On the eve of the battle Col. Andrews invited Chaplain Quint to accompany him to the top of a hill to watch the opposing batteries take pot shots at each other. From his vantage point, Quint could see no infantry. Then, suddenly, a bullet fired by a Rebel sharpshooter whizzed by, followed by another. Quint cast an anxious glance at Andrews who leisurely lifted his field glass to scan the horizon, seemingly oblivious to the danger. "Don't you want to look?" asked Andrews, offering the Chaplain the glasses. All Quint want to do was get the hell out of there but admitted he was too ashamed to say so.

A young man in Capt. Charles Morse's Company F came across the body of his father (who was in the 12th MA Inf.) in the cornfield. "It was a terrible meeting for father and son; they had not seen each other for over a year."

Capt. Robert Gould Shaw's men did everything they could for the wounded and dying rebels lying in the cornfield. He reported these men who fate had made enemies as being "surprised and grateful as men could be" at the attention they received. "Many said that all they wanted was to get into our hospitals, and wished they had never fired at shot at us."

Lt. Col. Wilder Dwight caught up the captured flag of the 11th Mississippi and rode along the regiment's line, waving it triumphantly. None who witnessed the sight ever forgot it. "Every cap went off and a cheer went up that you must have heard at Jamaica Plain," Morse wrote home.

The 13th New Jersey was so green that at the time of the battle, its colonel confessed to Col. Andrews that his men had never been drilled in loading and firing their weapons.

Battling a severe case of dysentery, Lt. Fletcher Abbott was barely able to stand but did not stay behind. When the rebels ran, he "never felt better in all my life," he reported, but when the enemy counter-attacked and the Federals retreated, it "took all the life out of me," and he finally gave up the fight and went to the rear.

Sent home to recuperate, Abbott never returned to the regiment.

There were a number of close calls among the officers during the battle:

• Capt. Tom Robeson was grazed twice, not seriously
• Capt. Charles Morse was struck in the temple by a spent ball and knocked flat. "I thought at first it was all up with me, but I soon got the better of that idea."
• A bullet penetrated Capt. Charles Mudge's blouse, vest, and 2 shirts, before skinning his ribs.
• Capt. Robert Gould Shaw was struck in the neck by a spent ball but not disabled
• Col. Andrews' horse was shot through the shoulder although the regimental commander was unhurt.

When Lt. Col. Wilder Dwight was wounded and left on the field, he managed to scribble a few lines to his mother:

"Dearest Mother,--I am wounded so as to be helpless. Goodbye, if so it must be. I think I die in victory. God defend our country. I trust in God, and I love you all to the last. Dearest love to father and all my dear brothers. Our troops have left the part of the field where I lay....All is well with those that have faith."

THE DEATH OF LT. COL. WILDER DWIGHT

Wilder Dwight's kinsman (and former member of the 2d MA), William Dwight Sedgwick, was struck in the back while trying to rally some men. The bullet passed through his body, grazing his backbone, paralyzing him. Left on the field and fearful that he might die before help arrived, he painfully wrote a few lines to his wife:

"As I write this, I have been lying here more than an hour, powerless to move my right leg. I think the wound to be mortal. I have been praying God to fogive my sins, to bless and comfort my darling wife and children, my dearest mother and sisters. As I have been lying here in very great pain, shells havebeen bursting close to me almost constantly. I wish my friends to know that I have fallen while doing my duty as well as was possible, which I can truly assert, and that I have not uttered a groan as yet, lying alone on the hard ground, in the sun, with no friend near."

Sedgwick was removed to Frederick, MD, where he died on 29 September.

After the battle, 20 more bullet holes were found in the flag and 3 through the staff. The socket in which the staff rested was shot clear away close to the Color-Sergeant's belt.

Cedar Mountain had been bad enough but seemed to pale in comparison to the battle of Antietam. Said Morse, "The sight everywhere was dreadful and one that I hope you may never see the like of; it cannot be imagined or described."

Capt. Charles Mudge was of the opinion that the newspapers had "exhausted all the most expressive terms" in describing previous engagements, and that after Antietam "there are no words left to express" the horrors of War.

After Capt. John A. Tompkin's Rhode Island Battery fired canister into a Rebel column at 60 paces, Shaw marvelled at the result. "They lay there...as if the two front lines had dropped dead."

Shaw also counted 72 dead of the 1st Minnesoata Infantry in a space of 50-100 yards.

Captains Morse and Shaw lay down for the night and when they woke the next day, daylight revealed that they had slept within 50 feet of a pile of 14 dead Confederates.

Henry Newton Comey returned from the front to find that someone had robbed his knapsack during the battle. "When we go into a fight there are cowards enough who fall to the rear and rob to make a large army," he complained. "Hanging would be too good for them."

Touring the battlefield in November, Capt. Henry Bruce Scott found shells, pieces of wagons, and a large number of unburied dead horse scattered about. He had to tred carefully, for his horse would sink down when he unintantionall rode over unmarked graves.

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