Ethan's Peach Tree

     Amid the massed foliage, the sounds of battle were muffled, seemed curiously distant, but smoke had drifted to this part of the field.  Colonel Dexter crouched behind a tree, about at the middle of his line, and peered through the smoke and deep shadows.  It wasn't long before he could hear the snapping of branches under appproaching feet, the crackling of leaves, the scraping of clinging brush, the swish of branches pushed back, then let go.  Now he could see men in gray, like ghosts coming through a smoking inferno, a solid line of wary and dangerous men.  When they were only thirty yards away, Dexter stood up from behind the tree.
     "Stand and fire!" he shouted.
     A solid line of blue seemed to rise up out of the earth and smoke.  Muzzles flashed, illuminating the sunless gloom to catch for an instant the expressions of shock and fear on the faces of the Confederates.  The impact of the point-blank volley staggered the Rebel line...

From Ethan's Peach Tree.

http://www.amazon.com/Ethans-Peach-Tree-ebook/dp/B00A4OONK0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373169282&sr=8-1&keywords=ethan%27s+peach+tree

 

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was a fiery abolitionist, a minister, and a celebrated speaker.  Mark Twain went to see Beecher preach and described him as "sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasams this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence."  While Beecher was on a speaking tour in England to argue against the Southern cause, a man in a London audience confronted him.
    The Londoner asked, "If your cause is so righteous with your great Northern strength, why can't you put down the rebellion?"
     Beecher answered, "Because we are fighting Americans and not Englishmen."

Photo from the Brady-Handy Collection, Library of Congress.  Published between 1855 & 1865.

After the sun went down, and the fighting ended for the day, exhausted soldiers would hear appalling sounds coming from the battlefield as they tried to sleep.  Moans and cries of the wounded frightening to hear, frightening because it was unthinkable to believe such sounds could be made by a human.  These sounds were far more than mere shouts for help and calls for water.  But soldiers wrote in their diaries that a no less harrowing sound heard coming from the battlefield at night was a low hum.  This hum was made by wounded men holding back the sound of their suffering by keeping their mouths tightly shut, and by wounded men too weak to give greater sound to their agony.

-SDJ-

Federal dead after the first day of Gettysburg.  Photographer, Timothy O'Sullivan, 1840-1882.  Library of Congress.

My Visit to Gettysburg Battlefield as a Boy in 1962