The Civil War Through the CameraElson, Henry W. (Henry William)
History
The Civil War Through the Camera
Elson, Henry W. (Henry William)
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Pictorial works
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."
[Illustration: RED MEN WHO SUFFERED IN SILENCE
COPYRIGHT, 1911, PATRIOT PUB. CO.]
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.
[Illustration: THE BOMBARDMENT OF PORT HUDSON.
_Painted by E. Packbauer._
_Copyright, 1901, by Perrien-Keydel Co.,
Detroit, Mich., U. S. A._]
VICKSBURG AND PORT HUDSON
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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