Determined to Stand and Fight by Quint Ryan;

Author:Quint, Ryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Savas Beatie
Published: 2017-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Confederate sharpshooters, taking up places in the recently-evacuated home, began to fire down into the Georgetown Pike. Colonel William Henry, commanding the 10th Vermont, watched the sharpshooters’ fire from the home until one of his soldiers “caught me by the coat-tail and pulled me to the ground, saying ‘that will do, Colonel, the blooming rebs mean you.’”

Confederate artillery had cleared the Thomas farm, but it was not possible for Frederick Alexander’s battery to do the same—they had run out of ammunition. The gunners had been engaged since first thing that morning and now, as watches clicked closer toward 4:00 p.m., there was nothing left in the ammunition caissons. It fell solely to Ricketts’s men to fight against the Confederate onslaught.

But the Union infantry men were increasingly reaching into empty cartridge boxes, as well. After firing their last bullets, the soldiers took to “borrowing of their dead and wounded comrades,” the chaplain of the 10th Vermont wrote.

Charging through the Thomas farm, Gordon’s men closed on the Georgetown Pike. A small stream wandered across their front—not enough to pose an obstacle, but enough to leave a stark reminder of the brutal fighting. “In this ravine the fighting was desperate and at close quarters,” Gordon wrote. “To and fro the battle swayed across the little stream, the dead and wounded from both sides mingling their blood in its waters; and when the struggle was ended a crimsoned current ran towards the river.”

Federal and Confederate troops fired devastating volleys at close range, destroying ranks and leaving acrid smoke hanging thick in the air. “I recall no charge of the war, except that of [Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle] in which my brave fellows seemed so swayed by an enthusiasm which amounted almost to a martial delirium,” Gordon remembered. Expressing a similar sentiment, a fighting man in the 126th Ohio jotted in his diary, “our brave boys like men battled with the tyrants with seemingly the energy of lions.”

Watching his division’s attack, John Gordon came to the conclusion that he needed help. “I dispatched two staff officers in succession to ask for a brigade to use upon the enemy’s flank,” Gordon reported. It did not take long for the officers to reach Gordon’s superior, John C. Breckinridge, who had set himself up in the front yard of the Worthington farm. Breckinridge sent orders for his other force, commanded by Brig. Gen. John Echols, but Echols’s division was still near Frederick, so it would be some time before they showed up.

In their stand-up, knock-down fight, it was not entirely clear just how much time Gordon’s men had left in them; he couldn’t wait. Riding over to William Terry, Gordon ordered the Virginians to move around Ricketts’s right and outflank the Federals. The Georgians and Louisianans would remain where they were, holding Ricketts in place with their heavy musketry.

The Virginians started their move to the left. “This was the most exciting time I witnessed during the war,” one of the Old Dominion soldiers wrote. Terry’s men found a “hollow” that carried a small spring towards the Monocacy.

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