Sheridan restlessly
urged the men across a small ravine opposite where he sat, his eyes wandering
occasionally everywhere over the large open space which gradually rose to the
vast comparatively level but slightly rolling battlefield in our front, as the
men looked curiously at him so near I could touch him as we marched, little
dreaming that three years after I should be honored for my work that day, which
he saw, by being a member of his staff, or that he would be instrumental in
saving my life when ill with malignant yellow fever and threatened with fatal
black vomit in New Orleans, La. in 1867, by sending his cook, a faithful old
colored woman, who was an expert nurse of yellow fever patients, to care for
me. It was the nearest we had ever been to him, and as our regiment passed
slowly by fours, the line being congested ahead, the men took a good look at
him for he was already famous and every soldier's ideal hero; and as they did
so they unconsciously slackened their sauntering pace a little which was what
caused Sheridan to urge them on.
We were on the eve
of the most brilliant spectacular battle of the war, at any rate that I had
seen, and my ideal genius developed by the great Civil War — Sheridan was to
lead us; and the valor of the renowned Sixth Corps, his pet of all the splendid
corps of as grand and valiant an army as ever existed — the Army of the Potomac
— was about being placed by him at the most important point in line of battle
ready to do and die for him, the Vermont troops or “Green Mountain Boys,” as we
were called through every city we passed, and especially our regiment being one
of two to occupy the keystone position or place of honor on the famous historic
Berryville and Winchester pike in the great assaulting line on a battlefield
slightly rolling but level in places as a house floor when once fairly on it,
to take another stitch out of rebellion, and to help immortalize our hero, and
we did both. Aye! we shall glorify Sheridan continually as a military genius,
even as he has honored us as his ideal soldiers and fighters heretofore, now
and probably will evermore, the grand old Sixth Army Corps which fights
everything everywhere, and rarely gives up fighting till called off, but, alas!
which will soon only be a hallowed, glorified memory; and — still — I like to
think of it in reflective moments as in a celebrated painting of a bivouacked
army at night asleep watched over by an army of hovering angels in midair; that
it as a hallowed spiritual body finally at peace in a heavenly paradise, will
go marching on throughout the boundless everlasting realms of eternity ever to
hover approvingly when occasion shall require over other mortal armies of
dauntless valor and constancy such as it has been in the great Civil War—one
of God's instruments for the betterment of humanity and civil liberty —the
most admired, honored, trusted and beloved by military geniuses of its period.
 |
Straight view of about 800 yards of the pike looking
easterly
towards Opequan Creek from the top of the divide about midway to the enemy's line of battle in the ravine, from where Sheridan formed line of battle. The narrow belt of timber has been cut away behind which we formed. [Click on photo to enlarge.] |
SOURCE: Lemuel Abijah Abbott, Personal Recollections
and Civil War Diary, 1864, p. 151-3
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