The 4th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War

We Have Seen a Pretty Hard Campaign

177 c h apter 11 We Have Seen a Pretty Hard Campaign Some Confederate soldiers paid a terrible price for the bayoneting of Harrison Jeffords in the weeks after the fighting at Gettysburg. According to an officer in the division with the 4th Michigan, many Rebels were killed in retribution at Wapping Heights near Manassas Gap on July 23. “We found over 100 bodies of rebels, who had been killed or wounded and afterward bayoneted by our men, who have not forgiven the rebels for their atrocities at Gettysburg and other places,” wrote Lt. Charles Salter of the 16th Michigan. “[T]he majority of the 3rd and 5th Corps declare they will bayonet every rebel they can get at, on the battlefield.”1 But this retaliation was still three weeks off. As darkness fell over the Gettysburg battlefield on July 2, James Houghton, with his wounded captain leaning on him for support, made it to a Third Corps hospital set up in a barn, possibly at the Jacob Snyder farm. Captain McLean was so weak he had to stop frequently. “[A]s we came to the gate we were met by a gard who informed us that they had about 300 wounded in Hospital and could not possibly admit any more,” Houghton wrote. “[T]he captain was to[o] weak to go any farther so He layed down on the ground saying He would lye there till they could take Him in.” If the violence in the trees near the Wheatfield had been horrific, the scene at the hospital was a nightmare. “The wounded were lying on the === c h apter 11 === 178 ground in rows acrost the yard . . . at the east end of the yard were lying Some of the most hop[e] less cases some were in the agonies of death,” Houghton wrote. The wounded were laid out in rows, with a path between them. He saw “the Surgeons were busily at work probing for bullets and amputating limbs.” When he walked back by the barn, “filled . . . with the wounded to its utmost capacity,” Houghton couldn’t take any more. As he started back to find his regiment, he came across one of his lieutenants. When Houghton told him about McLean’s condition and the state of the Third Corps’ hospital, the lieutenant decided they had to get their captain out of there. Borrowing a stretcher, they carried McLean to another hospital, where his wounds were quickly dressed. Exhausted, Houghton tried but couldn’t find his way back to his regiment. He lay down and fell asleep by a side of a log somewhere on the east side of Little Round Top.2 Through the morning of July 3 the ranks of the 4th Michigan slowly grew as men who survived the retreat from the Wheatfield found the regiment in the Union line near the George Weikert farm, north of Little Round Top. So did soldiers who worked through the night bringing in the wounded. While they didn’t yet know the score of all their casualties, a soldier from Monroe wrote that the regiment had been “handled more roughly this time than ever before.” Yet as bleak and terrible as the previous evening had been, there was some good news. Albert Boies, initially among the scores of men wounded and captured, had escaped from the Confederates during the night. Sgt. Edward Taylor was also wounded and would have been captured, but “managed to escape when they were repulsed by playing wounded and hiding being a large rock,” he wrote. About 80 men were missing, and most of them were prisoners. Some survived the experience, some died, and a few escaped. One of the many captured was diarist George W. Millens of Company B, who didn’t survive, while one of his comrades from Indiana, Adelbert F. Day, who’d already spent six weeks in Libby Prison after Gaines’ Mill, would “hoodwink” the count of his captors and be released in about two months from Belle Isle in a prisoner exchange.3 Company D, largely made up of men from the Ann Arbor area, suffered a large number of casualties. Letters and personnel records indicate that two captured men, David Webster, about 27, from Washtenaw County, and Sgt. Oliver Smith, about 25 and from Perry in Shiawassee County, also survived. Webster’s family correspondence indicates that both men were taken to Belle Isle prison, but there Smith decided to escape, according...