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Hot Skirmish before Pickett’s Charge
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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109 Hot Skirmish before Pickett’s Charge Before noon on July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg, on the battlescarred ground in front of a tall stand of oak and chestnut trees known as Ziegler’s Grove, at a spot near the blasted tomb stones and broken iron fencing of Cemetery Hill, a blue skirmish line charged two hundred yards into Confederate troops entrenched along the Emmitsburg Road and drove them back, after a tough fight. The Union force, composed of four companies of the 126th New York Infantry, pushed ahead into a wheat field, where a concealed gray brigade rose up and stopped the skirmishers. Three of four captains were killed, and more than a third of the rank and file were hit, including Pvt. Edgar McQuigg, who went down after a minie ball ripped into his left forearm, plowing through his elbow and shattering the bones above the joint. His company commander and sole surviving captain, Winfield Scott,165 recalled, “Without exception, I think it was the hottest skirmish I was ever in. The enemy held their line at the Emmitsburg Road, and they stuck to it as though they were ordered to hold it at all hazards.”166 The regimental historian reported that the skirmish was “admitted by all to have been the severest service the Regiment was ever engaged in.”167 For McQuigg, a twentyyear -old teacher from Covert, New York, it was the high-water mark of a turbulent year of campaigning. He had enlisted as corporal in August 1862, and, a month later, Confederates captured him at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, a disastrous affair in which members of the regiment were branded cowards for their role in surrendering a key position that caused the capture of the town and valuable military stores.168 He was paroled a day later and returned to his unit. Two incidents tarnished his record afterwards : In October, he was busted to private after being absent 110 2nd Lt. Edgar Henry McQuigg, Company I, Twenty-fourth Veteran Reserve Corps Carte de visite by unidentified photographer, about 1862–1864 [34.231.247.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:12 GMT) 111 without leave, and when he fell behind during a fatiguing march in January 1863, an officer reported him for straggling. The 126th arrived at Gettysburg on July 2 and received orders to support two artillery batteries at Cemetery Ridge, near the headquarters of Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George Meade.169 Later that day, it reinforced and successfully defended Little Round Top.Many in the regiment considered the stain of Harpers Ferry removed after the sacrifices made here. The wound that McQuigg received at the skirmish near Cemetery Hill took him out of action a few hours before Pickett’s Charge, during which the 126th captured four stands of colors. McQuigg spent the next year in a Philadelphia military hospital , regained partial use of his arm, then transferred to the Veteran Reserve Corps and served until 1867 as a clerk in the Freedmen’s Bureau at Whiteville and Wilmington, North Carolina. He resigned from the VRC as a second lieutenant, and with two partners managed Excelsior, a plantation near Rocky Point, North Carolina. He withdrew from the partnership the following year, went home to New York, married, and then returned to Wilmington . In 1884 McQuigg took a clerical job with the U.S. Quartermaster Department and relocated to Washington, D.C., where he died three years later of hepatitis at age forty-five. His wife, a son, and a daughter survived him. ...