behind AotW

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.

This faded photograph is of Oneil Savant, wife Eliza, and sons Jean Baptiste and Louis, taken in about 1874. By then he was “in indigent circumstances” and blind. The picture was contributed to his Findagrave memorial by Ethel Sacker.

He was a farmer in St. Landry Parish before the war and enlisted in 1861 at age 17 or 18. As a Corporal in the 8th Louisiana Infantry, Savant was wounded and captured at Sharpsburg in September 1862. He returned to duty in October 1863 only to be captured and a prisoner again, from November to near the end of the war.

This lovely picture of General William Edwin Starke is among the Images from the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans.

Starke was one of six General officers killed or mortally wounded at Sharpsburg.