USA > Vermont > The story of Vermont (1889) > Part 12
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Later in the day four companies of the Sixth were ordered to attack precisely the same position but were driven back. The frightful losses suffered by these two detachments seems to have been a mere waste of human life. The brigade took part in the rapidly-succeeding engagements of that sharp campaign which was expected to end in the capture of Richmond, but which did end in McClel- lan's failure and downfall.
At Savage's Station the Vermont troops, prac- tically alone, guarded the retreat of the Union armies in a memorable engagement, which has won the highest praise from military critics. In the fierce fight the Fifth Regiment alone lost two hun- dred and six killed, wounded and missing, and the
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other regiments suffered severely. At Crampton's Gap the Fourth and Second regiments made a memorable charge, carrying an important position. At Antietam the brigade, under the command of Gen. W. H. T. Brooks, took, with the Maine regiments of Smith, the " historic cornfield " whereon the fiercest struggle of that indecisive battle had raged. At the first battle of Fredericksburg, though it made no dashing charge, it was under fire for many hours with heavy loss.
When the campaign of 1863 opened, the Ver- monters again showed their mettle by the spirited storming of Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg, than which there was no more brilliant feat during the war. This attack was shared in by soldiers from Maine, New York and New Jersey, but the Vermont regiments were about half of the whole command. Crossing the stream they swarmed up the steep heights under a terrible fire and fairly drove the Confederates from their almost impreg- nable position. At that time the Vermont boys had now been in the field more than a year - many of the individual soldiers much longer. The brigade, with which one New Jersey regiment was now a part, so that it was not wholly composed of Vermont men, had by hard fighting on many fields won a reputation which even this feat of arms could hardly enhance.
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The veterans had won much glory and what was of infinitely more importance, they had done their duty well, but the credit of striking the decisive blow at the decisive moment of the hard-fought and important battle of Gettysburg, the turning- point of the civil war, belongs to the Second Ver- mont Brigade, then a comparatively new and untried body of men.
The second of July, 1863, was the second day of the great battle, the only one fought on Northern soil. General Sedgwick commanded the famous Sixth army corps. Of this the veteran Vermont regiments were a part. On that day he was ordered to march thirty miles to Gettysburg in the signifi- cant words : " Put the Vermonters ahead and keep the column well-closed up." The First Brigade was good at forced marches as well as fighting. The corps reached the field at evening while the battle was still in progress and was placed in a position on the Union left of great importance, but comparatively little danger, as the event proved.
On July 3, the final day of the battle, came the magnificent charge of Pickett's division upon the right centre of the Union army. The battle had raged for two days without decisive result. The arrival of the strong Sixth Corps on the previous evening after its famous forced march had greatly increased the effective strength of Meade's army,
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and General Lee who commanded in person the Confederate troops felt that upon this magnificent charge depended the day. The attack was pre- ceded by a continuous cannonade of one hundred and forty heavy guns, converging for two hours upon the point selected. When at last Lee judged that the Union lines were sufficiently demoralized by the fire and that the ammunition of their bat- teries was likely to be low, the great charge was made. Seventeen thousand men were flung in a solid mass against the Union lines in an unavailing attempt to break them.
That magnificent army was the flower of the Con- federate troops, fresh from victorious fields and in- spired by the genius of the greatest military leader of the South. As it swept across the intervening half-mile between the two lines, a part of the Union artillery was silent, the ammunition being exhausted in the long cannonade, but from the left centre of Meade's position a destructive fire came rattling. The rebel advance had at first been straight upon the place occupied by General Stannard's Second Vermont Brigade, but under this heavy fire the first portion of the attacking force slightly changed its direction exposing its right flank to Stannard's command. It was a crisis big with importance.
The Vermont troops of the Second Brigade were not seasoned veterans like those of the First. They
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were " nine months men " with but little experience in field duty ; but at the word of command the Thir- teenth and Sixteenth regiments fell upon the Con- federate flank with instant effect, leaving the rest of the brigade to guard its former position. The Con- federate line was thrown into utter confusion by this flank charge, and by the stout resistance of the Union right. Meanwhile the second section of the Confederates' charging force, which had not been deflected like the First, was bearing straight upon the Fourteenth Vermont, which for the time being was holding the place in line of the entire brigade. It was a moment full of danger, but the Sixteenth Regiment, perceiving the situation, re- formed and charged again, this time bearing back upon the left flank of the Confederates. Tearing a road through their lines, they took the colors of the Eighth Virginia and the Second Florida, and fairly forced a large body of the rebels into the Union lines where they were promptly made pris- oners. The charge was broken, the army of Lee driven back into Virginia, and the loyal State of Pennsylvania saved from invasion.
The importance of the battle of Gettysburg can- not be overestimated. The North had been pro- foundly moved by the invasion of Pennsylvania, which had seemed the most dangerous blow yet struck at the Union. The war had lasted two
THE VERMONTERS AT GETTYSBURG: STANNARD'S CHARGE.
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years and had cost much blood and treasure, yet the Union forces seemed to have made but little headway, and when the news came that Lee had struck the boldest blow of the war, the North was in an agony of suspense. It proved to be the proverbial darkest hour before the dawn.
The victory at Gettysburg drove the Confederate forces back to the defensive, it inspired the North with confidence, it was the beginning of the end. Grant had already won his great victories along the Mississippi. The Confederacy was hemmed within narrower limits. Its power to harm and its resources for resistance were lessened. To have rendered so signal a service as did Stannard's brig- ade on that day so big with fate is something to be remembered. No battle of the war has been more discussed and of none are the details more contro- verted. It is even a matter for controversy whether General Hancock or General Stannard gave the command to charge at the fateful moment, but no one has denied or is likely to deny the value of the " nine months men" from the Green Mountain State at the critical moment on that hard-fought field.
To the Vermont regiments of the First Brigade was assigned, just after Gettysburg, the peculiar duty of repressing the disloyal acts of mobs in New York State. The hour of the country's greatest
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peril had roused into hopeful activity those who at the North were secretly endeavoring to aid the South to success; the drafting of soldiers had aroused the keenest resentment on the part of the rabble of a number of Northern cities and espe- cially New York. To hold these in check and give them if necessary a severe lesson the veterans of Vermont were sent North, as men who could be relied upon to behave themselves in the face of new temptations and act with sobriety and good judg- ment in a duty of more than usual delicacy. This was an agreeable interruption of the more danger- ous work at the front, but it was soon over and the Vermonters were again in Virginia in the autumn of 1863, with the hardest part of their bloody work still before them.
When General Grant was called from his vic- torious career elsewhere to lead the Army of the Potomac, the war assumed an aspect even more ter- rible than it had yet put on. Grant was a com- mander who possessed above all others the quality of grim and dogged determination. His business was to win victories, to reach Richmond, to end the war, and he rightly judged that any sacrifice which should accomplish these objects must be borne without flinching.
The first great sacrifice was offered up at the battle of the Wilderness. Into the details of that
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fight we need not enter. The First Vermont Brig- ade was again placed in a position of the utmost importance, that known to students of military his- tory as the " old Brock road." Here a thousand men fell killed or wounded the first day. Here the trees were felled by cannon balls and the thickets torn by bullets until the very aspect of that tat- tered forest suggested the apparition of gashed and mutilated human forms. Here came the fierc- est assaults of Lee's forces, struggling through the heavy forest growth, to cut Grant's army in two. Here fell Colonel Stone of the Vermont Second, shot through the thigh. He went to the rear and had his wound dressed and returned to the front only to fall dead not long after. Lieutenant-Colonel Tyler who took his place received a mortal wound. Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis of the Fifth was seriously wounded, Colonel Barney of the Sixth mortally, Colonel Pratt of the Fourth received a disabling bullet in the thigh. Of five colonels of the Ver- mont troops three were fatally injured and but one was left unhurt.
On the following day, not disheartened by the terrible loss they had sustained, the same troops defended against one of the fiercest and most determined charges a position of the utmost im- portance. In the two days' fighting three fourths of the officers were killed or wounded. The hard
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fighting did not stop with the battle in the Wilder- ness. At Spotsylvania the First Brigade suffered heavily as usual. At Cold Harbor all the Vermont regiments were engaged. At Petersburg nearly four hundred men were taken prisoners, more than half of them to die in the rebel prisons. One at least was torn to pieces by bloodhounds while seek- ing to escape. Of those who survived the fearful imprisonment many were mere wrecks of men.
It was when, just after this sad capture, the Ver- mont troops had been ordered to Washington to meet Early's raid, that President Lincoln made one of those remarks which so endeared him to the men in the ranks. He had gone to the dock at Washington to meet the steamer on which the brigade had been expected to arrive, but was in- formed that it brought no troops; only Major-Gen- eral Getty and his staff. " I do not care to see any major-generals; I came here to see the Vermont Brigade," was the President's comment. When the regiments finally came, Mr. Lincoln was at hand to witness their disembarkation. Then came the famous Shenandoah campaign of Sheridan, in which the Vermont troops were again engaged and in which the Eighth and Tenth regiments distin- guished themselves, the former by a bayonet charge at Winchester, the latter losing its commander and sixty men in the same brilliant and bloody battle.
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The campaign of 1865 saw the final defeat of the Confederacy. Grant's genius had for the first time brought success upon the operations of the Army of Virginia, navigation on the Mississippi had been opened to Union vessels, the Confederate ports were blocked, Vicksburg had fallen, Gettys- burg had been won, Sherman had made his famous march to the sea. The final defeat of Lee's army meant the downfall of the Confederacy.
Vermont troops were again found leading the van in the great charge upon Petersburg which was the decisive blow of the campaign, and Captain Charles G. Gould of the Fifth Vermont Regiment was probably the first man to enter the rebel lines. This was not an accident. It was not an accident that the same troops had been placed at the post of greatest responsibility and loss in the battle of the Wilderness. Grant was a commander who did not allow chance to win his battles for him. The men of General Wright, who had suc- ceeded upon Sedgwick's death to the command of the famous Sixth Corps, were selected to lead the assault on Petersburg. Getty's division was as- signed for the assaulting column, and Getty put the Vermont brigade in the van.
There was no chance in these arrangements. The brigade was marched a mile along the line past many other good regiments, to a point oppo-
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site the portion of the works selected for the attack, and was stationed in the darkness at a point just opposite a ravine which broke the enemy's work.
In the early morning they prepared in silence for the assault, well knowing that for many of their number that day would be the last. So soon as it was light enough to dimly distinguish objects near at hand the advance was ordered. The men had been under arms in the dark and cold for hours. They knew what their orders were - to charge without firing, to carry the works and to re-form and hold their position. Silently until the first half of the distance was traversed, then with ringing cheer upon cheer as the shots of the rebel pickets dis- closed their position, the brigade dashed up the slope, the entering wedge of an army of fourteen thousand men. The artillery along the Confeder- ate line was turned upon them until they passed out of range, then the sharp rattle of musketry tore great gaps in their ranks, but nothing could stop them. They gained the works, carried them and turned the guns upon the flying rebels. They even followed in pursuit of them, in disobedience of orders, and were with difficulty checked and re- formed. They captured two rebel regimental flags in the assault and a large amount of war material - Vermont troops secured many banners during the war, but lost none.
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The charge of the Sixth Corps was but a part of the day's action. Other commands were engaged at other points and all manfully did their part in achieving the signal victory. At Appomattox Court House a few days after Lee finally surrendered to Grant, and the war was practically over. The Sixth Corps was detained in Virginia for some time but in June it was disbanded and the Vermonters, like the other soldiers North and South, went home to meet a welcome such as never men received be- fore. Only the Seventh Regiment was detained on duty in the Gulf region for about another year.
The account which has been thus presented is but fragmentary and incomplete, neglecting wholly many important engagements and scarcely more than mentioning others of the utmost importance. Nor does it refer to the excellent service of Ver- mont men in other departments during the war, in the artillery, the cavalry, the navy in the civil ser- vice, or of the women in the hospitals.
The full and complete story of any one of the States in the Civil War is of itself matter for a vol- ume. So far as it relates to Vermont, the whole subject has been covered by the historians of that great struggle. Benedict's "Vermont in the Civil War," is the authoritative record of the troops of the State. Vermont had furnished to the Union armies no division commander, no
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tactician of acknowledged supremacy. None of its generals reached the highest grades in the ser- vice, but its private troops were the best that fought in the war on either side, and its regimental com- manders numbered many men who were spirited and judicious leaders, and may have lacked only opportunity to demonstrate the possession of still higher and more valuable qualities.
If there was heroism with the troops of Stannard, of Brooks and of Phelps at the front, there was equal heroism at home. Scarcely a family but had sent some member to the front; scarce one in the sad later years of the war but mourned the death of friends or relatives. The cost was great, but there was no shrinking from it. The crushing weight of taxes was the least of the ills to be endured. In the absence of the stronger workers, old men who wished they were again young enough to fight for their country and lads who counted the years until they might be old enough struggled along with the women as best they could in the work of farm and factory. In preparing supplies for the soldiers, in knitting and sewing, by nursing in the hospitals, by that hardest task of all, which was to bear the loss of their nearest and dearest ones without repining and try to think that it was all for the best, Vermont's daughters showed no less fortitude than her sons. There was
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grief everywhere, but little faltering from the stern task which had been set for the people of the North.
Vermont's entire quota for 1862 was filled with- out recourse to the draft. By 1863 the number sent to the front had reached eighteen thousand two hundred and twenty-four. In that year, the virtual crisis and turning point of the war, the Dem- ocratic State Convention fell under Copperhead in- fluence. Vermont Democrats as a rule were as strong Union men as the Republicans, but in that Convention a platform was adopted which declared that the liberties of the people were endangered by the administration of martial law in loyal States. It was the time of provost - marshals and drafts, and this plat- form voiced a senti- ment which was not at all uncommon in the North. The Republi- cans retorted with the declaration that North- ern traitors were de- serving of greater re- proach than Southern rebels, the Democratic candidate was snowed FOR THE SOLDIERS,
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under by- a majority exceptional even in war times, and from the soldiers at the front came an indignant and unanimous protest. Southern sympathizers were not popular in Vermont in that anxious time and even such comparatively mild censure of the conduct of the war was bitterly resented.
It might have been supposed that Vermont, separated from the South by hundreds of miles of loyal territory and from the sea-coast by the width of a State, was not likely to feel the touch of actual warfare, yet something much like it visited St. Albans in 1864. It was the very crisis of the re- bellion and the active men of the town were at the front. In addition to this the Legislature was in session at Montpelier ; and an important court was sitting at Burlington. Many of the town's remain- ing citizens were at one or the other of these places on the rainy Wednesday when the famous St. Albans raid occurred.
It was the nineteenth of October, a date long remembered in Northern Vermont. The raiders were only twenty-two in number, and they did not descend upon the town in a body, but came one or two at a time, registering quietly at the hotels and finding out the resources of the place for plunder and the means of escape it afforded. At three o'clock in the afternoon, the raiders simultaneously
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entered the St. Albans, Franklin County and First National banks and compelled the cashiers at the pistol's mouth to sit quietly by while they searched for the available funds, in their hurry leaving quite as much as they found. One of the cashiers was locked into his own vault. Meanwhile a number of the party kept guard upon the street, aiming to prevent all knowledge of the raid from becoming general. Not far away hundreds of men were at work in the machine shops of the railroad, and it was necessary to the purpose of the raiders that they should not be apprised.
By degrees upon the village green assembled quite a number of the citizens who had come along the street and been ordered to stand there until released. One man when commanded to stop took the matter as a joke and was slightly wounded by a pistol bullet. When all was ready the raiders went to the livery stable nearest at hand and im- pressed horses for their flight. By this time the alarm had been sounded and men were running to the spot armed with clubs and rusty guns which would not go off. One of them wounded a raider with a rifle-ball, and in a volley from the band E. J. Morrison, a builder, was fatally wounded.
Away then flew the marauders, carrying with them over two hundred thousand dollars in money to enrich the coffers of the Confederacy. It was a
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full hour before pursuit was organized. The men were followed to Canada, and after very long and vexatious litigation only a part of the money was recovered. The pursuing party had actually se- cured a portion of the money and taken a number of the raiders, but were obliged to liberate their cap- tives and restore the plunder by the Canadian court, that tribunal announcing that the money was taken in actual warfare, and not recoverable on neu- tral ground.
Exaggerated reports of the descent were tele- graphed during its progress to other parts of the Union and aroused a fever of alarm, partly justified by the fact that similar raids had been attempted, and were feared elsewhere along the border. It is reasonably certain that the Confederate authorities sanctioned these plots, and among the men impli- cated in that at St. Albans were a number of young men of prominent Southern families.
The inevitable humorous incidents which accom- pany graver events were not lacking in the St. Albans raid. In one of the gutted banks was sit- ting an old man. With senses somewhat blunted by years he remained unmoved during the transfer of the bank funds and placidly inquired after the raiders had left the room " Who were those gentle- men?" A farmer coming to town that afternoon astride a fine horse was spied by one of the raiders
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who was in hot flight upon a jaded steed. A hasty and enforced exchange of mounts ensued. Proceed- ing on his way to town the farmer soon saw the fran- tically-riding pursuers, and, taking them to be an- other section of the party that had robbed him, set out across the fields at the top of his speed. The mistake was mutual and the pursuers, supposing him to be one of the robbers, fired at him until he was out of sight, fortunately without doing him any injury.
The close of the war was nowhere welcomed more gladly than in Vermont, for nowhere had greater sacrifices been made. The State had lost men and spent money far out of proportion to its size and wealth; its liberal provision for the sol- diers had entailed a heavy tax rate, while of the $3,600,752.52 spent during the war, more than half remained as bonded debt bearing a high rate of interest. The farms had been almost stripped of their tillers by war and emigration, and industry of all kinds had been dealt a heavy blow.
The return of the boys in blue and their resump- tion of peaceful pursuits with the impetus which was given to every branch of production after the termination of the war soon began to repair the ravages of the long conflict. The people set to work with a will, and with such success that the census of 1870 showed marked advance and improve-
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ment over that of 1860 in the moral and material resources of the State, while the population, in spite of the number of soldiers who had perished during the war and the emigration which recommenced after its close, increased over fifteen thousand. Though the panic of 1873 and the succeeding years gravely interrupted the prosperous course of affairs, the State has continued in the main to thrive in the two decades which have passed since the War of the Rebellion closed.
CHAPTER XII.
SINCE THE WAR.
At & Creamery! - Receiving Milk HE heroism of war seldom fails to win admiring comment and appreciation. Songs are written upon it, stories told of it, grave historians ex- amine each minute de- tail, and every well- fought battle, desper- ate charge or stout resistance goes upon record for the most remote generations. The heroism of peace is taken as a matter of course and few trouble themselves to inquire into it or tell its story. No flags are waved over it, no bugle blasts inspire it, the newspapers do not publish highly-colored ac- counts of it under flaring head-lines. Yet it is none the less heroic.
There was nothing in the conduct of the civil war on either side that more significantly displayed the spirit and courage of the people than the way
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in which those great armies which had faced each other for years dissolved again, and the soldiers dispersed to their widely-scattered homes and took up their unaccustomed tasks. Not only was this done without complaint or serious disorder, but such energy was displayed, such hard work done, such faith in the finality of the solution of vexed problems shown, that the material ravages of war were effaced and its frightful waste repaired in far less time than would have seemed possible. The qualities by which this mighty task was accom- plished were no less heroic than those which the soldier displayed in battle. There was no State in which circumstances made the task harder than in Vermont, and none in which it was faced with more zeal and accomplished with greater relative success.
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