This text is part of:
[172]
much that it had become choked with grease.
Permission being given, he went back and was met by a lieutenant who cried out to him, ‘Here!
Where are you going, you—shirk?
Go back to your company.’
‘I'm no shirk and no coward,’ replied Thompson, ‘I got leave to get this man's gun’ stooping to pick it up.
‘Well you can't have it,’ said the lieutenant, ‘Get out of here and get back to your company.’
In a moment, Thompson,—black with smoke and powder and panting from excitement and exertion, limped up to Lieut. Hill, with his hand upon a wound in his thigh.
He was so angry that he could hardly speak.
‘Didn't you tell me that I might have that man's gun?’
he asked, wrathfully, “Well, that—back there wouldn't let me have it and,—him, he ran me through the leg with his sword and said I was a shirk and a coward.”
‘Well, well, John,’ responded Lieut. Hill, considerably surprised, ‘you're wounded, go to the rear.’
‘Not by a—sight,’ shouted the enraged hero, fiercely, ‘I came out here to fight, and I'm not through yet,’ and he sprang forward into the fray.
（Thompson had a splendid record.
He was later commissioned Second and then First Lieutenant and was killed in the trenches at Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864.)
The Nineteenth Massachusetts held the north side of Caroline street during the night, and the enemy the south side, defended with the most formidable barricades which ingenuity could invent, consisting of barrels and boxes filled with earth and stones and placed between the houses, so as to form a continuous line of defense.
The Division Commander, Gen. O. O. Howard, inspected the line of defence at about 11 P. M. and was greatly pleased to learn that the men had secured the city after such a desperate defence.
The Second and Ninth Corps passed to the outskirts of the town as the enemy retired, and there and in the fields beyond bivouacked for the night.
The Nineteenth Massachusetts and the Seventh Michigan were permitted to remain in the town.
The pickets of the regiment had an opportunity to look
Salem Press. Co., Salem, Ma., 1906.
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.