Chancellorsville's Forgotten Front by Chris Mackowski

Author:Chris Mackowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Dark Humor, Nonfiction, An abstract treatise of sexuality.
Publisher: Savas Beatie
Published: 2013-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Brigadier General William Barksdale.

Library of Congress

Barksdale’s case was better served by making more of the flag of truce than it deserved. That way, he could claim that his men were defeated not because they were not ready but because of Federal perfidy.14

In any event, because of the pause offered by the flag of truce, Griffin’s men in the Sunken Road were startled to see the Light Division sweeping across the plain. “We all allowed that the whole Army of the Potomac were coming, you’uns kept up such a wicked yelling,” one Confederate later recalled.15

Uphill the Federals charged, with muskets uncapped, under fire from artillerists at the top of the heights and the two howitzers in the Sunken Road. Confederate infantry opened up as well. The Light Division faced opposition of a different sort, too: partially exposed remains of dead soldiers from the previous December’s attacks, uncovered by winter weather, reached dead limbs up from the earth, desiccated lips pulled back from teeth in ghastly expressions.16

“Across the ‘slaughter pen’ we went with a terrific yell,” wrote Adj. Charles A. Clark of the 6th Maine.17 “Artillery and musketry poured a fire upon us which seemed to make the whole atmosphere hot and lurid. Men fell on every hand,” Cpl. Wainwright Cushing said:

[G]rape-shot and shrapnel and bullets tore through our ranks, while officers and men were dropping on every hand. It was a race with death, but with all this terrible tension we were under we kept our formation, the lines closing up as they were thinned by the firing. A little in front of the first rifle-pit was a board fence and it seemed to me that bullets were splintering every square foot of it as we came near. How anyone should escape being struck in the hail of lead seemed to me a wonder. We went over the fence, under it, and through it.18

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