Heroes for All Time. Dione Longley
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hardships they endured—hunger, exhaustion, cold or heat—John Griswold “would preserve the same cheerfulness of demeanor, and never forget the least of those courtesies which make life in refined circles run in such an even course … whoever approached him felt that he had entered a circle of refinement. Nor was this intended for equals alone. He was particular in extending the same courtesies to the soldiers under his command.”31
Now as bullets flew around him, John Griswold splashed through the Antietam Creek toward the enemy. Mayer wrote:
In the middle of the creek a ball penetrated his body. He reached the opposite side and lay down to die. Meanwhile we had reached the bridge and formed. The 12th Ohio was on our left and lay behind the rail fence firing at the wooded steep [bank] opposite, from which a brisk fire was returned. Hither I hastened with four men and a stretcher and in the face of both fires climbed over the fence, forded the creek and bore off the body.32
We took him into a low shed near the bank, and laid him on the straw … he was ashy pale, so much had he suffered.
“Doctor,” he said, “pardon the trouble I give you; but I am mortally wounded, I believe.” I examined. The bullet had passed through the body in the region of the stomach. “You are, captain,” I replied. “Then let me die quickly, and without pain, if you can,” he rejoined …
Seeing through the door of the shed the blue water flash in the sunshine, he repeated the first lines of one of those gems of Horace we had so often admired:—
O Fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro, Dulci digno mero, non sine floribus.
[O spring of Bandusia, clearer than glass,
Worthy of sweet wine and flowers, too] …
The end came soon. Gen. Burnside called. The sufferer told him … “I am happy, general … I die as I have ever wished to die,—for my country.”
“Tell my mother,” he said to a comrade, “that I died at the head of my company.” Tears rolled down Burnside’s cheeks, as, delicately trying to suppress all symptoms of his pain, the philosophic and heroic spirit calmly passed away.33
John’s family brought his body home to Old Lyme and buried him in the Griswolds’ peaceful family cemetery with his famous ancestors. Rising from his grave is an elegant stone obelisk carved with John’s last words and a laurel wreath encircling a soldier’s cap. In the distance the sun flashes off the Black Hall River that flows alongside the burying ground.
In fifteen minutes’ fighting near the bridge, the 11th Connecticut had suffered over 130 casualties. “Col. Kingsbury was active, inciting his soldiers to the charge by his gallant bearing and the inspiration of his voice. Many men fell. The colonel was a special mark; and he was soon shot in the foot, and immediately thereafter in the leg; when he was at last prevailed upon to leave the field … The men were still fighting; now falling back, and again charging on the bridge.”34
Dr. Mayer “worked at dressing wounds and amputations until my head ached … men with the most frightful hurts were brought, carried, and dragged into the garden of the farm house” that was acting as a field hospital.35
Colonel Kingsbury would not survive. While his men carried him from the field, one ball in his foot and another in his leg, he took a bullet in the shoulder and then a fourth in the abdomen, a mortal wound. At the field hospital, a surgeon gave him morphine, and General Burnside came to his side. Kingsbury held on through the night and into the following day. “The colonel has opened his eyes, and given me the sweetest smile, and then closed them forever,” wrote Dr. Nathan Mayer. “He made us all better and nobler.”36
Griswold’s last words were inscribed on his monument: “Tell my Mother that I died at the head of my Company,” and “I die, as I have ever wished to die, for my country.” A writer for the Hartford Daily Courant declared, “We have never seen a monument more strikingly beautiful; more earnestly expressive.” (Hartford Daily Courant, August 5, 1863.)
Among the scores of wounded at Antietam was nineteen-year-old Alonzo Maynard of Stafford, shot again and again and again. Nearly twenty-five years after the battle, Maynard would describe what he had gone through that humid September day in 1862 as his regiment tried to take Burnside’s Bridge. “At Antietam I was shot through the right lung and shoulder with four balls, splintering the ribs in front, breaking collar-bone twice, destroying shoulder-joint, passing through lung, striking the spine and knocking off four ribs, breaking shoulder-blade in three or four pieces, splintering spine badly and breaking one vertebra. Thirteen pieces of bone came out of the wounds. My right lung is gone—torn in pieces and came out of wounds. There are 16 separate wounds through right breast and shoulder. Some of them were as large as a silver half dollar. I was confined to my bed five years. When I was wounded the doctors said there was no help for me, and it was several days before they dressed my wounds. I had a strong constitution and Yankee grit.” (National Tribune, May 27, 1886.) Yankee grit. And a New Englander’s gift for understatement.
This image from long after the war was used by the Committee on Invalid Pensions as part of a bill in the House of Representatives to increase Maynard’s pension. (Retouching in red emphasized the scars and sores.) The committee declared, “The evidence in this case discloses that the man has suffered terribly … Large burrowing abscesses frequently form upon the chest.” (Report of the Committee on Invalid Pensions, to whom was referred the bill [H.R. 3478] to increase the pension of Alonzo Maynard.) Despite his wounds, Alonzo Maynard married, had a son, and lived for more than four decades after the Battle of Antietam.
Hours later, other units were able to secure the bridge, and Union troops finally crossed the Antietam to attack the Rebels. While the battle ignited on the west side of the creek, the men of the 11th searched for their wounded friends, and began to bury their dead.
8TH CONNECTICUT REGIMENT
The men fought like Tigeres.
While the 11th Regiment battled it out at the bridge, the other units in their brigade—the 8th Connecticut, 16th Connecticut, and 4th Rhode Island—were doing what soldiers always do: they were waiting.
“[W]e were in line ready for work before sunrise,” wrote a lieutenant in the 8th; “the shot & shell flew around us like fun but there was not much fun about it as we soon found out it struck in our ranks & took one file completely out killing both of the men composing that file & a Sergeant of another Company who was in the rear & badly wounding another.”37
The fallen sergeant was a Hartford silversmith named George Marsh. “He was ill, but determined to be at his post,” wrote a comrade, “and there he died.”38
Once the enemy battery had the range on them, the Union soldiers were sitting ducks. The shells “came thick & fast but … there was no reply from our side we wondered at this thus it went on they using their artillery on us continually … Yet not a man in regit. stirred excepting ambulance corps who attended to wounded.”39
The 8th’s colonel, Edward Harland, who was commanding the brigade, directed the troops to move to a safer position. As the three regiments moved off, the Rebel artillery again tried to find their range. “[O]ur men would instinctively stoop and hesitate when the shells burst around them,” said Jacob Eaton. “Our Chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Morris, … passed up and down the lines, exclaiming after each explosion, ‘Never mind, boys! Come on; no one is hurt.’”40
“The Charge across the Burnside Bridge, Antietam,” drawn by Edwin Forbes.
Finally the troops reached comparative safety. To the north, Rebel fire made the stone bridge still impassable.