The Song of the Rappahannock

The 12th of May was ushered in with a tremendous assault by the whole of the Second Army Corps, led by Hancock. The assault was at first a sweeping success, but inside the captured work another entrenchment was encountered behind which the Confederates massed their forces, and then the real combat of the day began. It is an old story; we have all heard how the armies, locked in deadly embrace, fought hand to hand so that several times during the day the trenches had to be cleared of the dead to give foothold for the living, and how great oak-trees were actually severed by riddling bullets so that they fell as if cut down by a woodman's axe.

The morning was not far gone before all our army was engaged either within the salient, or in attempts to relieve the pressure there by fresh assaults on other portions of the line. In one of these the Fifteenth regiment met its culminating sacrifice. At one side of the Bloody Angle was an earthwork as yet untried by assault. Let us take a peep at it. To do so we must first force our way through a belt of dense pine thicket full of dead branches that tear clothes and flesh. At the edge of the thicket we come upon an open space. It is perhaps two hundred yards wide. Look across! At the farther side you see first a row of abatis – trees felled with their branches pointing outward and toward you, trimmed to sharpened points, and if you could examine closely you would find many fiendish "foot-locks" cunningly made to catch and trip any one trying to force his way through this savage fence. Beyond the abatis and above it rises a yellow earthwork, the top laid in logs, with the topmost log raised a few inches so that the defenders can fire through without exposing themselves. Here and there you see the muzzles of cannon gaping through embrasures, arranged in angles to sweep the open field with flank fire. The horrible, the hopeless task of the Jersey Brigade, with the Fifteenth regiment in the lead, is to capture that earthwork. The attempt seems hopeless, but attack, attack everywhere is the word to-day; no joint in the enemy's harness must be left unsmitten. Spottsylvania was not a place where only easy things were tried.

It is ten o'clock now, and within and around the Bloody Angle, at every point but this, an inferno of strife is roaring. The order comes, the regiment forces its way through the pine thicket, straightens its line as it emerges, and the earthwork bursts into flame. A bold dash now across the shot-swept open, no firing, the bayonet only, and with thinned ranks the abatis is reached. To men who march to death it is less formidable than it seems, desperate hands quickly tear it aside; up now Fifteenth, what is left of you, up the bank over the logs, inside and hand to hand, foot to foot in deadly mêlée. It is often said that the bayonet was a mere appendage in our war. But it was freely used at the Bloody Angle. The Fifteenth forced their way into that earthwork at the bayonet's point, held their costly capture for a short space, took about a hundred prisoners and a battle-flag. But too few of them were left to stand against the gathering force poured in on the little band from the inner line, and a battery is now sweeping down the brigade with flank fire of grape-shot. The order comes to retire. It is almost as perilous as the going in, and when the regiment is reformed less than a hundred can be counted. But at nightfall others who have remained all day among the dead and wounded, entrapped as it were, creep in, and at roll-call next morning it is found that one hundred and fifty-three men and four line officers remain, out of the four hundred and forty-four who marched into the Wilderness! The muster-out roll of that regiment carries the names of one hundred and twenty-two men who were killed or died of their wounds in those eight days of battle. And one hundred and sixteen of them met their death at Spottsylvania. The heroic chaplain of the regiment says of their last assault: —

"We were engaged a single half hour, but there are times when minutes exceed in their awful bearing the weeks and years of ordinary existence. Forty bodies, or nearly one-fifth of the whole regiment, lay on the breastwork, in the ditch, or in the open space in front. Numbers had crept away to expire in the woods, and others were carried to the hospital, there to have their sufferings prolonged for a few more days and then to yield their breath. The brave, the generous, the good lay slaughtered on the ground of our charge – the most precious gifts of our State to the sacred cause of our country."

In his "History of the Second Army Corps," General Walker says of the havoc made in that splendid organisation by the first few months of the last Virginia campaign: —

"More than twenty officers had been killed or wounded in command of brigades; nearly one hundred in command of regiments; nearly seventeen thousand men had fallen under the fire of the enemy, and among these was an undue proportion of the choicest spirits. It was the bravest captain, the bravest serjeant, the bravest private who went farthest and stood longest under fire."

That was always the story, true not once but many times, and in spirit if not in precise detail of all the battle-wasted corps of our army. As the living image of those choice spirits comes back to memory, – and some of them were my dear friends, – a significant picture weaves past and present together in imagination. Shadowy forms begin to shape themselves: they are phantoms of men in mature vigour, fitter than most of us who survive, and readier to go farthest and stay longest under the fire of that unending battle by which all true progress of our national life must be conquered. And then the picture slowly fades until only a great vacancy is left!

For no one need tell us who knew these men that theirs was but brute courage, only the product of military discipline. Seldom has conscience been so large a factor in war, Anglo-Saxon conscience at that, which strikes hard and gives all. The ghastly losses were no accident.

Was the sacrifice worth while? We are far enough away from it now to look back calmly and answer solemnly, Yes!

There is a keeping of life that is its loss, and a giving of it that is largest, truest gain. The one great inconsistency of our Republic was wiped away, as alone it could be, in blood; one single dangerously-dividing controversy was forever settled by that war. The pledge of our nation's indivisibility is the precious possession of those myriad graves, and the harbinger of our growingly beneficent greatness among the nations of the earth is the power of sacrifice for high principle, to which they bear their silent, their pathetic, but ever-present testimony.

To-day, after thirty years, the fruition of the sacrifice is seen. We behold the mighty uprising of a veritably united people in the cause of humanity, and on the heights of Santiago we see men of the South standing shoulder to shoulder with men of the North, mingling their blood victoriously under the old Flag, while the world looks on with admiration not unmixed with fear.