Meanwhile, at the other end of the 14th Regiment’s line, Company B had to skirt several obstacles in its way, which caused it to split off from the rest of the regiment. Their captain, thirty-year-old Elijah Gibbons, was no greenhorn, having previously served in Connecticut’s 4th Infantry. Seeing his company veering away, Gibbons quickly adjusted its position, leading the men between a farmhouse and barn on the Roulette farm. Sheltered by the buildings there, Confederate sharp-shooters had been peppering the regiment with musket fire.
“Captain Gibbons … finding the farm-house occupied by a large force of the enemy, ordered his company to advance and fire, scattering them and driving a portion of them into the cellar, where, by closing the door, a large number of them were captured.”15 Just minutes into its first battle, the 14th Connecticut already had a tidy package of Rebel prisoners to its credit.
Reunited, the regiment advanced into a cornfield “where the musket Balls & Cannon Balls are whizzing & tearing dreadfully,” wrote Frederick Burr Hawley in his journal. Tall stalks of corn hid the 14th soldiers from the enemy’s view but also made it impossible for them to see. “Our men fire in confusion & keep up a fire for a short time amid cries from Officers to ‘Stop that’ ‘there is a Delaware Reg in front of us.’”16
In front of the 14th Connecticut was the 1st Delaware Regiment; beyond that, a ravine and then another cornfield, filled with Confederates. It was about 9:30 a.m. Sgt. Benjamin Hirst of Rockville described his view of the chaos:
[A] voley tore through our ranks killing and wounding quite a number. The Regiment was thrown in some confusion and most of the Boys fell on their Bellies, firing indiscrimately and i am sorry to think wounding some of our men … i saw the whole of this at a glance and roard like a mad Bull for our men to cease firing until they could see the rebs. They finally crawled back a few yards and staid there …
i carried Wilkie [James Wilkie, wounded] from the front to the rear. i then came back to the front, and got a splendid view of the Rebels in a piece of corn opposite to ours. there was just 4 of our own Company and a few men of a Delaware Regiment giving them fits and i was just in the humour to join in, until i fired 13 rounds into their midst … seeing our colours falling further back we backed out to our Company, who were all lying on their faces expecting the Rebels were going to charge on us.17
From the edge of the cornfield, the 14th men fired across at the Confederates, while the Delaware regiment pressed ahead toward an old road that farm wagons had worn down until it was sunken into the ground. This sunken road, later known as Bloody Lane, now sheltered enemy soldiers who, in their first musket volley, took down about a third of the Delaware regiment. The Delaware line “seemed to melt under the enemy’s fire and breaking many of the men ran through the ranks of the Fourteenth toward the rear,” wrote one of the Nutmeggers.18 The fleeing soldiers unnerved the Connecticut boys; a few joined the rout, and their lieutenant colonel had all he could do to rally the rest.
Then it was the 14th’s turn to advance toward the Rebels waiting in the sunken road. “Forward!” came the order, and the jumpy men emerged from the cornfield and into “a smashing fire full in the face.”19 The vicious fire quickly drove them back. “We advance & fall back, without doing much if any good,” wrote a frustrated Fred Hawley; “we see men hit all around us & some are reported killed we remain flat on our faces on the ground for 1½ hours.”20
Near noon, the 14th fell back and reformed. Sgt. Benjamin Hirst recalled:
we were then moved further to the left in front to support one of our Batterys, in getting to which position, we as a Regiment were complimented for the coolness displayed in marching under fire. we were then Faced behind a stone wall just as the Rebels broke through the place lately occupied by us, but the 2nd line of Batle soon settled them, and we were again moved further to the front, during which a shell dropt in our midst killing 3 and wounding four of our Company.
I had just told the men to close up, and had got a couple of files ahead when it came to us with a whiz and the job was done, Sam Burrows, and Gross were covered with blood, and Albert Towne had his Haversack shot away without hurting him … we closed up like Veterans and moved on as if nothing had happened. we came under the shelter of a hill behind which the 81st pa were lying, in their front was one of our Batterys with every horse killed. they stood up and gave us 3 cheers as we took position along side of them.21
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Reconciling a soldier’s death was—is—never easy. In the Civil War, the most difficult losses to accept were those like Robert Hubbard’s.
Hubbard, thirty-one, was the eldest son in a Middletown farming family. In the summer of 1862, Robert wrote to his younger brother, Josiah, who had moved west to settle Kansas with a group of Connecticut abolitionists determined to keep the new territory from becoming a slave state. Robert asked his brother to return to Connecticut to care for their elderly parents—their father was seventy-seven years old—and their younger sisters.
Robert himself was joining Connecticut’s 14th Regiment. “I feel as if I could never forgive myself if this government should be overthrown and I had no weapon in its defense,” Robert explained to Josiah.22 Coincidentally, Josiah had sent a similar letter to Robert, announcing that he had joined a Kansas cavalry unit. The brothers’ letters crossed in the mail.
In the early afternoon of September 17, 1862, the 14th Connecticut moved from the cornfield near Bloody Lane through Roulette’s farm to a battery it was to guard. With Rebel artillery shells flying overhead, the 14th troops rapidly obeyed an order to lie down in the plowed field where they were positioned. Fred Hawley wrote: “we lay close to the ground the shell & cannon balls flying all around us often wounding and killing some one. These missels as they fly near us have a most hateful spiteful sing to them. They sound as if they meant evil.”23
Robert Hubbard
The 14th Connecticut passed through William Roulette’s farm twice. To farmers like Robert Hubbard, the bucolic surroundings would have held a sense of familiarity, but the screaming shells, smoke, and corpses of soldiers and horses transformed the tranquil farm scene into something horrific. The farmhouse became a bloody field hospital where surgeons cut and bandaged. Later, hundreds of bodies were buried on the Roulette grounds.
Flattened into the dirt, the 14th men waited for their next orders. Then above the shriek of the shells came an officer’s voice: they were moving. As the men rose from the field, “a rifle in Co. B was accidentally discharged, and we saw one of our members, one of the best men in the company, Robert Hubbard lying upon the ground writhing in the agony of a mortal wound.”24
Their captain directed some of his men to carry Robert to the rear. Hubbard died while the battle continued. His friends buried him beside the corncrib on Roulette’s farm.
On the day the 14th Regiment left Connecticut for the South, Hubbard had written to his mother, “If I should never return, my short life may have been of greater service to my family, my country and the cause of freedom than a life spent at home devoted to self.”25 In December of 1862, Robert’s sister wrote to William Roulette, who owned the farm where her brother was buried. The Maryland farmer had a coffin made for the Connecticut farmer, and sent Robert’s remains north. In a graveyard near their farm, the Hubbards laid him to rest.
Robert’s brother Josiah would survive the war and return to the farm in Middletown. Here, five years after the Battle of Antietam, Josiah’s first son, Robert, would be born.
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DAY’S