"Madness"

Around 5:00 p.m., the Confederate attack began when Colonel John B. Gordon’s Alabama brigade emerged from the woods. Over the next three hours, fifteen Confederate brigades marched into a maelstrom of iron and lead as Union artillery blasted the attackers with canister, tin cans filled with dozens of cast iron balls, whose effect at close range seemed to make men disappear. James J. Hutchinson of the 5th Alabama Infantry recalled that as the Confederates came fully in sight of the Federal batteries, not four hundred yards distant to their front, the open space behind them became black with troops, thousands of whom issued from the woods in their rear. He wrote that it was madness to go on, but the men moved steadily forward until within two hundred fifty yards, when the order was given to fire, and they immediately, without orders, dropped to the ground and began loading and firing as fast as possible.

Sandston, Virginia · United States