Mr Lincoln's Army (47 page)

Battery B was pounding away furiously, but
Gibbon, looking on with the eye of a gunner, noticed that in the mad excitement
the gun crews had let the elevating screws run down so that the guns were
pointing up for extreme long range, blasting their charges into the empty air.
He shouted and gestured from the saddle, but no one could hear anything in that
unearthly din, so he threw himself to the ground, ran to the nearest gun,
shouldered the gun crew aside, and spun the little wheel under the breech so
that the muzzle slowly sank until it seemed almost to be pointing at the
ground. Gibbon stepped aside, the gunner jerked the lanyard, and the gun
smashed a section of rail fence, sending the splintered pieces flying in the
faces of Hood's men. The other gunners hastily corrected their elevation and
fired double-shotted rounds of canister at the range of fifty feet, while the
Northern infantry cracked in with volleys of musket fire. In all its history
the battery never fired so fast; its haste was so feverish that a veteran
regular-army sergeant forgot to step away from his gun when it was discharged,
and as it bounded backward in recoil a wheel knocked him down and crushed him.

The front of the Confederate column was blown
away, and the survivors withdrew sullenly into what was left of the cornfield.
Some of the Federals west of the road raised a yell and went into the cornfield
after them, were struck in the flank by unseen Confederates farther south, and
came streaming back across the pike again to take shelter among the rocky
ledges west of the guns. The Rebels re-formed behind a low ridge, then came on
again. A soldier in the 80th New York, helping to defend the battery, called
this assault "one of the finest exhibitions of pluck and manhood ever seen
on any battlefield." But the heroism served only to swell the casualty
lists. There were too many Yankees there and the guns were firing too fast; the
charging Rebel line simply melted away under the fire, the men who were not hit
ran back into the cornfield again, and for a moment there was sometriing like a
breathing spell, while the rival armies lay, as one soldier wrote, "like
burnt-out slag" on the battlefield.
⁴

Two hours of fighting in one forty-acre
field, with the drumming guns never silent for a moment; Northerners and
Southerners had fought themselves out, and the fields and woods for miles to
the rear were filled with fugitives. A steady leakage had been taking place
from each army as all but the stoutest found themselves carried beyond the
limit of endurance. The skulkers and the unabashed cowards, who always ran in
every battle at the first chance they could get —and there was hardly a
regiment, North or South, which did not have a few of them—had drifted away at
the first shock. Later others had gone: the men who could stand something but
not everything, men who had stood fast in all previous fights but found this
one too terrible to be borne; the men who helped wounded comrades to the rear
and then either honestly got lost (which was easy to do, in that smoking
madness) or found that they could not quite make themselves go back into it. All
of these had faded out, leaving the fighting lines dreadfully thin, so that the
loss of strength on each side was far greater, just then, than the casualty
lists would show. Hooker's corps had lost nearly twenty-five hundred men killed
and wounded—a fearful loss, considering that he had sent hardly more than nine
thousand into action—but for the moment the story was much worse than that.

The
number of uninjured men who left the ranks was probably fully as great as the
number of casualties. The proud I Corps of the Army of the Potomac was wrecked.
⁵

On
the Confederate side the story was about the same. The troops who had held the
cornfield and East Wood when the fight began had been splintered and smashed
and driven to the rear. Their dazed remnants were painfully trying to regroup
themselves far behind the Dunker church, fugitives were trailed out all the way
back to the Potomac, and field and wood were held now by the reinforcements,
Hood's men and D. H. Hill's. There was still fight left in these men, but they
had been ground down unmercifully. At the height of his counterattack Hood had
sent back word that unless he could be reinforced he would have to withdraw,
but that meanwhile he would go on as far as he could. He had gone to the
northern limit of the cornfield, had seen the striking spearhead of his
division broken by the Yankee guns and rifles around Miller's barnyard, and he
was holding on now in grim expectancy of a new Federal attack. The cornfield
itself was a hideous spectacle—broken stalks lying every which way, green
leaves spattered with blood, ground all torn and broken, littered everywhere
with discarded weapons. Inconceivable numbers of dead and wounded lay in all
parts of the field, whole ranks of them at the northern border where Hooker's
first blasts of cannon fire had caught them—after the battle Massachusetts
soldiers said they had found 146 bodies from one Rebel brigade lying in a neat,
soldierly line. Hood wrote afterward that on no other field in the whole war
was he so constantly troubled by the fear that his horse would step on some
helpless wounded man. The Rebel brigades that were in the field when the
fighting began had lost about 50 per cent of their numbers.

But there could be no lull. Hooker had
Mansfield's corps at his disposal, and when the Rebels drove his men back
through the cornfield he sent for it. Old General Mansfield went galloping up
to his troops, his hat in his hand, long white hair and beard streaming in the
wind. The men in Gordon's brigade jumped up and ran for their rifles as soon as
they saw him coming, falling in without waiting for orders, cheering loudly.
Something about the old soldier, with his air of competence and his unexpected
mixture of stiff military dignity and youthful fire and vigor, had aroused
their enthusiasm during the two days he had been with them. Mansfield reined up
in front of them, calling:

"That's
right, boys, cheer—we're going to whip them today!" He rode down the line
from regiment to regiment, waving his hat and repeating: "Boys, we're
going to lick them today!"

They were a mile and more from the
battlefield, and the uproar beat upon their ears as they moved forward. The
noise seemed to be coming in great, swinging pulsations, as if whole brigades
or divisions were firing successive volleys. The booming of the cannon was continuous,
so steady that no individual shots could be heard; and before the field could
be seen the men could make out great billowing clouds of smoke drifting up in
the windless air. As they got nearer they met wounded men going to the
rear—chipper enough, most of them, all things considered, calling out that they
"had the Johnnies on the run." Gordon's brigade came out on the ridge
near the Miller farm, with the northern border of the cornfield in view. Federal
regiments were withdrawing across the hollow, stepping backward, loading and
firing as they retreated. One pitiful skeleton of a beaten regiment saw the
fresh 27th Indiana coming up behind it. Heedless that they were still under
fire, the men shouted with joy, threw caps, knapsacks, and canteens in the air,
waving jubilant welcome to the reinforcements; and when the Indiana soldiers
came abreast of them the retreating soldiers halted, re-formed ranks, and
started back into battle again without orders.

Mansfield
went in at the head of his first brigade, heading straight for the northern
part of the East Wood. The situation was not at all clear to him, and he halted
the column briefly while he tried to make out what was in front of him. Hooker
came cantering up, crying: "The enemy are breaking through my lines—you
must hold this wood!" Then Hooker rode away and Mansfield started putting
his leading regiments, 10th Maine and 128th Pennsylvania, into line of battle.
The East Wood presented almost as ghastly a sight as the cornfield, by now—deed
and living bodies everywhere, little groups of men trying to help wounded
comrades to the rear, shattered limbs of trees lying on the ground in a tangle,
wreckage of artillery equipment strewn about, with unseen Rebels keeping the
air alive with bullets, and streaky sheets of acrid smoke lying in the air.
Nobody knew whether there were Union troops in front or not. The ground was
uneven, crossed with rocky ledges and ridges. Organized bodies of troops could
be seen in the distance now and then, but the light was bad and the
skirmishers, shooting at everything that moved, did not know whether they were
firing at friends or enemies.

Brigadier General Samuel Crawford made his
way through the wood, trying to get his brigade into line: an unusual man,
doctor turned soldier, who had taken an unusual route to his general's commission.
He had been a regular-army surgeon before the war and was in the Fort Sumter
garrison. Back at the beginning of 1861, when Major Anderson moved the garrison
from Moultrie to Sumter, all the line officers being busy, the doctor was
posted at a loaded columbiad to sink the Confederate guard boat if it tried to
interfere. He didn't have to shoot just then, but either that experience or the
later bombardment itself apparently inspired him to give up medicine for line
command, and when the garrison came north he got a brigadier's star. His
brigade had been badly cut to pieces at Cedar Mountain early this summer, when
Pope's advance guard had its first meeting with Stonewall Jackson. Since then
Crawford had been vainly writing applications to have the brigade withdrawn for
reorganization and recruitment, pointing out that his four regiments numbered
only 629 men altogether, with so many officers gone that three of the regiments
were in command of inexperienced captains. His 28th New York had been
consolidated into four companies and was going into action today with
sixty-five men. Crawford had got nowhere with his applications, but a couple
of days before this battle the high command had given liim three brand-new
regiments of Pennsylvania recruits, and with this lopsided command—four
understrength regiments of veterans and three big, half-trained regiments of
rookies—he was now going into action against Hood and D. H. Hill.
Understandably, he was nervous about it.

Most of the enemy fire seemed to be coming
from the cornfield at the western edge of the wood, so Crawford wheeled his
regiments in that direction. The Rebel skirmishers were playing Indian again,
dodging back from tree to tree and ledge to ledge and firing from behind the
piles of cordwood that some thrifty farmer had stacked here and there; but the
Maine regiment, the veteran 46th Pennsylvania, and the tiny 28th New York
finally got to the edge of the wood, with two of the greenhorn regiments
struggling up on their right, and began to fire at moving figures among the
shattered cornstalks. Mansfield rode up, worried; he still didn't know where
the enemy was, and Hooker had given him the impression that Meade's
Pennsylvanians were still in the field. He made the Maine regiment cease
firing—"You are firing into our own men"—then put his horse over the
fence and rode on ahead to get a better look. Some soldier called out,
"Those are Rebels, General!" Mansfield took a last look, said:
"Yes—you're right"—and then a volley came out of the cornfield.
Mansfield's horse was hit, and when the old man dismounted to clamber over the
fence he himself got a bullet in the stomach.

Some of the rookies from the 125th
Pennsylvania picked him up, made a crude litter of muskets, and got him back
into the wood, where they laid him down, uncertain what to do next. They had
been soldiers for only a month, this was their first battle, and what did one
do with a badly wounded major general, anyhow? Three boys from the 10th Maine
took over—as veterans, one gathers, they knew a good excuse to get away from
the firing line when they saw it—the Pennsylvanians went back to the fence, and
the down-Easters tried to lug the general back to the rear. And they found, in
the wood, a bewildered contraband who was company cook in one of Hooker's
regiments and who, with a clumsy incompetence rare even among company cooks,
had chosen this time and place to lose, and then to hunt for, a prized frying
pan. The Maine boys seized him that he might make a fourth at carrying the
general, who was heavy and helpless. The contraband demurred—he had to find the
captain's frying pan, and nothing else mattered—but the soldiers pounded him
with their fists, the whine of ricocheting bullets cutting the air all around,
shells crashing through the branches overhead, and he gave in at last and poor
General Mansfield somehow was got back to a dressing station. There a flurried
surgeon pressed a flask of whisky to his mouth, almost strangling him; and,
what with the wound and the clumsy handling, the old man presently died. He had
had the corps only two days, but he had already made the soldiers like and
respect him; it seems likely that he might have made quite a name if he had
been spared.
⁸

But there was no holding up the fight because
a general had been killed. Crawford went down, too, with a bad wound, and a
colonel took over the brigade, and the veterans and the rookies got into a tremendous
fire fight with some of D. H. Hill's men along the east side of the cornfield.
Farther west General Gordon drove his brigade in past the Miller farm buildings
and over the pitiful human wreckage that littered the ground in front of
Battery B. The Rebels in the corner of the cornfield and along the fence on the
northern side were not disposed to go away, and the 3rd Wisconsin took a
beating when it got up to the fence; but Gordon worked the 2nd Massachusetts
around on the right and got an enfilade on the Texans, and the 27th Indiana
came up on the other side, and the Confederate line gave way.