Nightfall brought a blessed end to the shelling. “As most of us threw away our Coats & Blankets which were in the way when we first entered the fight we are now without any covering & are compelled to sleep on the damp cold ground,” wrote Fred Hawley. He seemed unable to take in the enormity of what he had just passed through. “We feel very tired & hungry having ate nothing since morning & many threw away their Haversacks so Hard tack is scarce.” Exhausted, scared, and hungry, the boys of the 14th lay down on the ground to sleep.27
Sleep didn’t come easily. Henry Stevens, the 14th’s chaplain, wrote: “All that night through and the following day and night they heard the dreadful groans and cries of the wounded and dying wretches in Bloody Lane just over the hill calling for water or help, or to have taken off others who, dead, were lying across or upon their tortured and helpless bodies, or for death to release them from their anguish … but they were powerless to render the assistance their hearts longed to give.”28
George E. Stannard was the youngest child of widow Roxanna Stannard of Clinton. He was about twenty-three when he wrote this letter to his mother:29
Keatyville MD September 20, 1862
Dear Mother
I take great pleasure in writing to you once more we have had a battle and a hard one but I am all right but our rgmt was badly cut up we formed a line of battle and charged through the corn on double quick the boys behaved like heros
a good many of our boys went down Pendleton was shot through the breast and arm Luit. Sherman in the arm John Parks through the leg he will die John Hurd in the arm twice George Doane in the knee Lewellin Dibble in the foot and a good many more not so bad and after we came out of the corn we were marched up through a narrow lane onto a hill between 2 cross fires and there our loved capt [Samuel Willard] fell with a shot through the brain he never spoke his body was sent home today Horace Stevens is missing but I think he is dead for the men that buried the dead in that part of the field say that they buried one of Co. G’s men and he is the only one not accounted for I don’t know how many men our rgmt lost altogether but it was enough
after the capt was killed we charged across the hill to the left and were ordered to report to Col Brooks and he ordered us to support the left wing we drove across the field amid such a storm of shot and shell, grape and canister and rifle balls as I never want to see again we marched on to the left of the Irish Brigade they received us with such cheers and yells as only an Irishman can give they told us afterwards that they thought we were the regulars we came up in such style
after we had succeded in turning the devils we had a very easy time most too much so we were ordered to lie down flat on our faces and not move and we did not feel much inclinde to move I tell you for the shell from thier baterrys were flying all around us … after a minute a Liut was lying about ten feet from me and he stuck up his head to speak to his Capt and a shell came along and took the top of his head off I went to him and three of his Co helped carry him off the field as we were getting over a fence a round shot came and saved us the trouble for it knocked it all down
just as we got back an orderly came along and said that Gen Richardson was killed Gen Morris sung out who will go and bring him off and four of us started and it was a race but we got him he was not dead but badly wounded in the breast we carried him to the hospital
after that we laid 36 hours on the plowed ground behind a little knoll but that night after the battle I never shall forget the groans and sreiks of the wounded curces and shell mixed up promiscous it was awful I can assure you but I cant write any more for we are going to move some where I am all right only hit once and that was with a spent ball in the leg it stung a little
GES
The battle’s final stage would begin at the southern end of the battlefield with the command of Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside. Among the roughly 8,500 Union soldiers in Burnside’s 9th Corps were three Connecticut regiments: the 8th, 11th, and 16th Connecticut Volunteers.
11TH CONNECTICUT REGIMENT
I can speak of time no more.30
That morning, General Burnside separated the 11th Connecticut from the rest of the 9th Corps. Burnside was friendly with the 11th’s colonel, twenty-five-year-old Henry Walter Kingsbury; years earlier, he had been young Kingsbury’s guardian. So when McClellan ordered Burnside to send his troops across Antietam Creek to attack Lee’s right flank, Burnside turned to Kingsbury to help him gain control of a stone bridge spanning the stream. Across this bridge, just twelve feet wide, Burnside intended to march his troops—but first he had to clear out the Confederates who held it.
Nathan Mayer, the 11th’s assistant surgeon, dismounted from his horse and took off his sword, canteen, haversack, and blanket. Taking his pocket surgical kit, he directed the stretcher-bearers to follow him, and fell in behind the soldiers.
Colonel Kingsbury had ordered Companies A and B to deploy as skirmishers, under Capt. John Griswold. While the remainder of the regiment was to storm the bridge, Griswold’s men would scramble down the banks on either side of the bridge and wade the fifty feet across Antietam Creek. Holding their muskets over their heads and pushing through chest-deep water, the skirmishers would move straight into a hurricane of bullets from the two Georgia regiments hidden on the opposite side of the creek. It was no wonder they hesitated. Then Captain John Griswold leaped into the stream at the head of his men.
The 11th’s colonel, Henry Walter Kingsbury, was just twenty-five years old. A West Point graduate, Kingsbury would need all of his training for the assault on the bridge. His 440 men had to move down a slope and across an open field exposed to Confederate artillery fire and a hail of bullets from two Georgian infantry regiments sheltered behind trees and stone walls on the far side of the creek.
Captain John Griswold, twenty-five, came from an old Connecticut family of some prominence. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather had served as governors of Connecticut. John, the baby of his family, had been just two when his father died, but he hadn’t grown up coddled and protected in his wealthy home in Lyme. As a boy he went off to boarding school, then on to Yale where he studied civil engineering as well as the classics. Instead of becoming a lawyer or merchant as did many of the Griswold men, John became a surveyor in Kansas, where bloody conflicts raged continually between abolitionists and pro-slavery settlers. Adventure and fortune soon lured him even farther from home: in 1860 “he sailed from New London for Honolulu, to engage in business [and] remained for six months, with a single Kanaka companion, on a Guano island in the Pacific, of which it was important to claim possession. He was at length taken off by a company of Chinamen and carried to San Francisco. At the outbreak of the rebellion, he hastened home and entered the national service.” (Obituary Record of Graduates of Yale College Deceased from July, 1859, to July, 1870, pp. 106–7.)
Within the regiment, Surgeon Mayer observed, Captain Griswold gained the admiration of many. “He was a great-hearted gentleman, well born, liberally educated, and wonderfully retentive of all the studies in ancient and modern literature … but, more than this, his character was trained, and his