Vermont riflemen in the war for the union, 1861 to 1865 / A history of Company F, First United States sharp shooters

by William Young Warren Ripley

Indeed Barlow's Division, as it lay that night, was actually in rear of the rebel left. Lee was quick to perceive the seriousness of the situation, and during the night he placed a formidable force in Hancock's front, and by the morning of the eleventh the corps found a strong line of works, well manned, to oppose their further progress. Reconnoissances were made, and a crossing effected at a point lower down, but the position was deemed too strong to attack, and the troops who had crossed were retired, soon after which the entire command was withdrawn to the northern bank of the Po.

Birney's Division was first over, and thus escaped the severe fighting which befell the other portions of the command in the movement. During all this time the battle had been raging furiously on the center and left of the Union army; repeated desperate assaults had been made at various points, and everywhere the enemy were found in great force behind strong works. The different assaults had been bloodily repulsed and the losses of men had been terrible. Still there was no sign of a retrograde movement. Grant seemed to have an idea that the true course of the Army of the Potomac lay to the southward instead of to the north. A repulse—such as would have been to the former commanders of that army a defeat—only spurred him to renewed effort, and it was in the evening of this day that he sent to President Lincoln the celebrated dispatch which so electrified the people of the North and made it clear to them that thenceforth there were to be taken no steps backward. "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." The operations of the past two days had convinced Generals Grant and Meade that a salient near the center of Lee's entrenched line was his weakest point, and during the afternoon and night of the eleventh the troops selected were brought up and formed for the assault. The point at which the attack was aimed was the one which has since come to be called the Death Angle at Spotsylvania; and well was it so called. Hancock's command was withdrawn from the extreme right and placed on the left of the Sixth Corps in such a position that their advance would bring them, not opposite the exact angle, but on the rebel right of that point. Birney's Division had the right formed in two lines of battle, with Mott's Division in one line in support. The sharp shooters were deployed on the right of Birney's front line so as to connect the right of the Second Corps with the left of the troops next on the right. The night was made doubly dark by a thick fog which shut out all objects from sight at a distance of even a few yards, and in groping along to find their designated position, the men found themselves far in advance of the proper point and close up to the rebel line. As soon as their presence was discovered the enemy opened a brisk fire upon them, but believing their position to be at least as advantageous as the one they had left behind, the men lay quietly down without replying to the enemy and waited the signal of attack. They were now exactly opposite the Death Angle and only a few yards from the abatis. At half past four A. M. the signal was given, and the troops of the main line, rising to their feet, moved forward silently to the attack.

The sharp shooters, far in the advance, lay quietly until the charging lines were abreast of them when they too sprang up and dashed straight at the enemy's works. The lines were now in entirely open ground, sloping upward toward the enemy, and fully exposed to the fire which came thick and deadly from every gun that could be brought to bear. Men fell rapidly, but nothing could stay the magnificent rush of the veterans of the Second Corps, and with ringing cheers they crowned the works with their standards and fairly drove the rebels out by the sheer weight and vigor of their charge. Not all, however—for nearly four thousand Confederates, including two general officers, surrendered themselves as prisoners. Some thirty colors and twenty guns were also captured.

The sharp shooters were active in the assault and also in the short pursuit, which was brought to a sudden check, however, by the sight of a second line of works extending across the base of the triangle made by the salient. The Union troops were now a confused mass of rushing men. They had lost their brigade, regimental and even their company organization, as not unfrequently happens in such assaults, and the enemy, advancing from behind their second line, compelled the triumphant but disordered federals to retire to the captured works where they were rallied. Quickly reversing the order of things, they, in their turn, became the defenders where they had so lately been the attacking party. Forming on the exterior slope, they fought the rebels stubbornly. It was as apparent to Lee as it had been to Grant and Meade, that this was the vital point, and now both parties bent their utmost energies—the one to hold what they had gained, and the other to repossess themselves of what they had lost. Both lines were heavily reenforced and the fighting assumed the most sanguinary character of any that had been seen during the whole of the bloody three years of the war. With desperate valor the Confederates rushed again and again against the Union lines to be met with a fierce fire at such short ranges, and into such dense masses, that every shot told. In some places they gained the crest of the breastworks and savage hand to hand encounters took place, but it was in vain; not all the valor of the boasted chivalry of the South could pass that line. Those who gained the works could not stay and live, and to retreat was as bad. Many gave themselves up as prisoners, while others, taking shelter on the other side of the works, kept up the fight by holding their muskets high above their heads and thus firing at random among the Union troops on the reverse side. All day long this terrible combat continued. The dead on each side lay in heaps—literally piled the one on the other, until in many places the ground was covered three and four deep. The very trees were cut off by musket balls and fell to the ground. There is in the War Department at Washington, to this day, the stump of a tree more than eighteen inches in diameter which was cut down by this awful fire. Darkness brought with it an abatement, but not a cessation of the struggle; for until three o'clock in the morning of the thirteenth the strife continued. At that hour the enemy definitely abandoned the attempt to recapture the angle and retired to an interior line. Twice during the day had Co. F exhausted the ammunition in its boxes, and it was replenished by a supply brought to them as they lay by the stretcher bearers, and once the regiment was retired for a fresh supply, upon receipt of which they returned to the fighting.

In this carnival of blood—this harvest home of death—Co. F again suffered the loss of brave men. Henry Mattocks, Thomas Brown and John Bowen were killed, and Amos A. Smith and J. E. Chase were wounded. Only eighteen men were now left out of the forty-three who entered the campaign; twenty-five had fallen on the field.

A great sovereign once addressed his general thus: "I send you against the enemy with sixty thousand men." "But," protested the general, "there are only fifty thousand." "Ah!" said the Emperor, "but I count you as ten thousand!" So each man of the gallant few who were left of what had been Co. F agreed to call his comrade equal to two men, and so they counted themselves yet a strong company.

The night of the twelfth was spent on the line which had been won and held at such a fearful cost of life. At twelve o'clock on the thirteenth the regiment, now but a handful of men, were moved by the right flank some three or four hundred yards, and ordered to establish a picket line in front of this new position. This was successfully accomplished with but little opposition and no loss to Co. F. That evening they were relieved and returned to division headquarters, where they bivouacked for the night. The three succeeding days were spent in the same manner; out before daylight, establishing new picket lines, sharp shooting as occasion offered, and spending the night near headquarters; but no important affair occurred, and no casualties were reported.

The seventeenth was spent quietly in camp—the first day of uninterrupted repose the men had enjoyed since crossing the Rapidan two weeks before. During that eventful period there had not been one single day, and hardly an hour, that the men of Co. F had not been under fire. It was a short time to look back upon, but what a terrible experience had been crowded into it! The company which is the subject of this history had lost more than half of its numbers, while in the Army of the Potomac the losses had been appalling—no less than four thousand five hundred and thirty-two men had been killed on the field, and the wounded numbered eighteen thousand nine hundred and forty-five (a total of twenty-two thousand four hundred and seventy-seven men) while of the missing there were four thousand eight hundred and seventy-two, making a total of twenty-seven thousand three hundred and forty-nine lost from the effective strength of the army since May 4th. Some idea of the extent of the losses may be obtained by the casual reader by a comparison, thus: If the entire population of any of the great and populous counties of Bennington, Orange or Orleans, as shown by the census of 1880, were suddenly blotted out, the loss would not equal the total of killed and wounded during the twelve days between the 4th and 17th of May, while the entire population of Grand Isle county is not as great as the number of the killed alone; and the total loss in killed, wounded and missing is greater than the population of any county in the State of Vermont except Chittenden, Franklin, Rutland and Windsor. And yet there was no sign of retreat. On the contrary, on every side were evidences of preparation for renewed battle, and during these days of comparative quiet attempts were made at various points to penetrate the rebel line, some of these assaults rising of themselves almost to the dignity of battles, but so insignificant were they as compared with what had gone before that they hardly attracted the attention, even, of any but the men immediately engaged.

On the nineteenth Gen. Grant ordered another movement of the army, again by the left, and again in the direction of Richmond. No unusual incident occurred to mark the progress of the sharp shooters until the twenty-first, when the regiment, by a sudden dash, occupied the little village of Bowling Green, where the retreating enemy had confined in the jail all the negroes whom they had swept along with them, and whom they intended to remove to a point further south where they would be removed from the temptation to desert their kind masters and join the Union forces. The advance was too sudden for them, however, and some hundreds of negro slaves were released from their captivity by the willing riflemen.

Two miles beyond Bowling Green the skirmishers met a considerable force of rebel cavalry, and a sharp skirmish took place. Two regiments of new troops came into action on the right, but being dispersed and routed retired to be seen no more, and the sharp shooters fell heirs to their knapsacks which they had laid off on going into action. The departed regiments had evidently had a recent issue of clothing, and their successors were thankful for the opportunity of renewing their own somewhat dilapidated wardrobes. They were further gratified about this time by the arrival of four convalescents, which swelled the number to twenty-two for duty. The twenty-second was a red letter day for the men who had been confined to such rations as they could carry on their persons. On this day they were ordered on a reconnoissance which took them into a section of country not frequently visited by either army. Halting at the County Poor House, they proceeded to gratify a soldier's natural curiosity to see what might be found on the premises to eke out their unsatisfactory rations, and, to their great delight, found chickens, mutton, milk and eggs in profusion, upon which they regaled themselves to their hearts' content. If these, thought the delighted men, are Virginia poor house rations, the poor of Virginia are greatly to be envied. Proceeding on the twenty-third towards Hanover Junction, they found their way once again blocked by the rebel army in a strong position behind the North Anna river and prepared again to receive battle on a fortified line of their own choosing. This was a disappointment, for the soldiers had become tired of such work and ardently desired to get at the rebels in an open field; but Grant, patient and persistent as ever, at once set about finding a means whereby he might beat them even here, if such a thing was possible.