"In Order that Their Friends May Find Their Bodies": The Original Burial Location of the 16th Connecticut's Dead

Two nights after the Battle of Antietam, the 16th Connecticut Infantry’s adjutant, Lieutenant John Henry Burnham, sat down to write by candlelight a letter to the Hartford Daily Courant. Burnham’s regiment had just passed through its bloody baptism of fire in the Otto cornfield. By the end of the fighting on the afternoon of September 17, 1862, the 16th Connecticut, which entered the battle approximately 750 officers and men strong, lost 42 men killed and 143 men wounded.

Lieutenant John Henry Burnham, 16th Connecticut Infantry

Burnham worked much of the day on September 19 to oversee the burial of the regiment’s dead. “The collection of the bodies was conducted under my own personal supervision, and after the men had reported them all picked up I examined the whole field myself, so that I am confident none were left on the ground,” he assured the newspaper’s readers, some of whom no doubt knew or loved the men Burnham buried. The adjutant was no doubt aware of this. In his letter, he gave “a minute description of the locality in which we placed the dead, in order that their friends may find their bodies if they wish.”

The adjutant found a suitable location on a hill south of the Rohrersville Road that connected the Burnside Bridge to Sharpsburg. The hill was “just back and west of a white house with a high piazza in front, and opposite of which is a brick house and large barn.” Burnham did not know the names of the families whose farmland became a burial ground. The “white house” was the home of John and Katherine Otto while the “brick house” across the road was Joseph Sherrick’s farmhouse. Burnham continued his minute description: “The bodies lie near a large tree standing alone, and which I had blazed on all sides so that it can be easily discovered.” Headboards with names and companies etched into them surrounded the tree.

Nature has a way of erasing the traces of terrible events that scar its landscape. As days, weeks, and months passed by on the battlefield, slowly, bit by bit, nature reclaimed the ground and wiped away the waste of battle. To ensure nature did not remove the final resting places of these Connecticut soldiers, Burnham was “particular to mention the precise locality of each, so that in the event of the signs being displaced by the elements or otherwise, they may be found,” he wrote.

Burnham’s diligence paid off as families removed the remains of many of their loved ones back home to Connecticut’s soil. Over time, those who went unclaimed were reinterred in the nearby Antietam National Cemetery. Burnham’s worry that nature would obliterate any sign of the Connecticut troops’ burial behind the Otto farm came true. There are no old trees on the hill where Burnham watched his comrades lowered into makeshift graves. The wooden markers are long gone, and so are the bodies.

Thankfully, Burnham’s detailed description of the original burial location of the 16th Connecticut’s dead paired with a postwar photograph likely showing the tree beneath which the Nutmeggers rested can help us locate that spot on the battlefield. The photograph, taken around 1900, shows the white Otto house and whitewashed outbuildings. To the right, or south of the barn, near the 11th Ohio monument, stands a lone, “large tree.” Today, the tree is gone, but walking to its location, a battlefield tromper will notice themselves standing on a hill fitting Burnahm’s description. My best, approximate estimate for the GPS coordinates of the tree and burial site is 39.452217, -77.737707.

Next month, we’ll examine how many friends of the 16th Connecticut’s fallen were able to retrieve their bodies and return them home thanks to Burnham’s letter.

"Death is so common": Soldiers' Views of Death in the Summer of 1862

        By the time of the Battle of Antietam, the Civil War had gone on longer than most Americans anticipated it would last. Staggeringly long lists continued to fill newspaper columns bearing the names of the dead. Death was everywhere in America. Few people escaped the war’s bloody summer of 1862 without knowing someone who died during the conflict.

After the end of the Maryland Campaign, both sides had already suffered a combined 386,015 casualties, according to one estimate.(1) Unfortunately, people grew accustomed to death, which was becoming all too common in the fratricidal American war.

On the home front, many dismissed the long lists. “We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee,” wrote a New York Times correspondent. “There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type.”(2)

While civilians comfortably snug in their homes could afford to dismiss the lengthening lists of dead, soldiers on the battlefield could not escape the war’s growing horror. Amid the deadly fighting in the summer of 1862, Sergeant Marion Hill Fitzpatrick, 45th Georgia Infantry, wrote on September 2, “I have changed much in my feelings. The bombs and balls excite me but little,” he told his family at home, “and a battlefield strewed with dead and wounded is an every day consequence.”(3)

Following the Battle of Antietam, Private Roland Bowen, 15th Massachusetts Infantry, searched for his friend and comrade, Private Henry Ainsworth. Unfortunately, by the time Bowen learned the fate of his friend, Ainsworth’s remains were already laid under 3 feet of dirt in a long, common burying trench holding the remains of 39 other men. To Ainsworth’s father, Bowen sadly remarked, “Mr. Ainsworth, this is not the way we bury folks at home.”(4)

Fitzpatrick’s resignation to the death surrounding him and Bowen’s remark that battlefield burials differed greatly from those at home came to mind as I read a description of the burial of a soldier in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry on September 28, 1862. The previous day, 36-year-old Private Michael Fay of that regiment died of cholera. Fay left behind a wife and 4 children when he enlisted on December 5, 1861. Lieutenant Elisha Hunt Rhodes wrote of Fay’s burial:

Sunday last a soldier of Co. “A” died and was buried with military honors. It was not an unusual scene for us, yet it is always solemn. First came the muffled drums playing the “Dead March” then the usual escort for a private. Eight privates commanded by a corporal, with arms reversed. Then an ambulance with the body in a common board coffin covered with the Stars and Stripes. Co. “A” with side arms only followed while the Company officers brought up the rear. On arriving at the grave the Chaplain offered prayer and made some remarks. The coffin was then lowered into the grave, and three volleys were fired by the guard, and then the grave was filled up. The procession returned to camp with the drums playing a “Quick March.” Everything went on as usual in camp as if nothing had happened, for death is so common that little sentiment is wasted. It is not like death at home. May God prepare us all for this event which must sooner or later come to all of us.(5)

The last 3 sentences of Rhodes’ description struck me the most. “Everything went on as usual in camp as if nothing had happened, for death is so common that little sentiment is wasted. It is not like death at home. May God prepare us all for this event which must sooner or later come to all of us.”

Michael Fay's grave in Antietam National Cemetery

        Death at home was something that could happen unexpectedly as it did in battle. The loss of so many friends and family hardened soldiers to the number of deaths happening around them by the summer of 1862. They could not afford to waste energy dwelling on the countless losses that continued to accumulate. But Fay’s family back home likely did not move on so quickly. Unfortunately, Fay’s remains stayed in Maryland, far from his home, and rest in Grave #2,840 in Antietam National Cemetery. 

Notes:

1. Darroch Greer, “Counting Civil War Casualties, Week-by-Week, For The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum,”                                                            

https://www.mathscinotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ALPLM_CountingCasualties_080519_lo.pdf.

2. “Brady’s Photographs: Pictures of the Dead at Antietam,” New York Times, October 20, 1862.

3. Lowe and Hodges, ed., Letters to Amanda: The Civil War Letters of Marion Hill Fitzpatrick, Army of Northern Virginia, 26.

4. Coco, ed., From Ball’s Bluff to Gettysburg…And Beyond: The Civil War Letters of Private Roland E. Bowen, 15th Massachusetts Infantry 1861-1864, 128.

5. Rhodes, ed., All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, 83-84.