Saturday, June 9, 2012

June 9 — Early this morning we received one hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition.

When we left camp old Stonewall’s cannon were thundering on the east side of the river below Port Republic, in front of General Shields. Shields had his forces strongly posted about one mile below Port Republic, his right on the river and his left butted up against a spur of the Blue Ridge that jutted boldly out into the plain. A little way up the side of the spur was a coaling which commanded the whole front of his line from the mountain to the river. General Shields quickly availed himself of the utility of this vantage ground on the extreme left of his line, by placing an eight-gun battery on the apparently invulnerable shelf up the mountain side, from which his batteries could sweep the whole field.

As we drew near and hastened toward the field the roar of battle grew fiercer and louder, the musketry being fearfully terrific. Just before we reached the field a goodly number of our wounded were returning to the rear, limping, bleeding, and groaning. Some of them greeted us to the field with the unpleasing and discouraging expression of “Hurry up; they are cutting us all to pieces.”

When we arrived in sight of the field and smelled the battle smoke one of Jackson’s aids came dashing from the front with a ready and prompt inquiry, “Whose battery is this?” “Chew’s,” was the quick response. “Have you plenty of ammunition?” The last question was answered in the affirmative, and the fleeting courier said, “Hurry to the front, captain.” “Forward, double quick!” was the ringing command of our calm but gallant captain, and in a very few moments after we wheeled in battery on the battle-field, under a raking fire from the eight-gun battery strongly posted on the coaling against the mountain side, and with perfect command of the field we were in.

The fire of that battery was terrible for a while. However, we held our ground and opened on the coaling with all our guns, with the utmost endeavor to give the enemy the best work we had in the shop. Some of Jackson’s batteries were in the same field with us, and were firing on the coaling battery. The air trembled with a continual roll of musketry and the thunder of the artillery shook the ground. The musketry right in front of us raged fearfully, far, far beyond the powers of description that my poor pencil can delineate. The shell from the battery on the coaling was ripping the ground open all around us, and the air was full of screaming fragments of exploding shell, and I thought I was a goner.

After we had been under this dreadful fire about thirty minutes I heard a mighty shout on the mountain side in close proximity to the coaling, and in a few minutes after I saw General Dick Taylor’s Louisianians debouching from the undergrowth, and like a wave crested with shining steel rush toward the fatal coaling and deadly battery with fixed bayonets, giving the Rebel yell like mad demons. The crest of the coaling was one sheet of fire as the Federal batteries poured round after round of grape and canister into the faces of the charging Louisianians. Yet the undaunted Southerners refused to be checked by the death and carnage in their ranks which the Federal batteries were so lavishly handing around, but rushed up the steep slope of the coaling like a mighty billow of glittering steel and closed in on the belching batteries and their infantry supports with the bayonet.

The fighting then grew dogged and stubborn. The opposing forces fired in each others’ faces. Bayonets gleamed in the morning sunshine one moment and the next they were plunged into living human flesh and dripping with reeking blood.

The Federals held to the coaling with bulldog tenacity, fighting like fiends, recognizing the fact that the point they were so gallantly defending was an all-important one, as it was the citadel of strength in Shields’s line and the key to his position. But the firm and unwavering courage and invincible prowess of Taylor’s Louisianians made them as persistent and obdurate in gaining and demanding, at the point of the bayonet, full possession and control of the death shelf as the Federals were in their inflexible stubbornness to hold it, and for a while the hand-to-hand conflict raged frightfully, resembling more the onslaught of maddened savages than the fighting of civilized men.

The hand-to-hand death grapple raged furiously over and around the Federal guns for a few moments, then Northern valor began to succumb to Southern courage. The Federals wavered, sullenly gave back, and finally broke and retreated hastily, abandoning the batteries for which they had fought so valiantly, and left them in full and undisputed possession of the Confederates.

When the Louisianians charged we ceased firing on the coaling battery, and immediately directed our fire on the infantry in the left center of Shields’s line.

Soon after the coaling battery was wrested from the Federals Shields’s whole line began to give back, and his army retreated in an almost routed fashion. We pursued them about five miles down the river. The track of the retiring foe was strewn with the accouterments of a discomfited army. Guns, knapsacks, overcoats, haversacks, and canteens were scattered all along the road. About three miles from the battle-field the retreating enemy abandoned a twelve-pound brass cannon. The carriage was disabled, and the gun was nicely spiked with a horseshoe nail.

When we returned from the pursuit we passed over the battle-field. Then the hills on the west side of the river were blue with Fremont’s infantry. There were several burying parties of our men on the field inhuming the slain, both Confederates and Federals, but they were sacrilegiously interrupted in their kindly service to the dead by being fired on by some of Fremont’s batteries on the hill beyond the river, an act in itself so atrocious that it would make even a barbarous vandal blush with shame to be guilty of its perpetration and consider it an infamy of the first water. This morning the butchering had commenced some time before we reached the shambles, and in going toward the field we passed a farmhouse that had been converted into an operating field hospital; dissecting room would be a more appropriate name, for as we passed the house I saw a subject on the kitchen table, on whom the surgeons were practicing their skillful severing operations. They tossed a man’s foot out of the window just as we passed.

The star of Stonewall Jackson’s fame as a brilliant strategist is growing brighter day by day. It has already won a worthy setting in the dazzling galaxy that flashes with martial splendor around the hero of Austerlitz. In the last month he, by quick and strategic movements, forced marches, deceptive maneuvering, and effectual fighting, has defeated and discomfited four Yankee generals — Milroy at McDowell, Banks at Winchester,— which was a perfect rout that landed Banks in Maryland and cast a tremor of fear over the Department of War at Washington — Fremont at Cross Keys; and to-day Shields, the ablest and most skillful of the four, was struck by lightning that flashed from the little faded cap, on the field at Port Republic.

Marched till ten to-night and camped halfway up the Blue Ridge on the Brown’s Gap road.