History of Kershaw's Brigade / With Complete Roll of Companies, Biographical Sketches, Incidents, Anecdotes, etc.

by D. A. Dickert

The troops lay on the battlefield all night under arms. Here and there a soldier, singly or perhaps in twos, were scouring through the dense thicket or isolated places, seeking lost friends and comrades, whose names were unanswered to at the roll call, and who were not among the wounded and dead at the hospital. The pale moon looked down in sombre silence upon the ghastly upturned faces of the dead that lay strewn along the battle line. The next day was a true version of the lines—

"Under the sod, under the clay,

Here lies the blue, there the grey."

for the blue and grey fell in great wind rows that day, and were buried side by side.

The Confederates being repulsed in the first charge, returned to the attack, broke the Federal lines in pieces, and by 9 o'clock they had fled the field, leaving all the fruits of victory in the hands of the Confederates.

No rest for the beaten enemy, no sleep for the hunted prey. McClellan was moving heaven and earth during the whole night to place "White Oak Swamp" (a tangled, swampy wilderness, of a half mile in width and six [135] or eight miles in length,) between his army and Lee's. By morning he had the greater portion of his army and supply trains over, but had left several divisions on the north side of the swamp to guard the crossings. Jackson and Magruder began pressing him early on the 30th in his rear, while Longstreet, A.P. Hill, and others were marching with might and main to intercept him on the other side. After some desultory firing, Jackson found McClellan's rear guard too strong to assail, by direct assault, so his divisions, with Magruder's, were ordered around to join forces with Hill and Longstreet. The swamp was impassable, except at the few crossings, and they were strongly guarded, so they were considered not practicable of direct assault. But in the long winding roads that intervened between the two wings, Magruder and Jackson on the north and Longstreet and A.P. Hill on the south, Magruder was misled by taking the wrong road (the whole Peninsula being a veritable wilderness), and marched away from the field instead of towards it, and did not reach Longstreet during the day. But at 3 o'clock Longstreet, not hearing either Jackson's or Magruder's guns, as per agreement, and restless of the delays of the other portions of the army, feeling the danger of longer inactivity, boldly marched in and attacked the enemy in his front.

Here was Frazier's Farm, and here was fought as stubbornly contested battle, considering the numbers engaged, as any during the campaign. Near nightfall, after Longstreet had nearly exhausted the strength of his troops by hard fighting, A.P. Hill, ever watchful and on the alert, threw the weight of his columns on the depleted ranks of the enemy, and forced them from the field. The soldiers who had done such deeds of daring as to win everlasting renown at Gaines' Mill and Cold Harbor, did not fail their fearless commander at Frazier's Farm. When the signal for battle was given, they leaped to the front, like dogs unleashed, and sprang upon their old enemies, Porter, McCall, Heintzelman, Hooker, and Kearny. Here again the steady fire and discipline of the Federals had to yield to the impetuosity and valor of Southern troops. Hill and Longstreet swept the field, capturing several hundred prisoners, a whole battery of artillery, horses, and men.

McClellan brought up his beaten army on Malvern Hill, to make one last [136] desperate effort to save his army from destruction or annihilation. This is a place of great natural defenses. Situated one mile from the James River, it rises suddenly on all sides from the surrounding marshy lowlands to several hundred feet in height, and environed on three sides by branches and by Turkey Creek. On the northern eminence McClellan planted eighty pieces of heavy ordnance, and on the eastern, field batteries in great numbers. Lee placed his troops in mass on the extreme east of the position occupied by the enemy, intending to park the greater number of his heaviest batteries against the northern front of the eminence, where McClellan had his artillery pointing to the east, and where the Confederates massed to sweep the field as Lee advanced his infantry. The object of Lee was to concentrate all his artillery on the flank of McClellan's artillery, then by an enfilade fire from his own, he could destroy that of his enemy, and advance his infantry through the broad sweep of lowlands, separating the forces, without subjecting them to the severe cannonading. He gave orders that as soon as the enemy's batteries were demolished or silenced, Armstead's Virginia Brigade, occupying the most advanced and favorable position for observation, was to advance to the assault, with a yell and a hurrah, as a signal for the advance of all the attacking columns. But the condition of the ground was such that the officers who were to put the cannon in position got only a few heavy pieces in play, and these were soon knocked in pieces by the numbers of the enemy's siege guns and rifled field pieces. Some of the brigade commanders, thinking the signal for combat had been given, rushed at the hill in front with ear piercing yells without further orders. They were mown down like grain before the sickle by the fierce artillery fire and the enemy's infantry on the crest of the hill. Kershaw following the lead of the brigade on his left, gave orders, "Forward, charge!" Down the incline, across the wide expanse, they rushed with a yell, their bayonets bristling and glittering in the sunlight, while the shells rained like hail stones through their ranks from the cannon crested hill in front. The gunboats and ironclad monitors in the James opened a fearful fusilade from their monster guns and huge mortars, the great three-hundred-pound shells from the latter rising high in [137] the air, then curling in a beautiful bow to fall among the troops, with a crash and explosion that shook the ground like the trembling of the earth around a volcano. The whole face of the bluff front was veiled by the white smoke of the one hundred belching cannon, the flashing of the guns forming a perfect rain of fire around the sides of the hill. It was too far to fire and too dense and tangled to charge with any degree of progress or order, so, in broken and disconnected ranks, Kershaw had to advance and endure this storm of shot and shell, that by the time he reached the line of the enemy's infantry, his ranks were too much broken to offer a very formidable front. From the enemy's fortified position their deadly fire caused our already thinned ranks to melt like snow before the sun's warm rays. The result was a complete repulse along the whole line. But McClellan was only too glad to be allowed a breathing spell from his seven days of continual defeat, and availed himself of the opportunity of this respite to pull off his army under the protecting wings of his ironclad fleet.

The Confederates had won a glorious victory during the first six days. The enemy had been driven from the Chickahominy to the James, his army defeated and demoralized beyond months of recuperation. Lee and his followers should be satisfied. But had none of his orders miscarried, and all of his Lieutenants fulfilled what he had expected of them, yet greater results might have been accomplished—not too much to say McClellan's Army would have been entirely destroyed or captured, for had he been kept away from the natural defenses of Malvern Hill and forced to fight in the open field, his destruction would have followed beyond the cavil of a doubt. The Southern soldiers were as eager and as fresh on the last day as on the first, but a land army has a superstitious dread of one sheltered by gunboats and ironclads.

All the troops engaged in the Seven Days' Battle did extremely well, and won imperishable fame by their deeds of valor and prowess. Their commanders in the field were matchless, and showed military talents of high order, the courage of their troops invincible, and to particularize would be unjust. But truth will say, in after years, when impartial hands will record the events, and give blame where [138] blame belongs, and justice where justice is due, that in this great Seven Days' Conflict, where so much heroism was displayed on both sides, individually and collectively, that to A.P. Hill and the brave men under him belongs the honor of first scotching at Gaines' Mill the great serpent that was surrounding the Capital with bristling bayonets, and were in at the breaking of its back at Frazier's Farm.