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[370] the neck, and fell again. The line was repulsed, and his body was never recovered.

A writer in the Boston Daily Advertiser for December 4, 1865, under date of Charleston, November 25th, gives the following account of the battle:—

Your readers may remember that Major-General Foster despatched General Hatch with some four thousand men, in November last, to cut the Charleston and Savannah Railroad, and offer another objective point to Sherman, then coming from Atlanta shoreward. The expedition landed at Boyd's Neck, on Broad River, and marched inland eight miles, encountering the enemy (about two thousand two hundred strong) . . . . at Honey Hill, on the Grahamsville Road. In the fight which ensued, miserable generalship won us as rare a defeat as the whole war has witnessed, we losing over twelve hundred men to the Rebels' forty. The Massachusetts Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth infantry were engaged. . . . . My object in revisiting the field was to discover, if possible, and mark the graves of Captain Crane and Lieutenant Boynton of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts, both killed in the action of November 30th, and said to have been honorably buried by the Rebels. We found the woods and swamp in which the fight occurred overgrown with weeds and bushes. Bits of clothing, scattered bones of men and horses, and all the debris of a battle-field, however, would have indicated, even to a civilian, that there had been a severe struggle upon the ground. . . . . We crossed the little sluggish brook which had been our limit of advance in the fight, and ascended an abrupt slope to the substantial fieldwork which crowned it. Standing upon the embankment, and looking down at the stream and its dead fringe of thickly-set swamp-trees, only broken by the narrow opening of the road, we could not wonder that a concentrated fire of musketry and artillery, at hardly a hundred yards' range, swept back the gallant soldiers who advanced to so hopeless a charge. The narrowing of the road, bordered as it was by pools of water and slashed trees, broke the double column, in which the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts charged twice, into a crowded and confused mass, a marked target for the Rebel fire, which mowed down the front ranks, and rendered advance physically and morally impossible . . . . Captain Crane, who was acting as aid to Colonel Hartwell, fell in the stream, horse and rider being instantly killed by canister. Lieutenant Boynton, hit in the leg by a musket-ball, fell, rose again, staggered forward, and was killed by a discharge of canister, falling a second

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