Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies

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[94] disastrous battle of Cedar Mountain on the 9th of August. The brothers had grown up together; they had gone to school together; and at college they had been classmates and roommates. The difference in their ages was less than sixteen months. The tie that united them had been very close, and the survivor mourned bitterly for the gallant brother whom he had lost.

Lieutenant Abbott marched with the army from Harrison's Landing down the Peninsula to Yorktown and Newport News. At the latter place his brigade was embarked and carried to Alexandria. He was with it on the march towards Centreville and at the battle of Chantilly, and while it covered, last of all the infantry, the retreat of Pope.

In the Maryland campaign he was seized with typhoid fever, and obliged to quit the field for a while. He soon returned to his regiment, and was with it on the 11th of December, 1862, when it cleared the main street of Fredericksburg. The Twentieth was most conspicuous that day, as it was the only regiment engaged in the street fight. It crossed the river in boats, and formed under the bank of the farther shore. Then it advanced, in column by company, up the main street leading from the river. Abbott (then captain) led the column, with his company of sixty men divided into platoons. The fire of the unseen enemy was extremely hot, and the men fell fast. Captain Abbott displayed the noblest courage on this worst of days. He fought his company till night ended the carnage. He lost thirty-five of his sixty men in this affair, which lasted only two hours and a half. The strain was as hard as troops can have to bear, because they could not see their enemy, and because the regiments ordered to support their advance, by moving up on the right and left, could not be made to go forward; and the Twentieth advanced alone, and fell in heaps under a fire that came from every house, from garret to cellar, upon their front and both their flanks. The officer commanding the brigade, in his official report of this day, after stating that he ordered the Twentieth to clear the street at all hazards, used the following language:—