behind AotW

a companion to Antietam on the Web

Author: Brian

  • Boldly captured fourteen rebels

    Private James Allen of Company F, 16th New York Infantry was awarded the Medal of Honor for single-handedly capturing a group of the enemy and their colors at Crampton’s Gap on 14 September 1862.

    … I was met by another volley, but was only slightly wounded. Putting on a bold face, and waving my arms, I said to my imaginary company: ‘Up, men, up!’

    The rebels, thinking they were cornered, stacked their arms in response to my order to surrender.

    Pictured is a page with his own narration of the events from Byer & Keydel’s Deeds of Valor: How America’s Heroes Won the Medal of Honor (1901), online from the Internet Archive.

  • Corp Charles M Smith

    Corporal Charles M Smith, Company D, 16th New York Infantry was mortally wounded in the chest at Antietam and died at a field hospital on the Samuel Poffenberger farm nearby on 12 October 1862.

    His photograph was once among many others pinned to the wall in the State Capitol in Albany, and is now in the collection of the NY State Military Museum, online through the Heritage New York portal.

  • Case 129. – Private J.H. Amidon

    Here’s the medical case of Private John Nelson Amidon, 49th New York Infantry, from the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1870). All six volumes are online from the National Library of Medicine, NIH.

    On 17 September 1862, the day before his 18th birthday, he was wounded by a gunshot to his right leg in action at Antietam. He was in a field hospital on the field then sent to a General Hospital in Washington, DC. By June 1863 he was terribly crippled and transferred to a hospital in Philadelphia. He suffered one procedure after another until he was sufficiently repaired to be discharged for disability on 10 February 1864. Remarkably, he enlisted again in August 1864, in the 15th New York Engineers and served to June 1865.

  • Signals at Little Round Top

    This is a lithograph by Don Stivers called Signals at Little Round Top. It depicts Captain Peter A. Taylor, Captain James T. Hall, Sergeant John Chemberlin, and Sergeant Lucian H. Goodnaugh at Gettysburg.

    Captain Taylor, of the 49th New York Infantry, was with the Army of the Potomac Signal Detachment on the Maryland Campaign of 1862 and wrote an after-action Report about his signal communications there. He continued in the Signal Corps to September 1865.

    His photograph was published in J. Willard Brown’s The Signal Corps, U.S.A. in the War of the Rebellion (1896), which is online from the Signal Corps Association 1860-1865.

  • Lt Ansil Denison, Jr.

    First Lieutenant Ansil Denison, Jr of Company K, 77th New York Infantry was mortally wounded at Antietam. He died at home with his wife and daughter in Gloversville, NY on 27 February 1863. His photograph is in the collection of the Lee Library, Brigham Young University in Provo.