Union Artillery

Porter posted his batteries intermittently along this ridge, most of them twelve-pounder Napoleons like the two here. As a Massachusetts artillerist recalled, the woods filled with smoke and bullets buzzed thicker and thicker before Confederate infantry appeared. One Federal gun fired a double charge of canister at a range of 35 yards, a last salute that mowed their ranks awfully. Thousands of gray-clad infantry then swarmed up the hill, and by nightfall they had captured nearly two dozen of Porter’s cannon. Edmund D. Patterson of the 9th Alabama Infantry remembered that after crossing Boatswain’s Creek, the front line, broken by fire and frightened by screams sounding like forty thousand wild cats, crowded to the top of the hill and prevented the artillery from firing into them; his men then ran over the guns, killing the gunners at their pieces, in a costly assault that left the dead and dying so thick as almost to block pursuit.

Virginia · United States