Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

To prevent a night surprise, a farmhouse about one hundred yards beyond the right of my line had been seized, and I had ordered it to be held by a picket of some sixty sharp-shooters. This would prevent a noiseless turning of our flank in the night-time. The enemy, appreciating this, had twice during the day attempted its capture, but it was held.

At the suggestion of General Weitzel, General Smith had ordered the front of his corps to be protected by telegraph wires taken from the poles of the line along the railroad — of which we had nine miles uninterrupted possession — and wound around the stumps of trees in front of his line and around posts driven into the ground. This wire was strung at such a height that the enemy making a charge in the night would assuredly stumble over it and be thrown down in masses within some fifty yards of the muzzles of our guns.

That order was carefully and properly executed by Weitzel and Brooks in the front. They commanded the left and centre divisions of the Eighteenth Corps line. Heckman's brigade and Weitzel's division held the extreme right. For some reason, never yet satisfactorily explained, the putting up of that wire, which events proved would have been of the greatest security, was neglected in front of Heckman's brigade, the extreme and exposed right of the line. As that brigade was “in the air,” that is, substantially without support on its right, there was almost a necessity for a double line of wire in its front. But there was none whatever there. The order to put it there, his division commander reports, was given to Heckman. I have seen in one of the many publications of Smith on this subject that he says it was because there was not enough wire with which to do it. How that can be I do not understand, for there was nine miles of that wire to be had for the taking, and the time in which to do it was more than ample.

In one of his later publications Smith says that no wire was ordered to be put in front of Heckman's brigade, and Heckman in his report speaks of no order to put the wire in his front. If there was no order given to have it done, it is very clear the order should have been given, as Heckman's brigade was on the right, in a position which most needed such protection.

It would have been better to have extended the wire a considerable distance to the right of Heckman's brigade.