4) orphans to be raised by relatives in Georgia.

    Both photographs here were contributed to John’s Findagrave memorial, by user JFJN and Stanley A. Hutson, respectively.