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Wejustrushedinlikewildbeasts orderly sergeant james wright had been lulled to sleep by rifle fire. Now, only a few hours later, he was awakened by it. The rattle of musketry rose to a fierce crescendo in the area behind and to the right of the First Minnesota.TheTwelfth Corps was busy at daybreak trying to drive the rebels out of the federal entrenchment along Culp’s Hill.The seesaw combat lasted until ten in the morning, when the rebels were finally dislodged and pushed back. For those Confederates who had not achieved eternal sleep this morning or the night before, their fighting earned them only a short night’s rest in the Union breastworks. Captain Ball of Company F, First Minnesota, had spent most of the night pacing. He heard twice more from the regiment, confirming the worst. He ordered the bleary-eyedWright to form the men and rapidly marched them to the First Minnesota’s position on the line. Wright wrote of the reunion, “We had not been separated far, or long, but the greetings were as sincere and earnest as if oceans had divided us and years had elapsed. There was a flood of inquiries about the missing ones, and the answers left no doubts in our minds of the awful calamity that [had] befallen the regiment.”¹ Company F added little more than twenty men to the regiment’s tattered ranks. It probably brought the number to something over one hundred men. Wright made note of the fact: “Under ordinary circumstances an organization that had suffered one half the loss that we had 82 — 8— 0-8735-1-text 2/27/04 1:32 PM Page 82 PUB007 Macintosh HD:Desktop Folder: would have been sent to the rear instead of the firing-line–but this was no ordinary occasion.”² Sergeant Henry Taylor found time to take out his diary and pencil and write, “Friday, July 3: Enemy feel of us at daylight–fighting on our right. At 8:30 a.m. Mr. Snow tells me he saw my brother dead a little to our left and rear.”³ In a letter to his parents three days later, Taylor told, in rather grisly detail, of the death of his brother Isaac. He offered the solace that Isaac would have been killed instantly, given the nature of his wounds. “I cannot express to you my sorrow at his loss. I feel as though I was all alone,” he wrote.⁴ He unburdened himself in a detailed letter to his sister dated July 19, 1863, from the regiment’s camp near Snickers Gap,Virginia. Taylor told of what must have been the most harrowing experience of his life: I looked for Isaac till about 9 p.m. but could not find him. . . . I slept a little . . . . July 3rd, half past eight, a man of Company G (Snow) was coming up with coffee for some of the officers, and saw Isaac lying dead–he told me he thought he saw my brother–killed.⁵ I went with him to the spot and found it but too true, secured his things–knapsack, haversack, and canteen were gone, he probably threw them off when he went into action. I found a spade and tookWilliam E. Cundy and James L. Brown of Co. E and went and dug his grave. We laid him down with all his clothes on, as he fell, and spread a shelter tent over him. As we laid him down, I remarked, ”Well Isaac, all I can give you is a soldier’s grave.” I then sat down on a stone while the two comrades buried him. I was the only one to weep over his grave–his Father, Mother, brothers and sisters were all ignorant of his death.⁶ While the morning fighting raged around Culp’s Hill on the far right, the Union center was relatively quiet except for periodic exchanges of fire by pickets or sharpshooters and the occasional artillery round. About 11:00 a.m. a fierce duel began between artillery of Confederate General A. P . Hill and some of General Hancock’s batteries near the First Minnesota’s position. It lasted about ten or fifteen minutes, then the field became quiet again.⁷“What a pitiable picture we would have made that morning. The stains of powder and dirt, gathered in the marching and the fighting of the two previous days, still covered our hands, faces and clothing, and physical weariness and mental depression and suffering...

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