Appendix C
(from Chapter 8)
1864 Report of Brig. Gen. Truman Seymour of the Union Army
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.
August 12, 1864
GENERAL: I have the honor to submit the following report of my command . . . in connection with the battles of May 5 and 6 in the Wilderness:
To this brigade I was assigned on the morning of the 5th instant. . . . The Sixth Maryland and One hundred and tenth Ohio were placed in the first line. . . . The position was on gently rolling ground, thickly covered with trees. . . . A vigorous advance was made and the enemy was soon found, but sheltered by log breastworks and extending so far beyond me that his fire came upon the prolongation of our line with the greatest severity. . . . The Sixth Maryland and One hundred and tenth Ohio suffered very severely, the Sixth Maryland losing 180 officers and men, killed and wounded [in] that superior regiment . . .
* * *
Sixth Regiment of Maryland Infantry Descendants Association
[“Fighting Sixth Maryland” for the Union Cause]
Company B—Muster Roll
Slaughter, Wm. H., Corporal, mustered Aug. 14, 1862; killed in action, May 5, 1864, Wilderness, Virginia.
[Great-great-great-grandfather of Anthony Ervin]
May 4, 1864, Wilderness of Spotsylvania, Virginia
The sun bled out behind the tree line as the infantrymen of Sixth Regiment Maryland crossed the Rapidan River at Germanna Ford. The two canvas-and-wood pontoon bridges that federal engineers had raised in the predawn saved the men from making the passage like the troops six miles downstream at Ely’s Ford. Those men had waded across the swollen river holding muskets and cartridges aloft like a ragged line of robbers in surrender, the cold brown water fingering their navels and mosquitoes droning at their ears before anchoring on their faces to feed. But this regiment stayed dry and bivouacked that night just off the muddy banks. The men clutched their moonlit rifles and shuddered at the looping cry of a whip-poor-will that in another time would be welcome birdsong but here seemed a cackling and hysterical requiem of the day to come.
The Sixth Regiment Maryland set off in the morning along the Germanna Ford road. After receiving command to picket the riverbank against Confederate advance they retraced their steps, only to recommence marching three hours later.
–Goddamn shitshow out here, muttered one soldier. The generals don’t know shit. They passing us around like a hot potato.
The young corporal next to him did not answer.
–I reckon we be just as good off blindfolded and spun round in circles before walkin off into rebel hands.
The corporal remained silent, his expression unchanged.
The soldier sucked in through his nose with a rattling sound and spat hard. The phlegm flew dense and palpable and landed in a quivering blob in the dust. He stubbed it down into the ground with his toeheel and eyed the young corporal again. He had deep-set narrow eyes in a round wrinkled face like some oversized progeny of a shrew and a pug.
–You’re a right goddamn party to march with, ain’t you, he said, and then fell back in search of kinder ears.
The teenage corporal, William Slaughter, had heard the man’s words but had been thinking about what a sergeant told him by fireside two nights prior. How Grant meant to crush the rebels and end the War of Rebellion by waging a bloodletting against Lee. How he was pressing for mass killing ’cause he knew the Union had more numbers and reckoned if North and South traded lives long enough there’d be no more rebels to go round. How the two of them was disposable. But more than his words Slaughter remembered the man’s eyes, haunted and far-off and whited out in smoke like the pupilless horror of some blind soothsayer. The young corporal drank from his canteen and tried to put out the thought.
One year ago to the day in this same tract of timber, the Confederates routed the Union army in a squalid slaying that was later given the genteel name Battle of Chancellorsville. In this place too did Stonewall Jackson under confusion of dark receive mortal bullet wounds from his own troops. It was an accursed place for any man. The ashen skulls and remains of those who just one year prior still wore their flesh now flanked the road, the clean-picked bones littering the woods like ungodly cairns guiding fresh meat into some impending reincarnation of carnage past. The men of the Army of the Potomac averted their eyes and said nothing. One hundred and twenty thousand strong, they advanced laboriously through that dreaded wilderness, dragging a support tail almost seventy miles long of over four thousand supply wagons and eight hundred–plus field ambulances and an entire herd of cattle. They slogged ahead in grim hope of traversing the dense forest to make battle in the open ground to the southeast where their superior manpower and firepower would favor them. That was Grant’s plan. That was not to be.
The Confederates moved in and surprised them near Saunders Field. At one p.m. skirmishing broke out. Troops poured in like ants spilling forth from a decapitated ant mound and soon the woods steamed and churned with killing. From its hostile perch the sun beat down through a haze upon those wretched men whose uniforms stuck to them in a paste of blood and sweat and urine. Abandoned knapsacks and blankets and jackets of gray and blue lay strewn about as soldiers shed themselves of all but food and water and instruments of destruction. The forest whistled with flying death and rained twigs and leaves and flecks of bark. In places bullets pattered down upon the duff like hail. Spooked out of their subterranean shelters by exploding shells, rabbits skittered in terror across the killing fields. White clouds born of black powder burst forth and drifted untroubled overhead like wraiths bearing languid witness to man’s unerring folly. Those who would desert had done so earlier when news broke of the fray, and the soldiers who now remained fought with the abandon of sinners who had long since consigned themselves to hell. By late afternoon many had already been captured by their own men and held down as branding irons sizzled a D, for Deserter, into their cheeks and were then delivered whimpering back into service marked with their raw scarlet letter. There was nowhere to run.
The Sixth Maryland and the One hundred and tenth Ohio were ordered to the front line to outflank the Confederate troops of Lieutenant-General Ewell. At five p.m. the forward cry rang out and they rushed forth with great shouts. The enthusiasm was brief. Their colonel sent message to Brigadier General Seymour that his men lacked support and the rebels outnumbered and outflanked them. To press on was certain butchery. The courier returned with a message to attack. The troubled colonel assumed his message did not get through. Only after a second order came did he bow his head for forgiveness and send his men forth into that woe. It was seven p.m., God’s hour. The light was gold.
William Slaughter and company charged and fired and the enemy zigzagged in retreat. But the rebels soon leapt over a line of earthworks and ensconced themselves out of sight. For the attacking men there was no shelter but for the slender trunks of second-growth trees and the occasional log. At one hundred and fifty yards the musket fire opened upon them. Hot yellow fury roared down all along the line.
The last hour of Slaughter’s life was the longest he had ever known. One Ohio private died in his arms, sucking at the warm canteen water that the young corporal emptied into his mouth. Another slumped dumbly against an oak as he tried to stuff back in the viscera hanging from his midsection, his fingers prodding even as his eyes began to glass over. An older veteran with blood flowing from his ear sat up in a daze and tried to light a tobacco pipe with wet trembling hands. One private sank to his knees as a purple hole bloomed in his neck and then tottered and fell facedown into a final rest of prostration and another lurched about vomiting blood and another hugged his knees and gurgled prayers through a severed tongue and another blubbered and crawled on his elbows tracking out a crimson rug behind him and everywhere there was groaning and babbling and moaning of the maimed and wounded. And Slaughter found no glory or right in any of it.
Dusk fell. Musketry flared in the twilight and shells exploded in tornadoes of fire and the rank air filled with the swooshing of shot and the steel clanking of ramrods pounding charge into musket barrels. By nightfall the shooting was blind and aimless. Comrade shot comrade. A round burst nearby and a body cartwheeled through the air and might have been made of straw except for its heavy landing. A dead tree caught fire and the flames hissed and whipped up the dry trunk, roasting its nesting denizens. Groundfires broke out in the blackness and relieved the injured of their suffering and the smell of their charred flesh carried on the evening breeze with their screams.
A flash erupted next to Slaughter and knocked him down. When he righted himself he could hear nothing but a ringing. As he cast about for his rifle, a musket ball struck him in the chest and his blood sprayed and he reeled back into some tree branches off which he hung quietly with outstretched arms. As he bled out over the black boughs, the ringing in his ears died away and he watched in awe as silent tubes of musket fire pulsed about and flames licked upward in pockets of incandescence and a man swaddled in flames flailed as he ran like some grotesque mime. In the soundlessness it was as if he had been ferried out to some removed vantage point for one final reckoning and calm accounting of the grand obscenity perpetrated on every man and martyr there. As the young corporal felt himself slip away, he thought of his wife and infant son whom he would never meet.
Then his legs buckled and Slaughter fell in the wilderness.