[268] At 12, midnight, Colonel Duryea will march his regiment, with fifteen round cartridges, on the county road towards Little Bethel. Scows will be provided to ferry them across Hampton Creek. March to be rapid, but not hurried. A howitzer with canister and shrapnel to go. A wagon with planks and material to repair the Newmarket bridge. Duryea to have the two hundred rifles. He will pick the men to whom to entrust them. Rocket to be thrown up from Newport News. Notify Commodore Pendergrast of this to prevent general alarm. Newport News movement to be made somewhat later, as the distance is less. If we find the enemy and surprise them, men will fire one volley, if desirable, not reload, and go ahead with the bayonet. As the attack is to be by night, or dusk of morning, and in two detachments, our people should have some token, say a white rag (or dirty white rag) on the left arm. Perhaps the detachments who are to do the job should be smaller than a regiment, three hundred or five hundred, as the right and left of the attack would be more easily handled. If we bag the Little Bethel men, push on to Big Bethel, and similarly bag them. Burn both the Bethels, or blow up if brick. To protect our rear in case we take the field-pieces, and the enemy should march his main body (if he has any) to recover them, it would be well to have a squad of competent artillerists, regular or other, to handle the captured guns on the retirement of our main body. Also spikes to spike them if retaken. George Scott to have a shooting iron. Perhaps Duryea's men would be awkward with a new arm in a night or early dawn attack, where there will be little marksman duty to perform. Most of the work will be done with the bayonet, and they are already handy with the old ones.There was a small negro church called Little Bethel which stood in advance of Great Bethel a short distance. That was in no way fortified, and sheltered a few men. I could not go with the command myself and it was not proper that I should; but I selected as commander my officer next in rank, General Pierce, of Massachusetts. I very much wished to devolve the command on Colonel Phelps as certainly the more competent officer, but there were unfortunately one or two colonels outranking
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
Tufts University provided support for entering this 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.