This text is part of:
‘ [103] falling severely wounded in this the enemy's lines, in the battle of Gettysburg, Pa., July 3, 1863, while serving as major, 19th Mass. Infantry.’ Among officers not already named who fell at Gettysburg (killed or mortally wounded) were Capts. John Murkland and H. P. Jorgenson (15th Mass.), Edwin Humphrey (11th Mass.), D. W. Roche, L. G. King and C. R. Johnson (16th Mass.), Lieuts. W. B. Mitchell (11th Mass.), E. G. Buss (15th Mass.), C. K. Knowles (22d Mass.), George F. Brown (16th Mass.), Herman Donath and S. S. Robinson (19th Mass.), Sumner Paine1 (20th Mass.), W. H. Barrows (32d Mass.), Henry Hartley (1st Mass.), with Christopher Ericson and A. H. Whitaker of the 9th Battery. A great loss was also sustained in Col. Paul J. Revere (20th Mass.), the second grandson killed of the Paul Revere of revolutionary fame, his brother, Dr. E. H. R. Revere, having fallen at Antietam.2 In Meade's somewhat belated pursuit of Lee, after Gettysburg, several Massachusetts regiments took part. At Auburn, Va. (Oct. 13, 1863), the 10th Mass. Battery (Capt. J. H. Sleeper) received the especial thanks of Major-General Birney (commanding 1st Division, 3d Corps) ‘for their gallantry in repulsing the enemy's attack on the head of the column.’3 In the ‘brilliant combat’4 at Bristoe Station (October 14), in which Warren's rear guard had a brush with Lee's whole army, the 15th, 19th and 20th Mass. infantries were engaged with slight loss and the 18th, 22d and 28th without loss. So in the running fight near Berryville, in which the 34th Mass. Infantry was for the first time under fire, the loss in that regiment was slight, but its adventures many, and its trophies in the way of weapons and supplies considerable.5 In this contest Corporal Gage of Co. E, bearing the State flag, was shot through the breast, as was another of the color-guard, Corporal Clark of Co. K, each dying without a word. Private McDaniels of Co. E, being hit in the foot, sat down, cut out the ball with his knife and recommenced firing. It was in this fight also that Lieut. Henry Bacon, when some of his company began bewailing by name
1 See memoir in Harvard Memorial Biographies, II, 477.
2 Memoirs of both are in Harvard Memorial Biographies, I, 124, 219.
3 Adjutant-General's report, January, 1864, p. 1011; Official War Records, 48, 312.
4 Dodge's Bird's Eye View, p. 167.
5 A very animated description of this fight may be found in Lincoln's 34th Mass., p. 143, this being, perhaps, the most graphic, as to personal narrative, among the Massachusetts regimental histories, and all the more because quite unstudied. The reports of Col. G. D. Wells, as brigade commander, are in Official War Records, 48, pp. 486-489.
Boston, Wright & Potter, 1895-96.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.