The Song of the Rappahannock: Sketches of the Civil WarDodd, Ira Seymour
History
The Song of the Rappahannock: Sketches of the Civil War
Dodd, Ira Seymour
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives
One regiment always comes to mind when Spottsylvania is named. It is
indeed only one out of many distinguished for heroic losses; but I knew
it well. Its members were fellow-citizens from my own State; the
regiment entered service at the same time with our own. We marched
together in the Sixth Army Corps; our first battles were alike; we both
left our dead on the plains below Fredericksburg and at bloody Salem
Heights.
The Fifteenth New Jersey was a choice regiment recruited from the
flower of the manhood of the northern counties, and peculiarly full of
that high sentiment which consecrated patriotism in 1862. It was
officered largely by promotions from the veteran Jersey Brigade to
which it was assigned, and after it took the field was commanded by a
very able regular army officer. A light loss at Fredericksburg, a very
severe one at Salem Church, where the regiment though as yet unseasoned
bore itself with a steadiness and gallantry that excited general
admiration, then a year of hard campaigning with but little serious
fighting, and the Wilderness was reached.
The Fifteenth entered the week of battles with four hundred and
twenty-nine men and fourteen line officers, beside field and staff. Of
those eight days in the Wilderness and at Spottsylvania only one passed
in which they met with no loss. During the fierce fighting on the
fifth and sixth of May, though holding a responsible and exposed
position, they suffered surprisingly little. On the seventh, another
small loss met them on the skirmish line. They marched out of the
Wilderness poorer by one sadly missed captain and perhaps twenty men.
The eighth brought the Jersey Brigade as the advance guard of the Sixth
Corps to Spottsylvania. At once, with no time to rest, they were
plunged into the first of that remorselessly persistent series of
terrific assaults which have made the name of "The Bloody Angle"
forever famous. This first was but a reconnaissance ordered by General
Warren to "develop that hill." For the Fifteenth it meant a charge
across a treacherous morass, through timber slashings protecting and
hiding the enemy's works, up to and over the very parapet, then back
again; and it cost them over a hundred good men. The ninth brought duty
on a perilous skirmish line, with a loss which included their
colour-serjeant, killed by the same sharpshooter who slew General
Sedgwick, the beloved commander of the Sixth Corps. The tenth, another
battle again before the Bloody Angle, and another severe loss. The
modest narrative of the regiment's historian says of May 11th:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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