This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[372]
muskets for duty.
It had been on active and arduous service in the field for forty days, and had been engaged in all the great battles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, sustaining very heavy losses at Spottsylvania Court-House, where it lost nearly an entire division, including its commander, Major General Johnson, who was made prisoner.
Of the brigadier generals with it at the commencement of the campaign, only one remained in command of his brigade.
Two (Gordon and Ramseur) had been made Major Generals; one (G. H. Stewart) had been captured; four (Pegram, Hays, J. A. Walker and R. D. Johnston) had been severely wounded; and four (Stafford, J. M. Jones, Daniel, and Doles) had been killed in action.
Constant exposure to the weather, a limited supply of provisions, and two weeks service in the swamps north of the Chickahominy had told on the health of the men. Divisions were not stronger than brigades ought to have been, nor brigades than regiments.
On the morning of the 13th, at two o'clock, we commenced the march; and on the 16th, arrived at Rivanna River near Charlottesville, having marched over eighty miles in four days.1
From Louisa Court-House I had sent a dispatch to Gordonsville, to be forwarded, by telegraph, to Breckenridge; and, on my arrival at Charlottesville, on the 16th,
1 On the 15th we passed over the ground, near Trevillian's depot, on which Hampton and Sheridan had fought on the 11th and 12th. Hampton had defeated Sheridan and was then in pursuit of him. Grant, in his report, says that on the 11th Sheridan drove our cavalry “from the field, in complete rout,” and, when he advanced towards Gordonsville, on the 12th, “he found the enemy reinforced by infantry, behind well-constructed rifle-pits, about five miles from the latter place, and too strong to successfully assault.” There was not an infantry soldier in arms nearer the scene of action than with General Lee's army, near Cold Harbor; and the “well-constructed rifle-pits” were nothing more than rails put up in the manner in which cavalry were accustomed to arrange them to prevent a charge. Sheridan mistook some of Hampton's cavalry, dismounted and fighting on foot, for infantry.
Scanned printed 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.