a companion to Antietam on the Web
This is a group photograph of the officers of the 6th Vermont Infantry at Camp Griffin, VA, near Washington, DC in October 1861. Among them, front row to the right of the colors, is Major Oscar S Tuttle. He commanded the regiment in Maryland in 1862. In the back at far right is his brother Lyman Mower Tuttle who was Assistant Surgeon.
The photograph is hosted by Tom Ledoux on Vermont in the Civil War; its from the Ed Italo Collection.
James McVay was an “old man” in the 14th Connecticut Infantry. He had enlisted as a Private in Company K with his sons Michael and Francis in July 1862. He died of “exhaustion” at the end of the regiment’s first day’s march on what became the Maryland Campaign.
His was the first death in that brand new regiment.
His name’s on a familiar looking monument in Norwich, CT.
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Notes
The clip above is from Charles D. Page’s History of the Fourteenth Regiment, Connecticut Vol. Infantry (1906).
The picture of the Soldiers’ Monument in Norwich, CT is online from Waymarking. You’ll notice the statue’s similarity to “Old Simon” in the Antietam National Cemetery.
Colonel Matthew S Quay commanded the 134th Pennsylvania Infantry in Maryland. They arrived on the battlefield of Antietam on the morning of 18 September after an all night march. He resigned due to illness in December, but was a Fredericksburg, VA on the 13th as an aide to General Erastus Tyler. Quay was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions there. By the end of the war he was private secretary to Governor Curtin.
He began his career in the Pennsylvania legislature in 1864 and was a political “boss” in the state for the rest of his life. He was US Senator for two terms, from 1888-1899 and again from 1901 to his death in 1904. Quay once said politics was “the art of taking money from the few and votes from the many under the pretext of protecting the one from the other.”
This lovely caricature of bosses Quay (left), Richard Crocker of Tammany Hall (seated), and Senator Thomas Collier Platt of NY (right) was on the cover of the Puck Magazine of 24 January 1900, online from ExplorePAHistory.
Colonel Henry M Bossert commanded the 137th Pennsylvania Infantry in Maryland, and his rookies saw their first enemy fire at Crampton’s Gap on 14 September 1862 and were in reserve at Antietam. This photograph of him is from Sue Bossert Hannegan, published in Roger D. Hunt’s Colonels in Blue (2007).
William Harrison Humphrey enlisted as a Private in the 2nd United States Sharpshooters in October 1861 and was with the regiment at Antietam. He later remembered:
[Very early on 17 September] while crossing the [Miller’s] field shot and shell drop about us in a careless manner, we think. Some of the boys speak how careless they are while others thought they meant to be … I have often thought if it had not been for now and then a good joke cracked just in the nick of time it would have been hard to have kept the boys in line had someone put on a long face and moaned about the horrors …
He was promoted through the ranks to First Lieutenant of his Company by November 1864 and transferred to the 4th Vermont Infantry in February 1865. He was seriously wounded by a shell at Petersburg, VA two months later and lost his right leg.
The picture on the right is held by the Vermont Historical Society. The other photograph shows him after his leg was amputated, with William F. Tilson (left), who was wounded by the same round as Humphrey. It’s from the Tilson Photograph Album, hosted online by Tom Ledoux.