Heroes for All Time. Dione Longley
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chaplain’s job was what he made of it: some limited themselves to holding Sunday services and passing out religious tracts to the soldiers. For his part, Trumbull saw with clarity that a successful chaplain had to be willing to risk his life alongside the men.
Every soldier must be ready to meet danger or death, and, if he failed in that supreme test of a soldier in time of war, he was every way a failure. A chaplain had a duty to inspire men for their service for their country. If he was himself a coward, or deemed unready to face a soldier’s perils, no words from him could have weight with his men. If, on the other hand, their chaplain shared their dangers bravely, his men gave him more than full credit for his courage and fidelity, and were the readier to do their duty under his direct appeals.25
In combat, Trumbull took charge of his regiment’s wounded, supervising their removal to field hospitals and making certain they were cared for. His calm attention as the bullets flew gave the soldiers confidence.
In August of 1864, the 10th Connecticut found itself in a desperate fight in Deep Bottom, Virginia. Trumbull’s friend and comrade, Henry Ward Camp, painted a droll image of the chaplain’s composure under fire:
the ground held by our advance was swept by a cross-fire against which no ordinary cover afforded security. Word came from the skirmish-line that Captain White was wounded seriously, it was feared mortally. Henry saw to his being carried back to the hospital … In a short time Henry returned … With thoughtful kindness, he brought for us a huge watermelon. It was speedily cut and divided; General Foster very glad to get his share. What could have been more refreshing under fire? Before it was finished, orders were given for our regiment to swing around, fronting the left, and covering the flank, upon which an attack was momentarily expected. It was comical enough to see officers forming their men, enforcing their orders with brandished slices of melon, and taking a bite between each command.26
A FIGHTING FORCE
As the war progressed, most of the Connecticut troops—whether they started as ministers, farmers, or pastry chefs—developed into competent soldiers, each filling a role. The citizen soldiers who had never held a gun or marched a mile would become a fighting force that left a record of honor on battlefields throughout the South.
Musicians assigned to be stretcher-bearers in battle wore strips of green cloth on their hats to identify their jobs. “The green band around their caps,” John Pelton told them, “would secure them against being laid hold of for other duty … but the green band and the white feather [traditionally symbolizing cowardice], they must understand, must by no means be construed as meaning the same thing.” (Capt. J. H. Harpster, “The Ambulance Officer’s Story,” in The Story of Our Regiment: A History of the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteers, edited by Joseph Wendell Muffly, p. 290.)
CHAPTER FIVE
I Never Knew What War Meant till Today
ANTIETAM, SEPTEMBER 1862
The battle was coming; the men knew it. All day, off and on, they’d heard the boom of distant artillery. They had made camp in the rolling hills of western Maryland, just outside the town of Sharpsburg, and more and more troops kept arriving. Officers strode back and forth, looking tense; clerks were hunched over field desks, rapidly writing orders.
Connecticut’s raw 16th Regiment came into camp toward the end of the day, joining the other regiments in their brigade. Furtively, the 16th’s soldiers studied the dusty veterans who lounged around trading battle stories and smoking their pipes. The 16th had left Hartford just nineteen days earlier. They’d had almost no training. “It was little more than a crowd of earnest Connecticut boys,” wrote one soldier.1 But there was no time left.
The day’s march had been a hard one, and the boys were hungry. The supply wagons hadn’t caught up with them yet, so some of them stripped a nearby cornfield, roasting the ears over fires built from fence rails. They’d hardly finished eating when they were hustled into ranks: their brigade was moving to the front.
They marched through the gathering darkness “into a meadow which lay between two hills,” wrote Lt. B. G. Blakeslee. “While getting into this position we could plainly see the rebel gunners load and fire, some of the shells coming quite near us … we were within a few rods of the enemy, and orders were given in a whisper; we were ordered to make no noise and to rest on our arms; for thirty minutes the utmost quiet prevailed. A musket was accidentally discharged; in a second the troops were on their feet, with arms at a ‘ready,’ and as they stood peering into the darkness ahead you could hear both lines of battle spring to arms for miles.”2
On the day he turned sixteen, Wells Bingham (left) enlisted in Connecticut’s 16th Regiment, along with his seventeen-year-old brother John (right). Less than three weeks after leaving Connecticut, the woefully inexperienced soldiers found themselves hurled into the chaos of battle near a meandering creek in western Maryland.
“[W]hat a queer sound it was,” wrote Pvt. William Relyea, “that rising of the hosts. Like the rushing of a strong wind that preceeds the storm, welling in fierceness and receeding in the distance … What a peculiar sensation it left upon our hearts, a dread and a fear of you knew not what … every nerve as you bend forward peering into the darkness before you, is strained to the utmost, and the heart beats loudly at the mystery of it all, yet we stood up manfully with the rest, though our blanching faces were kindly hidden by the darkness.”3
For Relyea and the other rookies of the 16th Connecticut, sleep was virtually impossible that night. But even with their minds running wild with anxiety, none of them could have imagined what tomorrow’s battle would bring. Those who survived would never look at life in the same way again.
SEPTEMBER 17, 1862, SHARPSBURG, MARYLAND
Minutes after sunrise, men were dying. In a pastoral landscape of cornfields, apple orchards, farmhouses, and woodlots, the bloodiest day in American history had begun. It would end with over 22,000 Americans dead, wounded, or missing.
Robert E. Lee had had the audacity to march his Rebels north into Maryland. He felt, mistakenly, that Maryland would support the Southern cause, and expected men there to flock to his army. From here, the Confederates posed a real threat to Washington. McClellan had to hurry his Union troops north to block them.
Lee had massed his Rebel troops—about 36,000 soldiers—on the west side of Antietam Creek, with the Potomac River at their backs. Meanwhile, McClellan had been gathering his Union troops on the east side of the creek.
The day before the battle, McClellan sent some 8,600 Union soldiers across the creek with Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, who maneuvered them to the north of Stonewall Jackson’s position. That night in the rain more Union troops, under Gen. J. K. F. Mansfield, followed Hooker across the creek.
At dawn, Union artillery opened on the Rebels, slicing into Stonewall Jackson’s forces. “Fighting Joe” Hooker marched his infantry south toward the Confederate line, pulling up before a great cornfield from which bayonets protruded. Union artillery raked the field, and Hooker reported: “In the time I am writing every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife, and the slain lay in rows precisely as they stood in their ranks a few moments before.”4
The blue-coated infantry moved forward again, pushing Jackson’s Rebels back. Lee hustled reinforcements forward, and a little after seven o’clock, Hooker called for support. General Mansfield, waiting in the rear with his 12th Corps, swiftly advanced to reinforce the wavering Union forces.
The white-bearded Mansfield, fifty-eight, projected an air of alertness and experience to the roughly 8,000 men he commanded. Fifteen years earlier, in the