previous next


Zzzgeneral Early's battles.

Let me lay before you, to begin with, some of his most important and distinguished services. He was a graduate of West Point, a veteran of three wars, and he took part in the civil war in well-nigh fifty battles and skirmishes. He was engaged therein at Bull Run, Manassas, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Malvern Hill, Cedar Mountain, Groveton, Fauquier Springs, Bristoe, Second Manassas, Ox Hill, (or Chantilly), Harper's Ferry, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville (or Second Fredericksburg), Salem Church, Winchester, Gettysburg, Second Bristoe, Rappahannock, Mine Run, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, the Po, Bethesda, Lynchburg, Monocacy, Washington, Parker's Ford, Shepperdstown, Kernstown, Winchester again (or Oppequan), Fisher's Hill, Cedar Creek and Waynesboro, [287] and in many less affairs, such as Auburn, Summerville Ford, Fairfield and Port Republic. Some of these names stand for several days of battle. I doubt if there was an officer or soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia who, in the open field, was oftener under fire. He was the right-hand man of Jackson, in his corps, and the right-hand man of Lee, after Jackson had fallen, and he enjoyed the abiding confidence of both. He was successively a colonel, a brigadier-general, a major-general and a lieutenant-general, each promotion coming to him unsolicited and unsought, and he commanded with equal ability a regiment, a brigade, a division, a corps, and an army.

It was his brigade which, after a swift march from right to left, at the first battle of Manassas, broke the last front of resistance offered by the enemy; and General Joseph E. Johnston says of Colonel Early, in his narrative of the war: ‘He reached the position intended just when the Federal army was apparently about to assume the offensive, and assailed its exposed front. The attack was conducted with too much skill and courage to be for a moment doubtful. The Federal right was at once thrown into confusion. A general advance of the Confedrate line, directed by General Beauregard, completed our success, and won the battle.’ This gave Early promotion to the rank of brigadier-general.

Creative Commons License
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.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Zzzgeneral Early (3)
Stonewall Jackson (2)
Robert Lee (1)
Joseph E. Johnston (1)
G. T. Beauregard (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: