Headquarters Army Of Potomac
Friday, May 20,
1864
To-day has been entirely quiet, our pickets deliberately
exchanging papers, despite orders to the contrary. These men are incomprehensible
— now standing from daylight to dark killing and wounding each other by
thousands, and now making jokes and exchanging newspapers! You see them lying
side by side in the hospitals, talking together in that serious prosaic way
that characterizes Americans. The great staples of conversation are the size
and quality of rations, the marches they have made, and the regiments they have
fought against. All sense of personal spite is sunk in the immensity of the
contest.
In my letter of yesterday I got you as far as the evening of
Sunday the 8th. On Monday, the 9th, early, Burnside was to come down the
Spotsylvania and Fredericksburg road to the “Gate,” thus approaching on the
extreme left; Sedgwick and Warren respectively occupied the left and right
centre, while Hancock, in the neighborhood of Todd's Tavern, covered the right
flank; for you will remember that the Rebel columns were still moving down the
Parker's Store road to Spotsylvania, and we could not be sure they would not
come in on our right flank and rear. Be times in the morning General Meade,
with three aides, rode back to General Hancock, and had a consultation with
him. The day was again hot and the dust thicker and thicker. As we stood there
under a big cherry tree, a strange figure approached; he looked like a highly
independent mounted newsboy; he was attired in a flannel checked shirt; a
threadbare pair of trousers, and an old blue kepi; from his waist hung a
big cavalry sabre; his features wore a familiar sarcastic smile. It was General
Barlow, commanding the 1st division of the 2d Corps, a division that for fine
fighting cannot be exceeded in the army. There, too, was General Birney, also
in checked flannel, but much more tippy than Barlow, and stout General Hancock,
who always wears a clean white shirt (where he gets them nobody knows);
and thither came steel-cold General Gibbon, the most American of Americans,
with his sharp nose and up-and-down manner of telling the truth, no matter whom
it hurts. . . .
It was about ten o'clock, and I was trotting down the Piney
Branch road, when I met Colonel McMahon, Adjutant-General of the 6th Corps; I
was seriously alarmed at the expression of his face, as he hurriedly asked where
General Meade was. I said, “What is the matter?” He seemed entirely unnerved as
he replied: "They have hit General Sedgwick just here under the eye, and,
my God, I am afraid he is killed!” It was even so: General Sedgwick, with a
carelessness of consequences for which he was well known, had put his
Headquarters close on the line of battle and in range of the sharpshooters. As
he sat there, he noticed a soldier dodging the bullets as they came over.
Rising from the grass, he went up to the man, and, laying his hand on his
shoulder, said, “Why, what are you dodging for? They could not hit an elephant
at that distance.” As he spoke the last word, he fell, shot through the brain
by a ball from a telescopic rifle. . . .
The dismay of General Sedgwick's Staff was a personal feeling; he was like a
kind father to them, and they loved him really like sons. So fell “good Uncle
John,” a pure and great-hearted man, a brave and skilful soldier. From the
commander to the lowest private he had no enemy in this army. . . .
I found General Meade with Generals Wright, Warren, and
Humphreys consulting together in the same spot where Grant sat yesterday among
the bullets, for no apparent reason. You never saw such an old bird as General
Humphreys! I do like to see a brave man; but when a man goes out for the
express purpose of getting shot at, he seems to me in the way of a maniac. . . . In the afternoon there was some fighting
on the right centre, without result; Burnside pushed down on the left, driving
the enemy before him; and so the day closed, our army crowding in on Lee and he
standing at bay and throwing up breastworks.
[At this period Lyman was in the habit of writing a few
lines about the events of the day, and then taking up his narrative several
days back. A bit of foresight of which he characteristically remarks: “I make a
rule to speak chiefly of what has passed, not deeming it prudent to properly
describe the present.” To avoid confusion, the letters have been
chronologically separated.]
SOURCE: George R. Agassiz, Editor, Meade’s
Headquarters, 1863-1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness
to Appomattox, p. 106-8
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