previous next

The battle of Averasboroa.

By Captain Graham Daves.
[We take pleasure in publishing the following addendum to General Taliaferro's report, and we are quite sure that there was no intentional omission of proper reference to the services of the gallant North Carolinians.]

Newbern, North Carolina, January 28th, 1879.
To the Secretary of the Southern Hitorical Society:
Sir--General Taliaferro's report of the battle of Averasboroa [not Averysboroa as printed], published in the January number of the Historical Papers, makes no mention of a battalion of North Carolina.troops conspicuous in that action — suffering the loss, among others, of its commanding offcer — and which, so far as known to the writer, was the only body of North Carolina infantry actively engaged in the battle in question.

The following notice is not unmerited, and is intended to supply merely what seems to be an omission — not to reflect in any way upon the General or his report.

The battalion, upwards of two hundred muskets strong, under command of its senior officer, Captain Armand L. de Rosset, of Wilmington, North Carolina, had been assigned to General Stephen Elliott's brigade a day or two before the engagement. Not a great many of the officers at Averasboroa had had much experience in infantry field fighting. Captain de Rosset was one of the few who had, he having served with distinction, as an officer of the Third [126] North Carolina infantry, in the Army of Northern Virginia through the campaigns of both 1862 and 1863, in which he was twice wounded, first at Sharpsburg, and again at Chancellorsville.

On the morning of the 16th of March, at Averasboroa, the battalion was moved to the left of Rhett's brigade, which held the left of our line. During the fighting of that morning, as described by General Taliaferro, Captain de Rosset, finding his men slowly pressed back, asked Colonel W. B. Butler, commanding Rhett's brigade, for orders; explaining that General Elliott was too far away, on the extreme right, to report to in the emergency. Colonel Butler replied: “I have no orders to give you;” his answer being evidently prompted by a not unnatural reluctance to give orders to troops under fire not a part of his command and not ordered to report to him. In the handling of his own brigade Colonel Butler evinced great skill and excellent judgment, and his praises were in every mouth. Turning then to an officer commanding a Georgia battalion on his right — probably the Twenty-third--Captain de Rosset advised that the two commands charge and retake the position from which they had been forced. This was determined upon, but in the act of giving orders for the formation for the movement, Captain de Rosset fell, almost at Colonel Butler's feet, shot through the lungs, as was supposed, mortally wounded. Even in that situation he rallied a few men, who had broken, before being carried to the rear.

When the army moved on towards Bentonsville, Captain de Rosset, with the other dangerously wounded, was left and fell into the hands of the enemy. They, finding it impossible to remove him, first relieved him of all superfluous personalty, and then paroled him. Kind friends came to him from Raleigh, passing through the lines of both armies under a safe conduct obtained from General Beauregard by the writer; and, contrary to all expectation, their gentle nursing effected his recovery.


Creative Commons License
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.

hide People (automatically extracted)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
January 28th, 1879 AD (1)
1863 AD (1)
1862 AD (1)
March 16th (1)
January (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: