[I] John Newton, like Winfield Scott and George H. Thomas, was a native of Virginia, and was appointed thence to West Point, where he was graduated in 1842, No. 2, in a class that included Rosecrans, Pope, Seth Williams, Doubleday, Sykes and other noted Federal leaders and Longstreet, D. H. Hill, Gustavus W. Smith, McLaws and Van Dorn of the Confederates. In continuous service in the Engineer Corps, he had attained the rank of captain when the war began. He was assistant engineer in the construction of the defenses of Washington; served through the Peninsular campaign; was at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg and followed Reynolds as commander of the First Corps. After leaving the Army of the Potomac, he commanded a division in the Fourth Corps, under O. O. Howard, in the army of the Cumberland having a part in the campaign which culminated in the capture of Atlanta, September 1864. Later he commanded various districts in Florida until his muster-out from the volunteer service, January 1866. His subsequent life was devoted to engineering, among his most notable deeds being the removal of obstructions in Hell Gate, the narrow passage of East River, between Long Island Sound and New York Harbor. Subsequent to his resignation from the army in 1884, he became Commissioner of Public Works in New York City; at the time of his death in his seventy-second year, May 1, 1895, he was president of the Panama Railroad and of the Panama and Columbian Steamship Companies.
[J] General Morris Schaff, who was a member of General Warren's Staff, says, "Robinson, who brought up the rear of the corps, camped on the Germanna Road, the middle of his division about where Caton's Run comes down through the woods from the west." P. 97
[K] Greeley in "The American Conflict" says, "Thousands of the unnamed and unknown have evinced as fervid and as pure a patriotism, but no one surrendered more for his country's sake, or gave his life more joyfully for her deliverance, than did James S. Wadsworth."
[L] In General Schaff's "Wilderness" we may read, "The victorious Confederates could not pursue beyond the guns, or even stand there, for Sweitzer's of Griffin's, and the First Brigade of Robinson's division, under my friend, Charles L. Peirson, a gentleman, together with our rallied men, now poured such a fire into them from the east side of the field, that they fled back to their lines on the edge of the woods.... In an effort to recapture the guns—whose loss, Griffin, the commander of our West Point battery in my day, felt deeply—the Ninth Massachusetts and the Ninetieth Pennsylvania suffered frightfully, adding to the thickly lying dead in the old field." (Page 163.)
[M] James Clay Rice was born in Worthington, Mass., December 27, 1829, and was graduated from Yale in 1854; after a period spent in teaching in Natchez, Miss., he came to New York, studied law, began its practice in 1856, and thus the war found him. He enlisted as a private in the Thirty-ninth (Garabaldi Guards) New York Infantry, was soon commissioned First Lieutenant, and Adjutant, and as a Captain, was present at Bull Run. On the organization of the Forty-fourth New York, or the Ellsworth Avengers, he was made Lieutenant Colonel, later Colonel, and saw all of the active service of that regiment, winning distinction at Gettysburg. At the time of his death he was in command of the Second Brigade, Fourth (Wadsworth's) Division of the Fifth Corps. Like Sedgwick, he was shot by a sharpshooter. His last words were, "Turn me over towards the enemy; let me die with my face to the foe."
[N] It is claimed that the body of Colonel Davis was carried from the field by Corp. S. H. Mitchell, "A"; Corp. B. F. Prescott and W. S. Sumner, both of "H"; and Sergt. L. A. Spooner of Company I.
[O] November 14, 1911, when visiting the Robert E. Lee Home for Confederate Veterans in Richmond, John Maxwell, an ex-confederate, whose later days were passing in this congenial harborage, was introduced and requested to tell the Northern visitors how he blew up the Yankees. Nothing loth, the veteran in gray, holding in his hands the works of an alarm clock, told the story of his sneaking into the Union lines and, when opportunity offered, placing his infernal machine, with his time-wheel for explosion properly set, where it would do the most execution and then hastening away. His auditors, so recently from the dedication of a Massachusetts monument on the edge of the Crater, recalling an even greater explosion, were hardly in position to find any great amount of fault with his act, since "Sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander." "Where were you, Johnnie, when the thing went off?" was a natural question from one of the hearers. "Oh, I was two miles away, making the best time possible towards the Confederacy." (Vid. R. R. Serial No. 87. p. 954).
[P] When the rails, thus heated, were grasped at their ends by several stalwart men and carried so that the red hot middle might hit a good-sized tree, the extended iron would be bent almost double. The two ends being somewhat divergent; four rails thus carried and thus applied and symmetrically placed about a tree made a very good Maltese Cross, the badge of the Fifth Corps and other army corps were wont to say when, as at the North Anna, they saw many tokens of this sort, "Well, the Fifth Corps has been here."
A. S. R.
[Q] At the last reunion, attended by Sergeant McFeeley, he gave the following version of the day's incident, stating that when the Union batteries began to play on our lines, the commander of the color guard sent him back to stop the firing and in so doing, he ran into the rebel line. At once he tried to hide behind some bushes but a Johnnie got his eye on him and ordered him to come out, which he did. Walking along in the ranks, a prisoner, he saw a reb have a stand of colors and, on account of the rain, they were done up in their case, which he recognized as one that he had mended, and he also knew the staff which had been scarred by battle as belonging, both of them, to the Thirty-ninth. Naturally McFeeley kept as near the colors as possible and their present holder, who was very happy over his proud possession, though he had only picked them out of the rut where Adams had thrown them. When Wheelock's relieving column came charging through, McFeeley stepped up to the rebel and remarked that he guessed he would hold that same flag awhile, thus saving the precious token from gracing some Confederate collection of curios.