Lee's Last Campaign by Clifford Dowdey

Author:Clifford Dowdey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2017-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

8

The second brigade to arrive from Mahone’s division was given the brutal assignment of following Harris and going all the way to the apex. This was Wilcox’s old Alabama brigade, commanded by South Carolinian Abner Perrin, who had been given command of troops of a different state on his performance at Gettysburg. In the misty rain, the Alabamians plunged into the then cluttered woods, slipping and stumbling over the churned mud. They fought their way to the works where Perrin, a prewar volunteer in an elegant militia unit, was shot dead from his horse while leading the charge to the outer parapet. His regiments were soon swallowed up in the sickening debris inside the works at the blunt apex.

One of their sharpshooters was found all alone by the 21st Regiment of Johnson’s Second Brigade. Having toured around the outside of the salient behind Hancock’s troops and into Hill’s line, the Virginians were returning to their works from the inside. The young Alabamian, firing with deliberation from behind a tree, was astonished to learn that the lines of his own regiment no longer stretched on either side of him.

In response to Lee’s nine o’clock order, around ten o’clock MacGowan’s South Carolinians came swinging along the road just below the base of the salient. The last brigade pulled out of Wilcox’s line on the right, they were directed by Lee toward the apex under Rodes’s guidance. At that time Lee, without clearing through corps commanders, was personally directing the movements of brigades from five divisions of two different corps in the fight for the salient.

When Sam MacGowan’s veterans reached the woods, Rodes showed that his inspired performance brought out unexpected gifts of timely flattery. Not recognizing the South Carolinians from Hill’s corps, he was compelled to ask the leading officers what troops were with them. When told, Rodes turned to his staff and shouted, “There are no better soldiers in the world than these.”

MacGowan’s brigade chronicler recorded, “We hurried forward, thinking more of him and of ourselves than ever before.”

It was perhaps well they received this extra boost to their morale, for, on reaching the contested fortification, the honest recorder wrote, “It was not a sight calculated to encourage us.”

The rain had filled the ditch with bloody muddy water, on which corpses floated. Groaning and struggling wounded nearly covered the ground. The enemy, pressed up against the outside wall of the works, fired between chinks and occasionally threw over bayoneted rifles like harpoons. To look over the parapet to get in a shot was certain disaster.

Wound-prone Sam MacGowan was led off with a Minié ball in his arm and the senior colonel was carried out wounded by volunteers eager to serve as stretcher-bearers. The soldiers fought as individuals in the weird hand-to-hand battle which changed the name of the Mule Shoe’s toe to the “Bloody Angle.”

Under Lee’s orders, the men, caught in the ghastliest fight of the war for them, kept trying to break the deadlock. The Federal troops were equally determined

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.