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 11^th Virginia, under Col. Garland, but subsequent information contradicted the statement-- that regiment it was said not being in the fight. Then the Alabama 4^th 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 4^th South Carolina, 4^th Alabama and 11^th 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 19^th 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 6^th Regiment for Yankees, fired and charged upon them and thus became possessed of the battery after it had been captured by the 6^th.

[Transcribed by Sharon Strout]