Bernard Franklin Blakeslee

From Hartford, he enlisted in Company A, 16th Connecticut Infantry, and mustered as Corporal on 15 July 1862.

He was wounded in the head in action at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

He was wounded again in the head in the Wilderness, VA on 5 May 1863. He was promoted to Lieutenant, Company G, in 1864. He was captured at Plymouth, NC on 20 April 1864 and held at Camp Oglethorpe, GA, Savannah, GA, the Roper Hospital in Charleston, SC and at Camp Sorghum in Columbia, SC. He escaped with a group of officers on 3 November 1864 and got to Union forces on the Atlantic; rescued by USS Canandaigua on 11 November. He was with his Company to the end of the War and mustered out on 24 June 1865.

He was a stockbroker and government official in Hartford. He was admitted to the Retreat for the Insane, Hartford in 1891, and died there in 1895.

Service information from Ingersoll.1 His presence at Antietam from his own History of the Sixteenth Connecticut Volunteers (1875). Details from a 2016 article by Scott Valentine in Military Images, source also of his picture, from a photo in the author's collection. His gravesite is on Findagrave.

09/02/1843; Southington, CT

04/25/1895; Hartford, CT; burial in Fairview Cemetery, New Britain, CT