Crossing Antietam

“Bearing aloft the flag of his country in the final charge” by Company A, 103rd New York Volunteers at the Battle of Antietam, Captain Henry Augustus Sand fell wounded. He penned a letter to his family in Brooklyn Heights while lying on the battlefield, and then three more before dying of his wounds six weeks later. His complete correspondence from the field, covering the first 18 months of the Civil War, paints a vivid picture of combat and life in a 19th-century German-Irish immigrant family.
Captain Sand helped raise the 103rd—known as “the German Grenadiers” and “Seward’s Infantry”—at the beginning of the war. The unit joined General Ambrose Burnside’s 1862 campaigns in North Carolina and Virginia. His letters were collected and transcribed by his sister, Emily Isabella Rossire née Sand, and illustrated with her own watercolors of the Antietam battlefield and sketches by their younger brother, Maximilian Edward Sand.

Peter H. Sand is a retired professor of international law at the University of Munich in Germany. He formerly taught at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and at Duke Law School in Durham, North Carolina. He lives in Munich, Germany.
John F. McLaughlin is a retired professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle. His wife was a descendant of Emily Sand Rossire and preserved the transcriptions of Henry’s letters. He lives in Seattle.

Henry Augustus Sand
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 184
Bibliographic Info: 57 photos (10 in color), notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2016
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6310-4
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2464-8
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Preface vii
The Letters, with Documents and News Reports 1
Between pages 82 and 83 are 4 color plates containing 10 images
Appendix: The ­Sand-Rossire Family of Brooklyn Heights 149
Bibliography 161
Index 165

“extraordinary…enthusiastically recommended”—Midwest Book Review; “excellent…insightful…recommend”—Civil War News; “this book is recommended for everyone interested in getting a glimpse into what it was like being a soldier in the American Civil War”—Blue & Gray Magazine.