Campfire and battlefield : $b an illustrated history of the campaigns and conflicts of the great Civil WarRidpath, John Clark
History
Campfire and battlefield : $b an illustrated history of the campaigns and conflicts of the great Civil War
Ridpath, John Clark
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Campaigns; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Pictorial works
Sumner was just in time to meet the flank attack, which was commanded
by Johnston in person. The successive charges of the Confederates were
all repelled, and at dusk a counter-charge cleared the ground in front
and drove off the last of them in confusion. In this fight General
Johnston received wounds that compelled him to retire from the field,
and laid him up for a long time. The battle--which is called both Fair
Oaks and Seven Pines--cost the National army over five thousand men,
and the Confederate nearly seven thousand. It was a more destructive
battle than any that, up to that time, the Eastern armies had fought.
A participant thus describes the after appearance of the field:
"Monday, June 2d, we visited the battlefield, and rode from place to
place on the scene of conflict. We have often wished that we could
efface from our memory the observations of that day. Details were
burying the dead in trenches or heaping the ground upon them where
they lay. The ground was saturated with gore; the intrenchments, the
slashing, the rifle-pits, the thicket, many of the tents, were filled
with dead. In the Fair Oaks farmhouse, the dead, the dying, and the
severely wounded lay together. Along the Williamsburg road, on each
side of it, was one long Confederate grave. An old barn, near where
the One Hundred and Fourth Pennsylvania volunteers first formed, was
filled with our dead and wounded; and farther to the right, near the
station, beside an old building, lay thirteen Michigan soldiers with
their blankets over them and their names pinned on their caps. Near
the railroad, by a {147} log house, the dead and wounded were packed
together. Both were motionless; but you could distinguish them by the
livid blackness of the dead. We could trace the path of our regiment,
from the wood-pile around by the intrenchments to its camp, by the
dead still unburied. Those that died immediately could not be touched,
but were covered with ground where they lay; the wounded, who crawled
or were carried to the barns, tents, and houses, and who died
subsequently, were buried in trenches. Our little tent was still
standing, though pierced by several bullets. Beside it lay two dead
men of the Ninety-eighth, whom we could not identify; for the sun,
rain, and wind had changed their countenances. On the bed lay a dead
Confederate. At the left of our camp, in the wood, where the
Eighty-first, Eighty-fifth, and Ninety-second New York volunteers and
Peck's brigade fought with Huger, the dead were promiscuously mixed
together, and lay in sickening and frightful proximity; strong and
weak, old and young, officer and private, horse and man--dead, or
wounded in the agonies of death, lay where they fell, and furnished,
excepting the swaths on the Williamsburg road, the darkest corner on
that day's panorama."
[Illustration: PRESIDENT LINCOLN VISITING GENERAL McCLELLAN.]
[Illustration: COMTE DE PARIS. DUC DE CHARTRES.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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