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

[708] “Petersburg militia.” We asked what Union troops were engaged, and they replied: “Some of Butler's men.” With the dislike all soldiers have for unknown troops, we said heartily: “Damn Butler's men! We do not know them. We wish the Fifth or Sixth Corps were here instead of them.” Many soldiers anxiously inquired: “Will Butler's men fight?” Then some private, who was better informed than the most of us, told us that Butler's men had been lying at Bermuda Hundred, and that there were many negro.troops among them. The noses of the Second Corps men were cocked sharply in the air at this information.

Word was passed among us that the negro troops had had famous success that day; that they had wrested a heavy line of earthworks from the Confederates, and had captured eighteen guns. The soldiers halted for an instant. They examined their rifles, and shifted their cartridge-boxes to a position where they could get at them easily, and they drank deeply from their canteens. Then belts were tightened, blanket rolls shifted, the last bits of hardtack the men had been chewing were swallowed, and their mouths again filled with water and rinsed out, and then, throughout the ranks, murmurs arose of: “Now for it;” “Put us into it, Hancock, my boy; we will end this damned Rebellion to-night!” and we laughed lowly, and our hearts beat high. Soon we heard commands given to the infantry, and they marched off. My battery moved forward, twisted obliquely in and out among the stumps, and then the guns swung into battery on a cleared space.

And then — and then — we went to cooking. That night was made to fight on. A bright and almost full moon shone above us. The Confederate earthworks were in plain view before us, earthworks which we knew were bare of soldiers. There was a noisy fire from the Confederate pickets in front of us. So unnerved and frightened were they that their bullets sang high above us. We cooked and ate, and fooled the time away. This when every intelligent enlisted man in the Second Corps knew that not many miles away the columns of the Army of Northern Virginia were marching furiously to save Petersburg and Richmond and the Confederacy. We could almost see those veteran troops, lean, squalid, hungry, and battle-torn, with set jaws and anxious-looking eyes, striding rapidly through the dust, pouring over bridges, crowding through the streets of villages, and ever hurrying on to face us. And we knew that once they got behind the earthworks in our front, we could not drive them out. They did not surrender cannon and intrenchments to disorderly gangs of armed negroes. They did not understand how troops could lose earthworks when assailed by equal numbers of soldiers. Still we cooked and ate, and sat idly looking into one another's eyes, questioningly at first,