Three years in the Sixth Corps

by George T. Stevens

"I will show President Lincoln that I am not afraid to die for my country," said the grateful soldier; and well did he fulfill his promise. Among the bravest of those two hundred heroes who crossed the swamp at Lee's Mills, was William Scott, of Company K, Third Vermont. But he was brought back a corpse. He had shown the President that he was not afraid to die for his country. He was one of the foremost in the charge, and one of the first to fall. His comrades made his grave under the shadow of the tall pines, and as they folded his blanket around him, and lowered him to his resting place, tears stood upon those brown cheeks; but the tears of sorrow were mingled with tears of joy, when they thought of his glorious death, and his narrow escape from an ignominious fate, and again, in their hearts, they blessed the man who was always the soldier's friend.

We resumed our place the next day after the battle, on the front line, and commenced digging.

Fierce night sorties were again made by the enemy and bravely resisted by our boys, who continued the work regardless of these annoyances. Only one fight occurred on our part of the line after the 16th, in which we lost any number of men. On the 28th the First brigade had a skirmish in which we lost one killed and half a dozen wounded. Among the latter was Lieutenant, afterward Colonel Milliken, of the Forty-third New York. A reconnoissance on the left about the same time, resulted in finding the rebels in considerable force, and a loss of two good soldiers to the Seventy-seventh New York. In the meantime earthworks of great strength were being thrown up on the right of the line before Yorktown, and everything was being put in a complete state of preparation for the grand bombardment. Enormous siege guns of one hundred and even two hundred pound calibre, and immense mortars were brought up and mounted in the earthworks, and it was thought that with the powerful means we were using the fall of Yorktown was only a question of time.

Our losses by the rebels before Yorktown were not great, but the ravages by disease were fearful. Many thousands of noble fellows who would gladly have braved the dangers of the battle-field, were carried to the rear with fevers engendered by the deadly malaria of the swamps, from which few ever recovered sufficiently to rejoin the ranks; and thousands of others were laid in humble graves along the marshy borders of the Warwick or about the hospitals at Young's Mills. For a month the men were almost continually under arms; often called in the middle of the night to resist the attempts of the enemy to force our line under cover of the thick darkness, standing in line of battle day after day and digging at earthworks night after night.

During the thirty days of the siege we had twenty days of rain. Thunder storms followed each other in quick succession, with lightnings more vivid than we had ever seen at the north. Men lay down to rest at night with their equipments buckled about them and wet to their skins. Men unaccustomed to the hardships of campaigning could not endure such exposure.

A few divisions of the army performed by far the greater part of the labor, either because they had at first reached positions which imposed greater toil, or because greater confidence was reposed in them. Our own division was one of those upon which the duties imposed were too great for men to perform; yet the men would have resented being sent to the rear, and it was said that General Smith remarked that "he had spoken for a front seat for his boys and he intended to keep it."

Added to all the exposures and hardships of the siege, there was a deplorable want of proper commissary and medical supplies. While the men were supplied with fair rations of hard bread, vegetables were unknown among us, and the supply of fresh meat wholly inadequate. In the Medical Department the greatest difficulty was experienced in obtaining supplies, and indeed it was impossible to get them. Not that regimental surgeons did not use their utmost endeavor to procure them, but as brigade and regimental commissaries could not obtain supplies of food which were not furnished to the army at all, so surgeons could not procure medicines and other necessaries which were locked in the storehouses in Washington. This subject will be more fully alluded to in another place, and it is to be hoped that the responsibility of this criminal negligence to supply the army with medical and hospital stores may fall where it belongs.

Thus, with their minds wrought up to a continual state of excitement, with constant exposure to tempests and malaria, with excessive and exhausting labors, and with improper food and scarcity of medicine, sickness and death swept over us like a pestilence.

At length, after a month of toil and exposure almost unprecedented, after losing nearly one-fifth of our magnificent army by disease and death, our batteries were finished, the enormous siege guns were mounted, and the thirteen inch mortars in position. The army looked anxiously for the grand finale of all these extensive preparations. Men had lost the enthusiasm which prevailed when we landed upon the Peninsula, and a smile was seldom seen; but a fixed and determined purpose to succeed still appeared in their faces. Now at length we were ready; and the countenances of the soldiers began to lighten up a little. But as the sun rose on the morning of the 4th of May, behold, the rebels had vanished, and with them our hopes of a brilliant victory! Unfortunately for our hopes of a great success at Yorktown, the rebel generals had shown themselves unwilling to afford us such an opportunity by waiting for us longer; and during the night of the 3d and 4th they had evacuated the place.

They had gained a month of time for strengthening the defenses about Richmond, and for concentrating their forces there. Now they were ready to fall back without testing our magnificent works and huge guns, and lead us into the swamps of Chickahominy; where they hoped that the fever would complete the ghastly work already commenced at Yorktown.