In the spring of 1863 Fiske was promoted to captain and assigned to the staff of a brigade in the Second Corps. The letters he wrote about Chancellorsville from prison in Richmond were sent to the Springfield Republican after Fiske was paroled to Annapolis, Maryland. They were published on May 30, two weeks after the newspaper had erroneously reported that Fiske had been killed during the fighting on May 3 and printed an obituary.
Libby Prison, Richmond, Va.
May 9
Dear Republican: There is nothing so likely to secure an observer from prejudice and false views and representations of things as to take a fair look at both sides before giving his final opinion upon any question. Your correspondent accordingly, having already made a survey of the great rebellion from the northern side, has now crossed the frontier and is making observations, with his usual philosophic imperturbability, upon the southern aspect of the secesh monster. His opportunity for this unbiased and impartial view of things came to him in this wise.
He was acting on the staff of a general of brigade last Sabbath morning in the thick of the battle about Chancellorsville. Things were in a decidedly mixed condition. The splendid semi-circular line of battle of Gen. Hooker had been broken the night before (Saturday, May 2d) by the disgraceful failure of the 11th and 12th army corps to maintain their entrenched position, although attacked by a greatly inferior force of the enemy. Our brigade, the 1st in French’s division, in the early Sabbath morning was ordered to leave its position, in rifle-pits pretty well over to the left of our line, and cross over the plank-road towards the right to recover the ground, a portion of it, lost the night before. Our boys charged in splendid style through a thicket of tangled wood for half a mile or more, driving the enemy before them like chaff, slaying many, taking some prisoners and fairly running over some and leaving them in their rear. Indeed, they charged with too much impetuosity and advanced so far that they were not properly supported on the flanks and were exposed to an enfilading fire of artillery as well as musketry. To halt our line and form it anew a little further to the rear in the woods, I was sent forward by the general, together with a fine young friend, one of his aides, both on foot, as our horses were left behind as utterly impracticable in that thicket of undergrowth. We had separated, he to the right and I to the left, delivered our orders to the colonels and assisted in executing it in the midst of a fire, the most diabolical that my eyes have yet witnessed, from front and rear (our own artillery from behind the wood occasionally dropped a shell among us) and both flanks, from at least 64 different points of the compass, I should say, and then I hastened to retrace my steps to report progress to the general.
I was hindered some little time in picking up prisoners (whom I didn’t like to leave with arms in their hands in the rear of our line). I would disarm and put them in squads of 3 or 4 in the charge of some one of our slightly wounded men, first seeing that his gun was loaded and capped, and then on again till I had picked up some 20 or more of the “butternuts.” Had a couple of the fellows on my hands and none of my own men in sight and was hurrying them forward by the persuasion of a cocked revolver, expecting every moment to come upon our general, when all at once pressing through a terribly dense portion of the undergrowth, I found myself face to face, at not twelve feet distance, with at least a whole regiment of the brownest and most ill-looking vagabonds that I ever set eyes on, every one of them with a gun in his hand, who were that moment rising up from behind a long line of rifle-pits they had taken from us the night before.
Here was a fix for an amiable and well disposed correspondent of yours, who had traveled some and ought to have known better, to get himself into. Here was a big mouthful to swallow for a belligerent patriot, intent on squelching the rebellion, who had just gotten his blood up, hadn’t been fighting more than an hour, and was bound to distinguish himself before night. Here was a capital chance for a man, who had just gotten his hand in at the business of capturing prisoners, to put a thousand or fifteen hundred more in his bag—if they would only let him. The undersigned is compelled to acknowledge that in this one instance he found the situation too much for him. He had drawn a mighty big elephant in a lottery and didn’t know what to do with him. One of the impudent wretches he had captured a few minutes before turned round with a grin and says, “Cap’en, I reckon things is different from the way they was, and you’ll hev to ’low you’re our prisoner now.” A very sensible remark of the young man, and timely, though he hadn’t a shirt to his back and only a part of a pair of pantaloons. Things was different from the way they were, with a vengeance. I gracefully lowered my pistol to an officer who stepped out from the ranks and presented it to him, apologizing for so doing by the remark that, “doubtless it would be more disagreeable to a whole regiment to surrender to one man, than to one man to surrender to a whole regiment.” The hard-hearted fellows didn’t seem to care at all for my misfortune, and only laughed when I told them my story. I was courteously treated and sent at once to the rear, minus my pistol and trusty sword (the loss of which I the more regretted, as it was not the purchase of money but the gift of a friend), and so hath ended ingloriously, for the present, my military service.
The transition from the fierce excitement of battle to the quiet stillness of my walk of near a mile through the woods with my guard, was so great that I could hardly realize it. It seemed the flitting of a vision before my mind’s eye. The roar of the cannonade and rattle of the musketry sounded far away to me, and I was like a boy rambling with a friend in the forest of a summer morning. Not for long though could the horrid sights and sounds of battle be put away from one’s thoughts. We soon came upon other portions of the bloody field and had to pick our steps among mangled corpses of friend and foe, past men without limbs and limbs without men, now seeing a group of surgeons and assistants operating on the wounded under a tree, and now passing a group of ambulance men carrying on a stretcher some groaning sufferer. Occasionally a wounded horse struggling in his death-agony would kick at us, and occasionally a wounded secesh would mutter a curse as he saw the “d—d Yankee” pass. And in a little time we were far in the rear, and I was turned over to the care of the provost marshal, into a crowd of 1,700 captured “Yankees” about to be marched in the broiling sun, without a mouthful to eat, save the few who had their haversacks and rations with them, to Spottsylvania Court House, about 10 miles distant. Never did that nice black horse I drew a few weeks ago from provident Uncle Sam seem a more desirable underpinning to my weary fleshly tabernacle than now that I could only remember him left in the edge of that fatal forest, with my blankets and provisions on his back.
Yours, forlornly and in bonds, but yet a “prisoner of hope,”
DUNN BROWNE
May 9, 1863
Libby Prison, Richmond, Va.
May 11
Dear Republican: Richmond is jubilant over the great victory that the South has gained, the tremendous thrashing the chivalry has given “the best army on the planet,” though to be sure their joy is fringed with mourning to-day over the funeral ceremonies of their hero, Jackson. Doubtless a great many reasons are given for our most disgraceful and disastrous defeat. There is only one real reason, and that the simplest possible. Our army didn’t fight as well as that of our enemies. We had every possible advantage. Our numbers more than doubled their’s till Longstreet’s reinforcements came up, which didn’t then bring their forces up to 100,000 to oppose our 130,000. Indeed, it would now seem that Longstreet didn’t come up at all. We had the advantage of position, and no inconsiderable amount of entrenchment. Gen. Hooker’s plan was admirably arranged and excellently carried out, until the fighting took place. He exposed himself in the hottest places of danger, and set an electrifying example of heroism to the whole army. The terrible loss of life among our generals shows that on the whole they were not found wanting at their posts of duty. We had men enough, well enough equipped, and well enough posted, to have devoured the ragged, imperfectly armed and equipped host of our enemies from off the face of the earth. Their artillery horses are poor, starved frames of beasts, tied on to their carriages and caissons with odds and ends of rope and strips of rawhide. Their supply and ammunition trains look like a congregation of all the crippled California emigrant trains that ever escaped off the desert out of the clutches of the rampaging Comanche Indians. The men are ill-dressed, ill-equipped and ill-provided, a set of ragamuffins that a man is ashamed to be seen among, even when he is a prisoner and can’t help it. And yet they have beaten us fairly, beaten us all to pieces, beaten us so easily that we are objects of contempt even to their commonest private soldiers, with no shirts to hang out of the holes in their pantaloons, and cartridge boxes tied round their waists with strands of ropes.
I say they beat us easily, for there hasn’t been much of a fight up here on the bank of the Rappahannock after all, the newspapers to the contrary notwithstanding. There was an awful noise, for I heard it. There was a tremendous amount of powder exploded, for I saw the smoke of it ascend up to heaven. There was a vast amount of running done “faced by the rear rank,” but I cannot learn that there was in any part of the field very much real fighting. I have seen men from every part of the ground fought over, men from almost every division of the army, and have inquired diligently after every vestige of conflict, and not one of them all had seen a great deal of spirited fighting, though a good many had heard a vast amount of it. The particular brigade or regiment or company of each man was captured because the enemy appeared in vast numbers on their flank or in their rear. They didn’t fight much because they were so unfortunately situated or surrounded that there wasn’t much use in resisting. I never heard of so much cross firing and enfilading fire, and fire in the rear, in all the history of battles with which I am acquainted. Do you point to the big lists of the killed and wounded, 15,000 or 20,000 on our side, as evidence of the desperateness of the encounter? I tell you that when men get up and run out of their rifle-pits and breastworks like a flock of sheep, instead of staying in and defending them, not only they deserve to be shot, but as an actual matter of fact they do get hit and killed about four-fold what would be hurt if they did their soldierly duty like men.
Am I saying things that oughtn’t to be spoken of out of school? That had better be smoothed over and explained away? I’m not certain about that. I think people ought to understand somewhere about where the truth lies, and I do not think soldiers ought to be eulogized and told that men never fought more gallantly on the face of the earth and the victory would have been theirs if their officers hadn’t mismanaged, when as a matter of fact their officers gallantly did their duty and were left to be killed or captured on the field because their men turned tail and ran away from them. Mind, I don’t mean to say that this was very generally the case in the late battle. But I do mean to say that according to my best information and belief the great 11th corps of our army, attacked by an inferior force of the enemy, gave way with only a shadow of resistance and ran out of their entrenchments like a parcel of frightened deer, thus making a great gap in our grand line of battle and disconcerting all our good arrangements, and opening the way for the disasters that followed. And from all I can learn the 12th corps didn’t do much better, and though a very large portion of the army did their duty very fairly, I have yet to learn of any considerable body of troops that displayed that real gallantry and determination to win which only can restore a losing battle and atone for the disgraceful flight of the cowards and panic-stricken. I know of whole regiments and brigades, long and heavy lines of battle, that gave way before lines of the enemy so thin and straggling as hardly to be considered more than skirmishers. I saw regiment after regiment and brigade after brigade of those corps I have mentioned come pouring back through our reserves till they covered acres and acres of ground, enough to have made a stand against all the rebels in Virginia, and only breaking our lines and telling such cock and bull stories of being cut to pieces in front and surrounded and attacked in the rear as carried evidence of their absurdity on the very face of them, till I could have cried for shame and grief to be obliged to acknowledge myself as belonging to the same army.
Still in spite of all I have said, it is by no means the truth that our men are a parcel of cowards and poltroons. They are as brave as the average of people—quite as brave as our enemies are. But we don’t fight in such a common-sense way as they do. Shall I tell you how one of our lines of battle engages? They go in fine style, steadily, in a good line and without any flinching, halt at what is held to be a desirable point, and at the command commence firing, standing, kneeling or lying down, as may be ordered. Then, as in all their previous training they have been told to load and fire as rapidly as possible, three or four times a minute, they go into the business with all fury, every man vying with his neighbor as to the number of cartridges he can ram into his piece and spit out of it. The smoke arises in a minute or two so you can see nothing where to aim. The noise is deafening and confusing to the last degree. The impression gets around of a tremendous conflict going on. The trees in the vicinity suffer sorely and the clouds a good deal. By-and-by the guns get heated and won’t go off and the cartridges begin to give out. The men have become tired with their furious exertions and the excitement and din of their own firing, and without knowing anything about the effect produced upon the enemy, very likely having scarcely had one glimpse of the enemy at all, begin to think they have fought about enough and it is nearly time to retire.
Meanwhile the enemy, lying quietly a hundred or two hundred yards in front, crouching on the ground or behind trees, answer our fire very leisurely, as they get a chance for a good aim, about one shot to our 300, hitting about as many as we do, and waiting for the wild tornado of ammunition to pass over their heads, and when our burst of fighting is pretty much over they have only commenced. They probably rise and advance upon us with one of their unearthly yells as they see our fire slacken. Our boys, finding that the enemy has survived such an avalanche of fire as we have rolled in upon him, conclude he must be invincible, and being pretty much out of ammunition, retire. Now, if I had charge of a regiment or brigade, I’d put every man in the guardhouse who could be proved to have fired more than twenty rounds in any one battle; I wouldn’t let them carry more than their cartridge box full (40 rounds), and have them understand that that was meant to last them pretty much through a campaign, and in every possible way would endeavor to banish the Chinese style of fighting with a big noise and smoke, and imitate rather the backwoods style of our opponents.
Whenever we choose to defeat the armies of the rebels, we can do so, and we don’t need 500,000 more men to do it with either. There are men enough in Hooker’s army now to march straight through to Richmond. Too many men are only an encumbrance. There isn’t the general living who has shown his ability to manage properly, certainly, more than 100,000 men. All we have to do is to make up our minds not to run before an equal number of the enemy, to keep cool and save our ammunition to shoot something besides trees with, and when the butternuts find we don’t run away, they will. Meanwhile, till I am able to return and effect in our army this change in their method of fighting, I have the honor to assure you that these brown-coated fellows are not so bad as they might be, only they don’t furnish us any sugar to put in our coffee, nor yet any coffee to put sugar in. Yours affably,
DUNN BROWNE
May 11, 1863