"In fairness to our Regiment, it should be stated that the left wing heard the orders which sent the Ninetieth forward and, responding, suffered with it. The wonder is that, in the confusion of numbers, noise and misunderstood commands, more errors May 6, '64 rather than less, are not recorded. It is not to the discredit of Colonel Lyle that he is said to have shed tears over the calamity which befell his brave followers through no fault of his."
Colonel Peirson in a paper read before the Loyal Legion also has a fling at these same guns to the following effect:—
"We also left behind two guns which were on the turnpike in front of Warren's position, which were lost by Griffin on the 5th, and were between the two armies until we retired. A brigade of Robinson's division vainly attempted a charge to retake them, but the plain was swept by canister at 350 yards, and the brigade returned with heavy loss. It was understood that the sixth Corps was to join in this attempt but General Upton, whose brigade lay on the right of Robinson, refused to move, saying, 'It is madness.' So sensitive were the enemy about the matter, they fired on our stretcher-bearers, who advanced to bring in the wounded; and the wounded were not brought in, but lay all night calling for water and help, to the great distress of their comrades."
Two such days, as were the 5th and 6th of May in the Wilderness, evidently were as much as even Grant and Lee could endure. The former is said to have remarked to Meade on the 7th, "Joe Johnston would have retreated after two such days' punishment." The losses on both sides were frightful; there was little of the spectacular which will always characterize Gettysburg, but men, in all their mortal combats, never grappled in fiercer, more determined struggles than in those of the dense and tangled Wilderness. In his Memoirs, Grant says, "More desperate fighting has not been witnessed on this continent than that of the 5th and 6th of May," and he was at Shiloh and Chattanooga; evidently the great Westerner was changing his mind as to the fighting qualities of Eastern armies. The Union force had lost 2,265 killed, 10,220 wounded, and 2,902 missing; an aggregate of 15,387. While Confederate data as to numbers are frequently questioned, the Medical and Surgical History of the War makes the Southern losses, 2,000 killed, 6,000 wounded and 3,400 missing; a total of 11,400. The Confederates also had lost Brigadier Generals Micah Jenkins and John M. Jones, both gallant officers, but their greatest personal loss was that of General Longstreet, grievously wounded on the 6th and immediately carried from the field. Thomas Nelson Page refers to the event as the fourth similar incident where, seemingly, the loss of one man ended the hope of rebel victory, as the deaths of A. S. Johnston at Shiloh, "Stonewall" Jackson at Chancellorsville, the wounding of "Joe" Johnston at Seven Pines and of Longstreet, "at the critical moment when victory hovered over his arms."
THE BATTLE OF THE WILDERNESS
By Channing Whittaker
Most of the Infantry fighting of the Wilderness, as is well known, occurred on May 5th and 6th, 1864, in almost impenetrable thickets of tangled woodland growth, a growth facilitated by warmth of climate, by a multitude of streamlets and by areas of morass. The Infantry line of battle may have been from five to seven or eight miles in length. General Grant said in his "Personal Memoirs," written just before his death, "More desperate fighting has not been witnessed on this continent than that of the 5th and 6th of May, 1864." The bloodiest battlefields of those two days were those of Caton's Run of May 5th and of the thicket bordered by the Brock and the Orange Plank Roads on May 5th and 6th. During the battle I was pretty completely occupied with what was occurring close about me and I had little knowledge of what was occurring beyond my individual eyesight. Since the war I have been too completely occupied by daily duties to seriously search the records to ascertain the contribution which the Thirty-ninth Massachusetts made to the battle as a whole. Since I received your letter I have tried to ascertain where the Regiment was and what it did with relation to the battle as a whole on those two days. It participated in the Battle of Caton's Run on May 5th and in that of the Brock and Plank Roads on May 6th, but because I am not at leisure and my sources of information are limited, I shall attempt no account of either battle as a whole.
It is only recently that I have learned of the trap which the Confederates had deliberately set for us on the morning of the 5th of May in the gully of the unwooded valley of Caton's Run, where, ambushed in the woods on the western edge, they awaited May 5, '64 "with fingers on triggers" the initial charge of our brave men, under the orders of Grant and Meade and Warren, down the long unwooded slope, across the roughly shaped gully of a primeval forest stream and up the long and open slope beyond it; of the brutal and terrible carnage on the slopes and at and about the battery caught in the gully; and that here, where at about eight a. m. was killed Charles H. Wilson of Wrentham, Co. I, Eighteenth Massachusetts, the first Federal infantryman to fall in the campaign, were controlled and stayed the proud banners of 17,000 Confederates under Lee and Ewell, including those of Walker, commanding the famous Stonewall Brigade. The first assault in this murderous trap was made by Griffin's First Division of Warren's Fifth Corps, while our Brigade, the First of Robinson's Second Division of the Fifth Corps, was held in reserve in their rear.
What I remember of the Battle of the Wilderness after the lapse of almost fifty years is a story quickly told. Some of the things which I saw and experienced made an indelible impression upon my mind. Other events have been crowded out by intervening occurrences, and of them I have no memory.