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

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At early dawn I was awake and tried to examine the Confederate line. I noticed that the noisy, wasteful picket-firing of the night before had ceased; that the main line of earthworks, indistinctly seen in the gray light, was silent. Some of our infantry came into our slight earthworks and we stood gazing into the indistinctness before us. All of us were greatly depressed.

It grew lighter and lighter, and there before us, fully revealed, was a long, high line of intrenchments, with heavy redoubts, where cannon were massed at the angles, silent, grim. No wasteful fire shot forth from that line. Now and then a man rose up out of the Confederate rifle-pits, and a rifle-ball flew close above us, no longer singing high in the air. Sadly we looked at one another. We knew that the men who had fought us in the Wilderness, at Spottsylvania, North Anna, and Cold Harbor were in the works, sleeping, gaining strength to repulse our assault, while their pickets watched for them.

At intervals tiny columns of smoke rose from behind their line . . . It was broad daylight. I had eaten my breakfast and was looking over the field of yesterday's fighting. Some dead men lay on the ground; but the scarcity of those in gray plainly showed that they had no stomach for fighting, that they were raw, undisciplined militia, who had abandoned their powerful line of earthworks when attacked by a few black troops. At sixty feet in front of the captured works I saw pine trees which had been struck with Confederate bullets thirty feet from the ground. This told, better than words, the nervous condition of the men who pretended to defend the line.

Wandering toward the rear, I came on the line of rifle-pits which had been used by the Confederate pickets, and saw two dead men lying close together. I walked over to them. One was a burly negro sergeant, as black as coal, in blue; the other was a Confederate line sergeant, in gray. Their bayoneted rifles lay beside them. Curious at the nearness of the bodies, I turned them over and looked carefully at them. They had met with unloaded rifles and had fought a duel with their bayonets, each stabbing the other to death.

The battery bugler blew “Boots and saddles!” and I hastened back to my gun, to hear that the other corps of the Potomac Army had arrived and that the infantry would make a general assault that day, probably in the afternoon. We limbered up, then marched to the left and took a new position on a bit of level land which gradually sloped toward a creek which flowed between us and the silent Confederate line. The preliminary artillery practice began, so as to announce in thunder tones that we were getting ready to make an assault. I worked listlessly to