Hillsborough Recorder (NC)
August 7, 1861
Page 2
WHO
TOOK SHERMAN’S BATTERY?
The
Richmond Whig of Friday, has the following:
The
capture of this famous battery has been ascribed to various regiments. The first telegrams gave the honor to the 11th
Virginia,
under Col. Garland, but subsequent information contradicted the statement--
that regiment it was said not being in the fight. Then the Alabama
4th had the glory; then the Hampton’s
Legions. The Lynchburg Virginian
ascribes it to the regiment commanded by Col. Early. But the Enquirer of yesterday gives the chief
praise to Ex-Gov. Smith. According to
that paper, the 4th South Carolina,
4th Alabama and 11th Virginia regiments were
engaged with the battery, and “finding they were being overwhelmed in numbers,
were about giving way in the centre of the column. At this juncture, Ex-Governor Smith, with his
19th regiment of Virginians, came to the rescue. Seizing a Confederate flag he unfurled it to
the breeze, and appealing to the troops in short, forcible terms, to rally to
the rescue and make one gallant, final charge with their comrades in arms and
win the day, he put himself at the head of the column, and followed by our
gallant men, charged through several companies of sharp shooters stationed in the
bushes behind fences, reached the terrible battery and amid a blinding storm of
“leaden rain and iron hail,” captured it and turned the pieces on the panic
stricken foe. Not one man of Sherman’s battery was left
to tell of its capture, and but four horses remained alive.”
It
might be that these various and conflicting claims to the distinguished glory
of silencing this most formidable battery of the Regular Army, may be explained
by the fact, that there were four or five other batteries quite as formidable
as this, which shared its fate. Perhaps
all the claimants did their parts, and each of them won a battery. But who made the conquest of the great Brobdignagian Battery of 32 pounders,
that monstrous novelty in warfare, which Old Scott unquestionably sent over to
us for the purpose of battering down Washington? We suppose we must await the official
dispatch to assign the glory of that achievement.
To
the above the following is added by the Raleigh Register:
We
learn from a gentleman just from Richmond that there is a strong reason to
believe that Sherman’s famous Battery was taken in the first instance by the
late lamented Colonel Fisher’s Regiment of North Carolina State troops, and
that it was after the capture, and when he was beyond the battery, and between
it and the enemy, that he met his death.
His body was found about forty yards from the battery. It seems that a Georgia Regiment came up and
mistaking the 6th Regiment for Yankees, fired and charged upon them
and thus became possessed of the battery after it had been captured by the 6th.
[Transcribed by Sharon Strout]
