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Updated: June 17, 2025
What was yesterday a proud, well-disciplined army that had accomplished during the first part of the day all, or more, that even the most sanguine General could have expected crossed rivers, pulled themselves over the mountains, assaulted and surprised an enemy who lay in feeling security behind almost impregnable fortifications, routed and driven them from the field, capturing almost the whole camp equipage with twenty field pieces now before him poured, the same victorious army, beaten, stampeded, without order or discipline, all the fruits of victory and his own camp equipage gone, his wagon trains abandoned, the men without arms, his cannoneers without cannonry and every color trailing in the dust.
The door was suddenly opened, and the attorney-general Roderer burst in. "Sire," cried he, with impassioned utterance, "you must save yourself! All opposition is vain. The cannoneers have already withdrawn the loading from the cannon, because they are unwilling to fire upon the people. The king has no time to lose.
In an instant, before a single shot could be fired in return, before the muskets could be taken from the stacks, before the cannoneers could reach their pieces, Kershaw's men, with loud and continuous yells, swarmed over the parapet in Thoburn's front, seized the guns, and sent his half-clad soldiers flying to the rear.
Yet it so happened that the cannoneers, floundering through the bogs, made such an outcry especially when one of their guns became so bemired that it was difficult for them to escape the disgrace of losing it that the garrison, hearing a great tumult, which they could not understand, fell into one of those panics to which raw and irregular troops are liable.
Over all that extensive and enchanting region, trampled and torn and laid waste by hostile armies in 1864 and 1865, John Randolph rode and hunted from the time he could sit a pony and handle a gun. Not a vestige remains of the opulence and splendor of his early days. Not one of the mansions inhabited or visited by him in his youth furnished a target for our cannoneers or plunder for our camps.
One of Honore's cannoneers was killed while loading the piece; the others pushed the body out of their way, and the service went on with the same methodical precision, with neither more nor less haste.
Fringed with darting flames the cavalry drove on headlong into the unseen; behind clanked the flying battery, mounted gunners sabering the dark forms that leaped out of the underbrush; on on rushed horses and guns, riders and cannoneers a furious, irresistible, chaotic torrent, thundering through the night.
Our cannoneers were standing up bravely to their work, but the rebel shells were bursting about them in a wild storm of crashing, deafening explosions, and hurtling, shrieking masses of iron. The sharp crack of their own rifles was at times drowned by the ear-splitting din of the bursting shells.
With carriage and caisson leaping at every jump, the half-naked, smoke-begrimed cannoneers clinging to their seats like monkeys, they dashed recklessly forward, swung about into position, and almost before the muzzles had been well pointed, were hurling canister into that blue, victorious advance.
Schott's riflemen camped there now, and, as we rode by, the soldiers stared at our Indian. Then we passed Gansevoort's Third Regiment, under tents and making ready to march; and the log cantonment of Colonel Lamb's artillery, where the cannoneers saluted, then, for no reason, cheered us. Beyond were camped Alden's Regiment, I think, and in the rear the Fourth and Fifth New York.
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