Capt. Caspar Crownshield, the grandson of Benjamin Crowninshield, was in the 20th Massachusetts Infantry alongside William Lowell Putnam, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., James Jackson Lowell, and Paul Joseph Revere. From Camp Benton on 21 October 1861, after the Battle of Ball's Bluff, he wrote that he and his men "awaited the result with much anxiety. We none of us said anything, but I think that all felt, as I did, that we were in a desperate situation." Later in the letter, he admits "I never saw such a sight and God grant I may never see such another. I was all covered with blood from some one, I suppose who had been shot near me. I felt very faint..." He survived the Civil War and died in 1897.