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5. At the Battle of Bull Run with the Second New Hampshire Regiment
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and, returning to my camp, break camp and follow him, which I did, reaching Beverly the same day and going into camp. Meanwhile, the news of the catastrophe at Rich Mountain had been sent to Garnett, who commenced to withdraw the same night, but his flight was not discovered until morning, when General Morris and our command in front of Philippi pursued him, diverging from the road to Beverly at a suitable point south of Laurel Hill, and started down Tygart’s Valley River for Virginia. [Lieutenant Colonel John] Pegram,who had commanded the position on the western slope of Rich Mountain and had withdrawn to the north over the mountain ,learning that General Garnett had retired and our troops were coming down the road to Beverly, sent in an officer under a flag of truce and surrendered. General McClellan directed [Brigadier General Newton] Schleich to pursue Colonel Scott and those troops which I had seen at Beverly and which fled towards Huttonsville by the turnpike road over Cheat Mountain. Morris’s command continued the pursuit of General Garnett to Carrick’s Ford, on Tygart’s Valley River,where General Garnett,supervising the rear guard of his command, was killed. The Confederates continued to retreat.General Garnett’s body was brought into our camp and subsequently delivered in a flag of truce. This movement, although almost bloodless on our part, substantially put an end to the domination of the Confederacy in western Virginia. It is true [General Robert E.] Lee, then commander of the Virginia troops, undertook to recover it during the summer and autumn, but was unsuccessful. West Virginia then became a state in the Union. 5 At the Battle of Bull Run with the Second New Hampshire Regiment Francis S. Fiske, Brevet Brigadier General, U.S.V. the principal battles of the War of the Rebellion have been fought over again on paper so often that everyone knows or can learn as much about them as one who fought in them. For a soldier engaged in the fight can see but little [of] how the battle wages away from his immediate vicinity, and it is only from the separate accounts of the several acts of the drama, often simultaneous At the Battle of Bull Run • 47 02.27-74_Cozz 12/2/03, 8:45 AM 47 48 • part 2: the war in 1861 although far apart, that one can learn the whole story of a battle, with the various incidents, each having more or less influence upon the result. What I saw of the First Battle of Bull Run forms the subject of this article. What I shall say will relate largely to the movements and behavior of the Second New Hampshire Regiment, to which I belonged, the only regiment from New Hampshire engaged in the battle, but a fair type of all the New Hampshire and indeed of all the New England country regiments. It is not my purpose to try to analyze the tactics and maneuvers by which we won a victory and then suffered it to be snatched from us. I shall try simply to tell a plain, unvarnished tale of what came within my own ken—the unpleasant things I saw and in which I took an unimportant part. The first accounts of the battle produced the impression of the total rout and panic of the whole Union army. The correspondent of the London Times and other newspapermen, together with many congressmen and civilians,who had come out to see the fun and were the first terror-stricken fugitives from the vicinity of the scene of battle, drew pictures of men pale with terror throwing away their guns and equipments, cutting the traces of artillery and baggage horses, and stampeding from the enemy in close pursuit. The effect produced by these accounts has never been done away with, and today the common belief is that the whole Union army became a disorderly mob and fled from the field in uncontrollable panic. This, notwithstanding the official reports that many regiments and brigades withdrew from the field in good order, some of them ignorant that there had been anything like a panic. The Century Magazine for May 1885 contained an article written by General [Joseph] Johnston, who commanded the Rebels in the battle, which of itself alone is a sufficient contradiction of the earlier statements. He says, “At twenty minutes before five, when the retreat of the enemy toward Centreville began, I...