Scott Memoirs: Part 17

-- Bradford Ripley Alden Scott: Memoirs of the Civil War

Scars of War

Having brothers in all that history-making along through all those old familiar roads and places in our county identified the memory imperishably. It has been interesting in later visits to the scene to see them marked with appropriate monuments - e.g. the site of the Stevens house at the foot of Marye's hill at Fredericksburg, where General Cobb of Georgia was killed in the battle of Dec. 13, 1863. The next day the young South Carolinian Kirkland defied the enemy's bullets while carrying water to their wounded all over the plateau in front till firing stopped to cheer him from both sides. The place where Stonewall Jackson was wounded on the Plank Road above Chancellorsville. The place farther up that road in the Wilderness where a year afterwards the Texas Brigade held up General R. E. Lee on the field with their order "Lee to the Rear" while they charged and repulsed the enemy -- the most dramatic scene of the Civil war. The monument at Salem Church raised to the gallant New Jersey boys, with generous mention of those from Alabama who withstood them there. And another on the Brock Road near Spottsylvania Court House where Gen. John Sedgwick (excellent officer and "gentleman", as Gen. Lee spoke of him) was picked off by a Confederate sharpshooter while placing some artillery for the opening day's fight there May 8, 1864.

Chancellorsville house had been rebuilt when I was last there and a white oak tree in the road of Jackson's advance, that I first noticed bored through by a 3-inch cannon shot, had healed up so hardly a scar was seen. Even the acres of timber killed by minnie balls alone in the "Bloody Angle", that the following summer showed like a leafless winter forest in the midst of June, have now grown up again in living green. Only a few rotting stumps, full of bullets still, and old minnie balls plowed up in the fields, remind us of the hail of lead that fell there for 18 hours without intermission on May 12, 1864, and that I distinctly remember hearing at a distance of 16 or 18 miles like the grinding of a distant mill, or more exactly imitated by the sputtering roar of our smaller boys' play of sprinkling grains of powder in hot ashes.

We were all at church that day of the Angle fight, thinking of our kindred and friends down there in the midst of it, and doing some extra praying besides, no doubt. But "the worst was yet to come". Vandalism, starvation and bayonette subversion of civil order, compared to which open war was child's play, and the memory of which it has taken two foreign wars and half a century to efface, and so will be passed over as lightly as possible -- still lay ahead of us.