By Pat Leonard, 5-6-13
On the afternoon of May 2, 1863, Cpl. Rice Bull looked out over the position that his newly formed regiment, the 123rd New York Infantry, was assigned to defend, just south of the Chancellorsville crossroads. He and his fellow upstaters had not yet “seen the elephant” – the soldiers’ expression for experiencing combat – and he was reassured to see that they were supported by more veteran units, including the Second Massachusetts and the 27th Indiana. He noted the striking contrast between those units’ faded, bullet-ridden battle flags and the crisp, spotless condition of his regiment’s colors.
Bull’s reassurance, however, turned to disappointment when the Army of the Potomac’s commander, Gen. Joseph Hooker, circulated a message boasting that he had “caught the Confederates in a trap from which they could not escape.” In their naïveté, Bull and the other farm boys of the 123rd feared that the war would end before they got to see any action.
They need not have worried. On the next day – the second bloodiest day of the Civil War – their position came under assault by the Confederate general Richard Anderson’s division. Soldiers along the entire Union line – veteran and rookie troops alike – were now in a desperate struggle for their lives.
At the height of the battle, Rice Bull was struck by a bullet that entered his right cheek, glanced along his jawbone and exited his neck, but miraculously missed any vital blood vessels or nerves. While attempting to make his way to the rear, Bull was hit again, this time by a ball that pierced his left side just above his hip and exited near his spinal column.
Bleeding, disoriented and exhausted, he managed to find a depressed area behind the lines, where he joined other wounded men lying out of harm’s way while waiting out the battle, which was going poorly for the Union side. In fact, the Confederate onslaught surged past the wounded soldiers without their even realizing it, enveloping them behind enemy lines. Not long after, they were captured and taken further behind the front.
Yet they were not entirely abandoned. Bull noted: “While we were in the Confederate lines, all the Johnnies treated us with kindness and with consideration for our feelings; they did all they could to make us comfortable. They had no means with which to help us much but were willing to do what they could. I came in contact with many of their soldiers while I was a prisoner and without exception found them kind and helpful.” He went on to report: “Later in the afternoon we were visited by a good many of our late enemies; they were friendly and helped our wounded in every way they could.”
The rebels that Bull saw assisting the Union wounded belonged to Ramseur’s Brigade, made up four North Carolina regiments. “They were well appearing and their kind treatment of our wounded stamped them as a fine class of men. They might have felt ugly and revengeful … yet held no grudge and were glad to do what they could for us.” When Bull found himself too dizzy to walk without assistance, one Confederate whittled a cane for him from a branch. He still possessed that cane 50 years later.
Bull’s experience was echoed by the Confederate surgeon Spencer Welch of the 20th South Carolina, who later reported that he “saw one of our soldiers cut a forked limb from a tree and make a crutch for a Yankee who was wounded in the foot.
In the meantime, the battlefront moved north. The advancing rebels continued to pursue the reeling Unionists, driving them back against their river crossings. Even though his army was greatly outnumbered, Robert E. Lee remained on the offensive and expected to crush the federals with an all-out assault on the morning of May 6.
Against the advice of several subordinates, Hooker didn’t give Lee the opportunity to renew his attacks. On the night of May 5-6, he withdrew his army across the river, then pulled back the pontoon bridges. Except for two wagons of medical supplies that his medical director, Jonathan Letterman, ordered to remain on the river’s south side – “with the hope that our wounded would receive a share of them, which they did” – the men left behind would have to fend for themselves.
Among those left behind, on another part of the field, was the surgeon Daniel Holt of the 121st New York. He continued to attend to his duties, dressing wounds and performing amputations, until so exhausted that he at last found himself standing, he later wrote,
"fast asleep over a dying man. Had not General Wilcox (Cadmus M. Wilcox, C.S.A, First Army Corps) kindly supplied me with food from his own table, and made me a guest rather than a prisoner, I believe I should have been compelled to throw myself down with the rest and crave the treatment I myself was yielding. As it was, I kept about, being the recipient of numerous favors from rebel officers, always treated with respect, and in very many cases with marked kindness. Here General Lee came to see me. Four times did this great man call and feelingly inquire if the men were receiving all the care that could be bestowed; at the same time remarking that it was beyond his power to yield such succor as his heart prompted. … I must in justice say for an enemy, that I was never treated with greater consideration by intelligent men, than I was by these very rebs for the ten days that I remained among them."
Holt was also befriended by a Confederate surgeon, Dr. George Rogers Clark Todd, Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother. In conversation, Todd told Holt that the first lady was “a poor weak-minded woman.” Though he didn’t say so at the time, Holt later admitted that he concurred with Todd’s assessment.
Just down the road from Holt’s location, the Rev. James Sheeran, chaplain for the 14th Louisiana regiment, was traversing the battlefield administering to dying soldiers when he came upon a makeshift hospital full of Yankees. Finding that no one had so much as cleaned and dressed their wounds, he rounded up several paroled attendants and ordered them to go through the knapsacks of dead soldiers to find shirts, handkerchiefs and other materials suitable for bandages. He then departed; when he returned two hours later, he was “pleased to find the surgeons and nurses all at work attending to their wounded.”
With the bulk of the fighting over, Letterman continued to agitate to supply and recover the wounded that were still south of the Rappahannock, whose number he estimated at 1,200. Under a flag of truce, he negotiated with his Confederate counterpart, Dr. Lafayette Guild, to arrange care for both armies’ wounded. “General Lee offered free passage to our ambulance trains to Chancellorsville and other points,” Letterman recounted. “When this information was received, on the 11th of May, I advised a pontoon bridge to be thrown over the Rappahannock, at the United States Mine Ford, that our trains, capable of carrying all the wounded at one trip, might at once pass over … and return without delay.”
Letterman’s request for a bridge was not immediately acted upon, so he was forced to ferry food and medical supplies across the river, a tedious process that was inadequate to the task at hand.
What Letterman feared, Rice Bull was experiencing firsthand. The noble actions of their captors notwithstanding, men were growing feverish and dying of their wounds at an accelerating pace. For the less severely wounded, starvation was becoming a concern. Bull wrote of the chaplain Thomas Ambrose, 12th New Hampshire, who had stayed with and cared for the men, only to watch them succumb to hunger and neglect. Ambrose walked to General Lee’s headquarters to beg for food and medicine. Lee had little to spare, but did manage to give the Union chaplain a 50-pound sack of meal, which he carried nearly three miles back to the wounded men. “It was the only food we had for the next six days,” Bull noted.
The rebel soldier who had provided Bull with a cane continued to work among the Union wounded, and shared what little rations he had with them. At one point, when a Southern civilian rode up and began to berate the Yankees, “our Johnnie friend turned on him, saying: ‘You just keep quiet old man, don’t you see these are wounded men? You have no right or business to insult them.'”
At last, after having his request telegraphed to, and approved by, his superiors in Washington, Letterman’s pontoon bridge was built on May 13. Immediately he sent 550 ambulances over the river and started to collect the Union wounded. He reported that by 9:30 p.m. the next day, “these sufferers, numbering eleven hundred and sixty, were within our lines. The trains of each Corps were halted as they crossed to the north bank of the river, refreshment given the men, and such professional care bestowed by the Medical officers accompanying them as the cases required.”
Corporal Bull was among the men that made this crossing. He welcomed the coffee he was handed after reaching the Rappahannock’s north shore, but found he could not eat any solid food. As one of the 17,197 Union casualties of Chancellorsville [1,606 killed, 9,672 wounded and 5,919 captured or missing], he was sent home to recuperate. Confederate losses were slightly less: 13,303 casualties [1,665 killed, 9,081 wounded and 2,018 captured or missing], but represented a significantly greater percentage of their total forces. Lee also lost “his right arm” – Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was wounded by friendly fire on the night of May 2-3 and died a week later.
Combatants’ recollections of most Civil War battles often mention acts of kindness performed for wounded enemy soldiers, but Chancellorsville stands out in this regard. Perhaps because both armies remained close to the battlefield for nearly a month afterward, there were more opportunities for the soldiers’ innate humanity to surface. And perhaps because the battle was fought at the war’s midpoint, when soldiers had learned to respect their adversaries, but hostilities had not yet degenerated into the “total warfare” of later engagements – like Spotsylvania, or during scorched-earth campaigns like Philip Sheridan’s in the Shenandoah Valley – the men were more favorably disposed to performing such acts. Whatever the reason, something in addition to “Lee’s greatest victory” can be assigned to the horrific encounter that took place in early May 1863, something in which soldiers on both sides could take pride.
As for Corporal Bull, he recovered from the wounds he suffered at Chancellorsville and later rejoined his regiment in the Western theater. He participated in Gen. William T. Sherman’s assault on Atlanta and the infamous “March to the Sea.” While crossing Georgia, his unit came upon a prisoner-of-war camp that the Confederates had abandoned just days before. Seeing the miserable conditions under which the prisoners were kept, he realized how fortunate he was to have been wounded and paroled the year before, and not just captured. Bull survived the war and went on to become the secretary treasurer of the Troy & New England Railroad. He died in 1930, three weeks before turning 88.
Pat Leonard is the editor and publisher of The Gold Cross, a magazine for volunteer E.M.T.s in New Jersey. He has written two novels, “Proceed With Caution” and “Damned If You Do.” His great-greatgreat uncle, Sgt. Jerome Leonard, 55th Pennsylvania Infantry, was wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor and later died at Bermuda Hundred hospital after his leg was amputated.
Image: A pontoon bridge over the Rappahannock River, after the Battle of Chancellorsville.Credit Library of Congress
From: opinionator.blogspot.nytimes.com
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