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 heart disciplined.” As the 11th Regiment traveled through the South, recounted Mayer, “We quoted Horace, and discussed questions of moral philosophy.” No matter the 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
