and fights for life.42
***
Early in the fall of 1861, a Norwich teenager named Marvin Wait left Union College, where he was a student, to join Connecticut’s 8th Regiment. An intelligent, dedicated young man, he learned quickly; less than six months after enlisting, Private Wait of Company D had become 1st Lieutenant Wait.
Wait received orders to report to the Signal Corps in Burnside’s division, where he rapidly learned the use of signal flags. Using a spyglass and flags at the Battle of Roanoke Island, Wait had been able to transmit messages from General Burnside’s gunboat to his officers. At the Siege of Fort Macon, North Carolina, Marvin Wait and another officer, Lieutenant Andrews, took a position where they could see the Union shells as the artillerymen attempted to bombard the Confederate-held fort. Andrews’ official report explained:
The ten-inch shell were falling almost without exception more than three hundred yards beyond the Fort. Lieutenant Wait and myself continued to signal to the officer in charge until the correct range was obtained. The eight-inch shell were falling short—we signaled to the officer in charge of that battery with the same effect …
From the position of our batteries, it was impossible for the officers in charge to see how their shots fell, but owing to the observations made by Lieutenant Wait and myself, and signaled to them from time to time, an accurate range was obtained by all the batteries … After 12 m.. every shot fired from our batteries fell in or on the Fort. At 4 o’clock, P.M., a white flag appeared on the Fort.43
The head of the Signal Corps presented a battle flag to Lieutenant Wait in recognition of his meritorious conduct that day.
Wait returned to the 8th Regiment a month before it marched with McClellan to Sharpsburg, Maryland. On the morning of the Battle of Antietam, it was just after seven when a Confederate cannonball bounded through the ranks of Company D. Three men were killed outright; a fourth wounded. Wait was so close that he was covered with dirt and blood.
As the 8th Regiment moved into line of battle later that day, one of the officers noticed the “determined fire of his eye” as nineteen-year-old Marvin Wait moved forward with his men.44 As he raised his sword high in the advance, a bullet shattered his right arm, but Wait would not leave his troops. Shifting his sword to his left hand, he continued. “If Lieutenant Wait had only left the battle of his own accord when first hit in the arm, all would have been well, but he bravely stood to encourage his men still further by his own example,” wrote Captain Charles Coit.45
Young Marvin Wait of Norwich (left) would not leave the field after being wounded. Hit by multiple bullets, he finally fell. Chaplain John M. Morris (right) carefully tucked the bleeding Wait into a sheltered spot behind a stone wall, and hurried off to find an ambulance for him.
In the minutes that followed, Wait was hit in the left arm, the abdomen, and the leg. He staggered, and went down. An enlisted man ran to his young lieutenant and began helping him to the rear, when the regiment’s chaplain appeared and took over.
Men were falling everywhere, and Major Ward was begging his soldiers to fall back, fall back before the regiment was annihilated. Lieutenant Wait died of his wounds before he reached a surgeon.
“A braver man than Marvin Wait never confronted a foe; a more generous heart never beat: a more unselfish patriot never fell,” wrote Lt. Jacob Eaton sadly.46
The Waits had their only son’s body brought home, and they buried him in Yantic Cemetery in Norwich. Over his grave they set a white monument carved with spy glass and signal flags, and engraved “He died with his young fame about him for a shroud.”
***
Somehow, two regiments—the 16th Connecticut and 4th Rhode Island—hadn’t received (or understood) the order to advance. General Rodman, commanding the division, directed Colonel Harland to continue on with the 8th, while Rodman himself would race back to hurry on the other two regiments. But the two missing regiments never came up, and the 8th Connecticut found itself alone as it moved through a hurricane of bullets and shells coming from three sides. The men didn’t flinch for a moment.
Captain Wolcott Marsh, twenty-three, led the men of Company F, many of them farmers from rural communities like Plainfield, Canterbury, and Brooklyn. Writing to his wife just after the battle, Marsh wonderingly recorded their grit:
the order came for us to go forward which we did on a double quick as we came to the brow of hill & over it a terrible fire was concentrated upon our little band but on we pushed down the hill & up the top of next bullets came in terrible showers & from all sides of us
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