Antietam, Sharpsburg and Vicinity Constructed and Engraved to Illustrate “The War with the South,” by Charles Sholl, 1864.
A native of Middletown, Gen. Joseph K. F. Mansfield had served in the army since age eighteen, when he had graduated from West Point. At the outset of the war, Mansfield had capably protected the capital as commander of the Department of Washington—but he yearned for a field command. In September of 1862, Mansfield got his wish, taking charge of the Union army’s 12th Corps. “Although he appeared like a calm and dignified old gentleman when he took command of the corps two days before,” said one of his men, “he was the personification of vigor, dash and enthusiasm” in battle. (John Mead Gould, Joseph K. F. Mansfield, Brigadier General of the U.S. Army, A Narrative of Events Connected with His Mortal Wounding at Antietam, Sharpsburg, Maryland, September 17, 1862, p. 29.)
Today was no different. “The General was moving around the field continually,” wrote one of his men. “He seemed to be everywhere.”6 Mansfield rode rapidly back and forth, positioning his troops, then watching from the high ground the overall movement of the battle.
One of his regiments, the 10th Maine, was now firing into a wooded area where Confederates were using trees and woodpiles as cover. Mansfield had received a report that Hooker’s troops held the woods; when he saw the 10th Maine loading and firing,
Mansfield at once came galloping down the hill and passed through the scattered men of the right companies, shouting “Cease firing, you are firing into our own men!” He rode very rapidly …
Captain Jordan now ran forward … and insisted that Gen. Mansfield should “Look and see.” He and Sergt. Burnham pointed out particular men of the enemy, who were not 50 yards away, that were then aiming their rifles at us and at him … he was convinced, and remarked, “Yes, you are right.”7
Mansfield had ridden into “a most perilous position—where the bullets and missiles were flying like hail, and where no one upon a horse could survive. It seemed as if the very depths of Pandemonia had sent her furies,” wrote Surgeon P. H. Flood of the 107th New York.8 A conspicuous target, the general immediately drew the fire of Confederates in the woods before him. One of the 10th Maine soldiers watched as his commander moved off: “He then turned his horse and … attempted to go through [a broken fence], but the horse, which … appeared to be wounded, refused to step into the traplike mass of rails and rubbish, or to jump over. The General thereupon promptly dismounted and led the horse … as he dismounted his coat blew open, and I saw that blood was streaming down the right side of his vest.”9 A minié ball had pierced Mansfield’s lung. As blood soaked his chest, soldiers slung him in a blanket and carried him to the rear. He would die the following morning.
While General Mansfield was borne to the rear, the fight continued to rage back and forth, with first the Federal, then the Confederate forces dominating. Both sides suffered appalling casualties. By nine in the morning, a lull had set in at the northern end of the battlefield, while the battle had ignited farther south.
Just before he left Washington to join McClellan’s command, General Mansfield wrote a hurried note to his twenty-two-year-old son Sam, who had just graduated from West Point. “You must purchase a horse … fill your pockets with sandwiches and follow me.” (Letter from J. K. F. Mansfield to Samuel M. Mansfield, September 12, 1862; courtesy of the Middlesex County Historical Society.) Arriving in Maryland after the battle, Sam found that instead of acting as his father’s aide, he was escorting the general’s coffin home to Middletown. The younger Mansfield went on to serve as colonel of Connecticut’s 24th Regiment.
THE 14TH CONNECTICUT
I never prayed more fervently for darkness.
About eight o’clock that morning, Cornwall native general John Sedgwick had forded Antietam Creek with about 5,500 troops. At the center of Sedgwick’s line marched the men of Connecticut’s 14th Regiment, who had left Hartford less than a month before. How green were they? Frederick Burr Hawley of Bridgeport wrote peevishly in his journal, “Immediately after crossing [Antietam Creek], we come into a ploughed lot, our feet being wet, get covered with mud, some gets in my shoes & chafes my feet.”10
Minutes later, Hawley and his 14th comrades had more than chafed feet to worry about. Sedgwick rapidly moved his forces toward the center of the battlefield, and into the East Woods.
The order was given to form line of battle, shells were bursting about them, tearing off huge branches of trees while shot were cutting the air with their sharp shriek.
This order to form line of battle was perhaps the supreme moment of their experience, as there shot through the minds of the men the thought of the loved ones at home; the terrible possibilities of the engagement made vivid by the ghastly scenes through which they had already passed at South Mountain; some indeed would be wounded, some slain outright; there must inevitably be suffering and death: and as they looked at the familiar faces of their comrades, they wondered who it would be.11
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“These may be my last words,” Samuel Willard wrote to his wife; “if so, they are these: I have full faith in Jesus Christ, my Savior; I do not regret that I have fallen in defence of my country; I have loved you truly and know that you have loved me … If my body should ever reach home, let there be no ceremony; I ask no higher honor than to die for my country.” (Samuel Willard, as quoted in Samuel Irenaeus Prime, The Power of Prayer, pp. 408–11.)
“I cannot sing the old songs. Or, the late Home of a Union Soldier,” ran the title of a touching print published in 1868. A downcast woman standing at the piano wiped away a tear. Over her shoulder lingered a faint image of her lost soldier husband.
When the 14th Regiment had left Connecticut for the South, Madison’s Samuel Willard, a captain in Company G, carried a small diary in his pocket. Here the thirty-two-year-old penciled thoughts and experiences that he later copied into letters to his wife Margaret. Now, about to enter battle, the realization struck him that he might meet death at any moment.
In the midst of the booming of Union and Confederate artillery, as the 14th Regiment prepared to advance, he added, “The battle has commenced, one man killed within 20 rods of me, by a shell … God save my men, God save me, God save the United States of America. God bless you my own dear wife, and may we meet at last in heaven where there will be no war.”12
Captain Willard fell in battle that day, shot through the head. His brother-in-law, Pvt. John Bradley, stayed with him while he died on the field.
Long after the Civil War, a Connecticut woman described a scene from her childhood. One day, in the early twentieth century, she was playing the piano for her grandmother in her home in Madison. When she performed an old Civil War song called “Tenting on the Old Camp Grounds,” her grandmother “threw her apron over her face and broke into shuddering sobs. It wasn’t until she cried and asked me never to play that song again, that I realized what the war had done to her,” said Margaret Shepard.13 Her grandmother was Margaret Willard, widow of Captain Samuel Willard. Some four decades earlier, the war had taken her husband and two of her three brothers.
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The 14th soldiers now moved forward on the double-quick, scrambling over fences