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Updated: May 18, 2025
Not a rifleman in those crouching ranks, not a cannoneer at those masked and shotted guns, but knows the needs of the situation, the imperative duty of forbearance. Besides, there has been time enough to forbid them all to fire. True, a single rifle-shot might drop him and be no great disclosure.
Several of her guns were left loaded, but not shotted; and as the fire reached them they sent out on the startled morning air minute-guns of fearful peal, that added greatly to the alarm that the light of the fire had spread through the country round about. The 'Pennsylvania' burned like a volcano for five hours and a half before her mainmast fell.
Captain Bowes, who was overlooking the prison from an elevation outside, had, however, divined the trouble at the outset, an was preparing to meet it. The gunners, who had shotted the pieces and trained them upon us when we came out to listen t the speech, had again covered us with them, and were ready to sweep the prison with grape and canister at the instant of command.
"Oh, I knew we should be in this war sooner or later, but I didn't think I should be the first man to get shotted up." "It means some one has been trying to shoot us up," answered Rector. "Trying!" exploded Chunky. "They did more than try. They succeeded. Don't you see this wound on my countenance? Wait till I get sight of the man who put that mark on my face. I'll bear the scar for life.
It was therefore with a sigh of real and genuine relief that I heard a shot come whistling close past us from the brig in reply to our own. Captain Vernon, too, was evidently much relieved, for he ejaculated in tones of great satisfaction: "Good! she has fired a shotted gun at us and refuses to show her colours. Now my course is perfectly clear.
Then we marched silently through the woods to join Huger, fifteen miles away at Suffolk. Still unconquered, we hauled down our drooping colors, their laurels all fresh and green, with mingled pride and grief, gave her to the flames, and set the lambent fires roaring about the shotted guns.
It was a soldier, not the modern orator, who first said that "Webster shotted our guns". A letter to Senator Hoar from another Union soldier says that he kept up his heart as he paced up and down as sentinel in an exposed place by repeating over and over, "Liberty and Union now and forever, one and inseparable". Hosmer tells us that he and his boyhood friends of the North in 1861 "did not argue much the question of the right of secession", but that it was the words of Webster's speeches, "as familiar to us as the sentences of the Lord's prayer and scarcely less consecrated,... with which we sprang to battle". Those boys were not ready in 1850.
Little injury had been done by the collision, or the grinding; and, in consequence of our guns having been so much shotted, no damage whatever was done the lower masts of the prize. The shot had just force enough to pass through the bulwarks, make splinters, and to lodge. This left both vessels in good condition for going into port.
The picture of five United States gun-boats lying in line before the city, their ports open and their guns shotted, was pleasing in the eyes of loyal men. Outside of the poorer classes there were some loyal persons, but their number was not large. There were many professing loyalty, who possessed very little of the article, and whose record had been exceedingly doubtful.
"I got wounded in the fracas, I did. I'm going to France one of these days to fight the Huns. Then I suppose I shall get shotted up some more. You take it from me, though, I'll put some of those savages on the run before they get me," declared Chunky belligerently. "Perhaps you will explain why your men ran away from us the other night, sir?" spoke up Walter. "They were called away.
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