As they advanced, the attackers came upon the abandoned German batteries and saw the horses torn by the shells, some still alive in agony, kicking and screaming. The ground was strewn with dead and dying men. Soon the advancing Federals ran into concealed defenders, who unleashed a volley on them. The 7th Michigan returned a volley and then broke for the rear, joined by the 42nd New York. The 20th Massachusetts continued to exchange fire with Branch’s men, and it was bloody work. Private Jared Hunter was hit by a shot that had already passed through the neck of the man in front of him. Hunter died silently and instantly. Soon the Confederates began to flank the 20th, and they were forced to withdraw. Twice they paused to fire a volley at their attackers and ultimately formed a line farther to the rear.114
Burns led the 72nd Pennsylvania in. Colonel Edward Hinks of the 19th Massachusetts took his exhausted regiment “into the dense woods…up a very steep hill, some 150 yards, against a murderous fire.” One soldier remembered, “We then advanced in line of battle at the double quick toward the woods, the bullets flying thick and fast, piercing clothing” and worse. They ascended a hill with “the woods being so thick that it was not only impossible to keep our formation in line of battle, but also impossible to see more than two lengths of a Co. either way.” Burns threw the 19th Massachusetts and the 71st Pennsylvania into the area recently vacated by the 7th Michigan and 42nd New York. They soon came upon the enemy on “the crest of the hill not ten yards distant.” He ordered his men to fire and then “received the fire of the enemy breast to breast.” The enemy were “not ten feet away…and poured a terrible fire into our ranks. In this one volley about 80 of our men were either killed or wounded.” Soon men were seen coming out of the woods, and Colonel Hinks asked, “What men are these?” His answer was a shower of bullets. Hinks was wounded in the thigh and had to leave the field. Because of the illness of Lieutenant Colonel Devereux and the mortal wounding of Major How, the command of the regiment fell to Captain Edmund Rice. Rice remembered that the enemy “poured a volley upon us at so short a range that our men’s faces were in many instances singed by the flash of the enemy’s muskets and on the right of our regiment some of our men crossed bayonets with the enemy.” Of Major How, Rice said that his wound was “the highest praise which can be spoken of a true patriot.” The major said, “Let me die here on the field. Tis more glorious to die on the field of battle.”115
Bayonet check. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
John Sedgwick. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Federals saw a Confederate regiment “not ten feet from our left” and another one on the right, and “the rebels at once rose and poured a terrible volley into our ranks. In this one volley about 80 of our men were either killed or wounded.” Quickly recovering, they returned fire but “could not stand it for long” and had to pull back. Dana took his old regiment, the 1st Minnesota, into the woods, followed by Sully’s 15th Massachusetts. The 34th and the 82nd New York maintained their positions. Sedgwick was wounded in the arm and in the leg and had two horses shot out from under him.116
Hooker saw Seymour’s men retreating, “completely routed, and many of the fugitives rushed down the road on which my right wing was resting.” Some ran through his lines “and actually fired on and killed some of my men as they passed.” Hooker had grave concern about the disastrous effect this could have on his lines and was relieved when they had passed through. Strange’s Confederates were close behind but were stopped by the fire of the 16th Massachusetts Volunteers and the 69th Pennsylvania Volunteers, who hit the attackers’ flank with rifle fire. “Whenever the enemy ventured to uncover himself from the forest, a destructive fire was poured into him along my right wing.” Cuvier Grover then took the 1st Massachusetts, and Joshua Owen led the 69th Pennsylvania into the open field on the Confederate flank, attacking with great and almost reckless daring. A member of that unit later remembered, “The Sixty-ninth poured volley after volley into them, keeping up a ceaseless and irresistible fire.” Owen ordered his men to fix bayonets and said, “Up, Sixty-ninth, and at them!” The regiment instinctively rose with a cheer, jumped to their feet and charged up the hill at the double-quick. “The enemy didn’t like the looks of that line of steel, and in his turn was forced to retreat, leaving his dead and wounded behind him.” Sumner’s brigade commander, William Burns, said that the 69th “pursued the victorious rebels back over the ground through which they were passing and crowned the crest of the hill where McCall had lost his artillery. Gallant Sixty-ninth!”117
Joseph Hooker. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The 2nd New Hampshire and the 26th Pennsylvania soon joined Grover. His men suffered severely from the enemy’s fire, but they broke Strange’s attack. Eventually, Grover’s force would be withdrawn to its original position in Hooker’s line. Hooker remembered, “The loss of the Rebels in this battle was very severe. The field on which it was fought was one of unusual extent for the numbers engaged, and was almost covered with their dead and dying.” 118
Chapter 9
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE CENTER
While Kemper’s attack on the right had moved out ahead of the rest of the division, fighting soon spread to the center and left. Micah Jenkins advanced toward Lieutenant Frank Amsden’s 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery Battery G and Captain James Cooper’s 1st Pennsylvania Light Battery B, both positioned to the south of the Long Bridge Road. Their guns were ready to receive Jenkins warmly with canister.119
With the 4th and 5th South Carolina to his left and the Palmetto Sharpshooters and the 2nd South Carolina Rifles to his right, Jenkins approached Amsden and Cooper’s position. The Federal batteries were about two hundred yards south of the road, with an open field of a few hundred yards to their front and a wood line to their rear. The 6th South Carolina had been deployed as skirmishers. McCall had moved the 9th Pennsylvania Reserves to the left to meet Kemper’s attack, and Cooper and Amsden’s batteries were only thinly supported. The 1st and 3rd Pennsylvania Reserve units quickly began to fall back. Cooper saw the Confederates advancing toward him, and his ten-pounder Parrott rifles opened on them, joined by Amsden’s guns. Charging artillery in an open field, Jenkins’s men were hit hard. Jenkins himself had his sword shot off, his overcoat was hit several times by shell fragments, he was wounded in the shoulder by a piece of shell and he had two horses shot out from under him. A veteran of the 1st Pennsylvania Reserves wrote, “The batteries thundered volley after volley.” The Confederates rushed at them in a massive column from the wood and, with a fiendish yell, came swarming across the field. The artillery tore terrible gashes through the enemy’s ranks, covering the ground with the dead.
The gunners loaded double, even triple charges of canister, the guns recoiling with so much force that they endangered the lives of those around them.120
Cooper’s fire was joined from across the road by Randol’s six Napoleon smoothbores. J.R. Sypher called the fire “the most terrific storm of grape and canister, that ever whirled in death-torrents across fields of fiercest battle.” They charged in masses, approaching the guns “at point-blank range, with charges of double shotted grape and canister.” The fire plowed “a horrible furrow of flesh and gore through the living field.” Adding to carnage inflicted by the enemy guns, the terrain also was a serious challenge for Jenkins, as the trees and undergrowth made it difficult to keep his unit in formation. He came upon one of his men who was afraid to advance and who said it was “too hot in there…the bullets fly too thick.” Jenkins upbraided him, saying, “Go back sir and don’t disgrace yourself.”121
Micah Jenkins. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Amsden’s guns soon ran low on ammunition, and he sent for his caissons. Unfortunately for the Federals, Seymour had taken the precaution of ordering Amsden’s caissons to the rear shortly before Jenkins’s attack but had failed to tell the battery commander where they were being sent. Stunned that they could not be found, Amsden ordered a lieutenant and two buglers to
search for them, but they could not locate the missing ammunition. He reported this to McCall, who ordered him to the rear. Their guns would soon be missed.122
While watching Jenkins’s attack, Porter Alexander saw a “tall, handsome, young fellow” drop out of the ranks and approach him. “As he seemed weak I went to meet him & found he had been shot through the lungs, the bullet passing clear through.” He had been his unit’s color bearer. Alexander had a flask with some of his father’s “Old Hurricane brandy of 1811” and gave him some and then helped the soldier to an ambulance. When the wounded man asked if he might survive, Alexander told him the story of a soldier who had been shot through the lungs at Bull Run and had lived. The wounded soldier replied, “I’m willing to die for my country if I must; but I’d a heap rather get well & see my mother & folks again.” Alexander never saw the man again but always wondered if he had made it through.123
McCall shifted the 9th Pennsylvania back from his threatened left to retake the position. Colonel Jackson, commanding the 9th, said that his men “deeply sympathized with the captain [Cooper] in his loss, I at once determined to recapture the guns.” He re-formed his regiment and advanced. As they did, they moved through the debris and “carcasses of horses and bodies of men, inextricably mixed.” The captain of the 9th, John Cuthbertson, remembered the fight: “A hand-to-hand struggle ensued; muskets were clubbed and bayonets were used, the enemy was driven from the guns.” A “supernatural frenzy fired the spirits of the men. The shouts of command, the shrieks and yells of the enemy…the thrust and parry of the bayonet, the crash of the clubbed musket, the spouting of blood, the death cry.” It was an evening of horror. After he was wounded in the thigh and carried from the field, Cuthbertson said that the men fought “with a recklessness of life” that astonished him. The 9th pushed the Confederates back temporarily, but the fighting was not yet ready to end. The seesaw battle for the guns would continue124
Jenkins and his men continued on, attacking and being driven back by the volleys from Seymour’s men. The Confederates relentlessly continued their assault. Joined by the 9th and 10th Alabama of Wilcox’s Brigade, Jenkins’s men finally began to drive the Federal defenders. As he rode over the works of Cooper’s infantry supports, Jenkins’s horse was shot from under him. The Confederates stormed up to the enemy defenses, and the struggle became hand-to-hand, involving bayonet thrusts and swinging muskets crushing brains. Soon the remaining Federals abandoned the position, retreating a few hundred yards and regrouping. Cooper’s men tried to limber the guns so as to get them safely out, and Jenkins yelled to his men to “shoot down their horses!” so that the cannons could not be pulled from the field. With most of the horses down, the Federal gunners retreated, leaving their battery behind. Jenkins’s men then turned the guns on their former owners. As the Confederates moved through the guns, they drove through infantry fire, as well as artillery on their flanks. Scores of men were falling to the fire from the infantry and the guns. One soldier remembered the terror: “The sullen ‘thug’ of the grape shot as they bury themselves into the bodies of the men is an appalling sound—one that can never be forgotten…whole companies are decimated.”125
One Union soldier, James Maxwell Sloan, recalled his capture. He had taken a moment to try to help one of his fellow soldiers, who “asked me something in an unintelligible tone I could not understand. I bent over him and asked if I should give him some water.” After providing the water, Sloan moved on, promising to send aid. Soon he happened upon a single Confederate soldier who “appeared somewhat startled, but stood still, never attempting to use the excellent rifle he carried.” They had a conversation, and the Union solder ordered the Confederate to throw down his rifle. “He made no movement towards a surrender, but pointed me to where his friends were and hailed them. And sure enough I saw for the first time a whole regiment of Rebels just a few paces off.” Realizing his dilemma, “an involuntary sentence burst from my heart, and all I could say was, my God, this is awful.”126
Truman Seymour. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
A correspondent for the New York Tribune described the scene:
“Attacks in the Center.” Map by Hal Jespersen.
Scene along Willis Church Road. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated History of the Civil War.
The foe coming from the dense forests, rushed…with a recklessness and contempt for death that has surpassed the desperation of all other fields. In an hour like that, when men in dense masses, maddened with the excitement of battle, rush upon the fiery ordnance that at every round for a distance of a thousand yards, at point blank range, with charges of double shotted grape and canister, plows a horrible furrow of flesh and gore through the living field, artillerymen, like demons incarnate, revel amid blood, groans, destruction, death, mangled forms, and fumes of hell.127
Richard Ervin of the 6th South Carolina remembered being wounded in the attack: “We swept on nearing the battery, just then I fell.” He was shot near his left shoulder, “the ball going through all of my clothing and stopping on a rib near my heart.” Ervin was holding the flag, and it was clutched firmly in his left hand. He “had lost all power” in his hand and could not loosen his grip. “When I was hit by the ball, it felt like a red hot iron was run in to me. I was knocked to my knees and could not see for a few seconds.” Ervin’s thoughts turned to home and to escaping the battlefield. “I hugged my broken arm close to my body, and turned to the left, where I would soon be down a hill and less exposed to shot and shell.”128
In his report, Jenkins stated that he had advanced far enough to take “command” of the Willis Church Road: “I had a very strong position and with my weakened numbers could have made it good for some time.” (Jenkins was within firing range of the road but had not physically reached it. Being close enough to fire on it effectively gave him command of the road.) The young Jenkins, only twenty-seven, was overcome by the slaughter. He had roughly 1,000 men in the spring, but since Seven Pines, his brigade was now reduced to only 125. Thomas J. Goree, one of Longstreet’s staff officers, remembered that Jenkins was “weeping like a child” over the fate of his men. Goree said that Jenkins told him that he had prayed that he would share in their death.129
Chapter 10
HAVOC AT RANDOL’S GUNS
Cadmus Wilcox’s brigade had arrived around 2:00 p.m. It was clear that Federal troops were in his front, and his brigade, along with Pryor’s and Featherston’s, was ordered to advance about one mile to the edge of the woods. He was to the left of Jenkins, across the Long Bridge Road. His brigade had a clear field in front of them. Wilcox threw skirmishers out, feeling for the enemy, and waited in position for three hours. Around 5:00 p.m., Federal artillery began firing; “shot and shell passed over and fell beyond us, some exploding near us.” One of his batteries returned the fire, but owing to the wooded terrain, little damage was incurred by either side. Around 5:40 p.m., Wilcox saw Hunton’s (Pickett’s) brigade moving across the open meadow, and then he was ordered to form his brigade in the field, while Featherston was to his left, shifting to the left to reach Huger, who was expected to be attacking.130
Ordered by Anderson to press forward, Wilcox was instructed to shift to the left to keep in touch with Featherston. He was ordered forward and again was told to shift to the left. One more time he received both instructions. Following this confusion, he ultimately was ordered to press forward. Wilcox knew nothing of the strength of the enemy in his front and knew little of the terrain. Then the command came: “Forward…every man was on his feet, and with a savage yell sprang into the opening. With all possible speed” they rushed forward through the field, “guided alone by the artillery fire of the enemy,” which passed over them, still causing little damage. Soon they entered more woods, which were so “thick with undergrowth that a forward movement in line of battle was impractical.” By constantly adjusting his angle of approach, Wilcox was able to reach a more open area. Wilcox said that the trees and undergrowth were so thick that he cou
ldn’t see his men on the left or on the right. Randol’s guns were blasting away at them. Many of his men “had their lives snuffed out by iron missiles hurled from those blazing cannon.” Still they pressed on. Two of his regiments, the 9th and 10th Alabama, had crossed over the Long Bridge Road where it curved and joined Jenkins in the attack on Cooper’s battery. The 8th and 11th Alabama, plus four companies of the 6th South Carolina, stayed to the left of the road, which descended and crossed a small stream. The area was boggy, “with a dense growth of trees in it, rendering it difficult for the regiments on this side to make their way through it.” The cannons of Alanson Randol’s six-gun Battery E of the 1st U.S. Regulars had been facing toward the attack on Cooper, but now they were turned toward the Alabamians. Thompson joined in with his six guns. Behind Randol’s guns, between them and their caissons, were the 4th, 7th and 11th Pennsylvania Reserves. The Confederates came on and at three hundred yards were met with the “frightful havoc” of Federal canister, with “the grape shot coming thick and fast through the trees.”131
The Battle of Glendale Page 8
