The Annals of the Civil War Written by Leading Participants North and South
Alexander Kelly McClure, Ed.

[260] cannonading on the selected spot until sunset. He made no impression upon their works, “no more than you could make upon the side of a mountain of rock.” Humphrey's Division formed under shelter of the rise, in column, for assault. They were directed to make the attack with empty muskets; there was no time there to load and fire. The officers were put in front, to lead. At the command they moved forward with great impetuosity; they charged at a run, hurrahing. The foremost of them advanced to within fifteen or twenty yards of the stone wall. Hooker afterward said: “No campaign in the world ever saw a more gallant advance than Humphrey's men made there. But they were put to do a work that no men could do.” In a moment they were hurled back with enormous loss. It was now just dark; the attack was suspended. Three times from noon to dark the cannon on the crest, the musketry at the stone wall, had prostrated division after division on Marye's Hill.

And now the sun had set; twilight had stolen out of the west and spread her veil of dusk; the town, the fiat, the hill, the ridge, lay under the “circling canopy of night's extended shade.” Darkness and gloom had settled down upon the Phillips House, over on the Stafford Heights, where Burnside would after awhile hold his council of war.

The shattered regiments of Tyler's Brigade of Humphrey's Division were assembled under cover of the bank where they had formed for the charge. A colonel rode about through the crowd with the colors of his regiment in his hand, waving them, inciting the soldiers by his words to re-form for repelling a sortie. But there was really little need for that. Longstreet was content to lie behind his earthworks and stone walls, and with a few men, and the converging fire of numerous guns, was able to fling back with derision and scorn all the columns of assault that madness might throw against his impregnable position. The brick house on the hill was full of wounded men. In front of it lay the commander of a regiment, with shattered leg, white, still, with closed eyes. His riderless horse had already been mounted by the general of the division; about him, in rows, the wounded, the dying, a few of the dead, of his own and other commands. The fatal stone wall was in easy musket range; in a moment, with one rush, the enemy might surround the building. Beyond the house, and around it, and on all the slope below it, the ground was covered with corpses. A little distance below the house, a general officer sat on his horse — the horse of the wounded colonel lying above. It was the third steed he had mounted that evening. The other two lay dead. He was all alone; no staff, not