In the same order the commanding General further states:
“On a narrow front, intersected by ravines and covered with dense undergrowth, with a single battery, Hamilton’s division went into action against the combined rebel hosts. On that unequal ground, which permitted the enemy to outnumber them three to one, they fought a glorious battle, mowing down the rebel hordes until, night closing in, they rested on their arms on the ground, from which the enemy retired during the night, leaving us masters of the field.”
General Hamilton’s official report, in describing the action of the Union left flank, states:
“Colonel Sanborn, in command of the first brigade, most gallantly held the left in position until, under a desolating carnage of musketry and canister, the brave Eddy was cut down, and his regiment, borne down by five times their numbers, fell back in some disorder on the Eightieth Ohio, under Lieutenant-Colonel Bartilson. The falling back of the Forty-eighth exposed the battery. As the masses of the enemy advanced the battery opened with canister at short range, mowing down the rebels by scores, until, with every officer killed or wounded and nearly every man and horse killed or disabled, it fell an easy prey. But this success was short lived.
“The hero Sullivan rallied a portion of the right wing, and, with a bravery better characterized as audacity, drove the rebels back to cover. Again they rallied and again the battery fell into their hands; but with the wavering fortunes of this desperate fight the battery again fell into our hands, and with three of its guns spiked and the carriages cut and splintered with balls, it is again ready to meet the foe.”
At the close of the engagement the ground in front of the battery showed heaps of dead bodies. Statistics show that the Confederates’ loss in this engagement amounted to eight hundred in killed and wounded. While actual inspection of the field of carnage indicated that a large proportion of the slain had met their death from the canister of the Eleventh. The Brigade Commander’s report states that the battery fired with great rapidity and extraordinary accuracy.
The battery entered the fight with ninety-seven men and five officers, commissioned and acting. Of these, eighteen were killed and thirty-nine wounded, many mortally. A number of the wounded had been bayoneted at their guns. Of the cannoneers alone, forty-six were killed or wounded. Forty-six out of a total of fifty-four. More than five men out of every six.
The statistics compiled by Col. Fox in his “Regimental Losses in the American Civil War,” show that this day’s record in killed and mortally wounded equaled, within one, the total killed in any light battery during its entire term of service. This work also states that the losses of the Eleventh at Iuka were 22% greater than those sustained by any other light battery in any one engagement during the war.
You have been familiar with death and wounds and the aching pain of deep sympathy for suffering comrades. Therefore I will not depict the tortures and individual heroisms of those artillerymen who fell, to die or partly recover. Those who died left a legacy of glory and honor to posterity and to their country. That legacy is of greater value than the greatest riches, for it will always endure, and the martyrs of the civil war, the dead and the living, will proudly bear to the throne of God those scars which were the price of their country’s salvation.
One singular feature of this fight was that but two members of the battery were taken prisoners. The guns were captured and recaptured several times before dark. The battery men had never abandoned them voluntarily. One Confederate prisoner afterward said: