Part of the Havoc Wrought on Marye’s Heights by the Assault of Sedgwick on May 3, 1863. No sooner had they seized the stone wall than the victorious Federals swarmed up and over the ridge above, driving the Confederates from the rifle-pits, capturing the guns of the famous Washington Artillery which had so long guarded the Heights, and inflicting slaughter upon the assaulting columns. If Sedgwick had had cavalry he could have crushed the divided forces of Early and cleared the way for a rapid advance to attack Lee’s rear. In the picture we see Confederate caisson wagons and horses destroyed by a lucky shot from the Second Massachusetts’ siege-gun battery planted across the river at Falmouth to support Sedgwick’s assault. Surveying the scene stands General Herman Haupt, Chief of the Bureau of Military Railways, the man leaning against the stump. By him is W. W. Wright, Superintendent of the Military Railroad. The photograph was taken on May 3d, after the battle. The Federals held Marye’s Heights until driven off by fresh forces which Lee had detached from his main army at Chancellorsville and sent against Sedgwick on the afternoon of the 4th.
THE DEMOLISHED HEADQUARTERS
From this mansion, Hooker’s headquarters during the battle of Chancellorsville, he rode away after the injury he received there on May 3d, never to return. The general, dazed after Jackson’s swoop upon the right, was besides in deep anxiety as to Sedgwick. The latter’s forty thousand men had not yet come up. Hooker was unwilling to suffer further loss without the certainty of his cooperation. So he decided to withdraw his army. The movement was the signal for increased artillery fire from the Confederate batteries, marking the doom of the old Chancellor house. Its end was accompanied by some heartrending scenes. Major Bigelow thus describes them: “Missiles pierced the walls or struck in the brickwork; shells exploded in the upper rooms, setting the building on fire; the chimneys were demolished and their fragments rained down upon the wounded about the building. All this time the women and children (including some slaves) of the Chancellor family, nineteen persons in all, were in the cellar. The wounded were removed from in and around the building, men of both armies nobly assisting one another in the work.”
COPYRIGHT, 1911, PATRIOT PUB. CO.
RED MEN WHO SUFFERED IN SILENCE
In modern warfare the American Indian seems somehow to be entirely out of place. We think of him with the tomahawk and scalping-knife and have difficulty in conceiving him in the ranks, drilling, doing police duty, and so on. Yet more than three thousand Indians were enlisted in the Federal army. The Confederates enlisted many more in Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. In the Federal army the red men were used as advance sharpshooters and rendered meritorious service. This photograph shows some of the wounded Indian sharpshooters on Marye’s Heights after the second battle of Fredericksburg. A hospital orderly is attending to the wants of the one on the left-hand page, and the wounds of the others have been dressed. In the entry of John L. Marye’s handsome mansion close by lay a group of four Indian sharpshooters, each with the loss of a limb—of an arm at the shoulder, of a leg at the knee, or with an amputation at the thigh. They neither spoke nor moaned, but suffered and died, mute in their agony. During the campaign of 1864, from the Wilderness to Appomattox, Captain Ely S. Parker, a gigantic Indian, became one of Grant’s favorite aids. Before the close of the war he had been promoted to the rank of colonel, and it was he who drafted in a beautiful handwriting the terms of Lee’s surrender. He stood over six feet in height and was a conspicuous figure on Grant’s staff. The Southwestern Indians engaged in some of the earliest battles under General Albert Pike, a Northerner by birth, but a Southern sympathizer.