Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/1050

984. With his battery he had his first experience in battle during the Peninsular campaign, participating in the fighting on the retreat from Yorktown, and in the Seven Days' battles which followed the accession of Lee to the command of the army. Subsequently he took part in all the battles of the Maryland campaign doing effective work at Sharpsburg, and also being engaged with the enemy on the following day at Harper's Ferry, where he was detailed to organize the artillery captured by General Jackson. Four battle names follow in his record that will be forever famous as gigantic and desperate struggles—Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Spottsylvania Court House, in all of which he was a gallant participant. Then the struggle was renewed before Richmond, and he fought with the victorious Confederates at Cold Harbor. Immediately thereafter he went with his battalion, attached to the Second corps, under command of General Early, to the Shenandoah valley, where they drove out Hunter, and then, crossing the Potomac, marched through Maryland participating in the battle of Monocacy, where the battery was hotly engaged and lost two of its lieutenants, and moving on the outworks of Washington and joining in the demonstration against the Federal capital, which included some brisk fighting. Then returning to the valley, he was engaged at Stevenson's depot, July 19, 1864, where the battery suffered severely, losing its four guns, and two lieutenants. Here Captain Kirkpatrick's horse was killed under him. Given another battery of guns, he rendered important service in the action of August 17th, near Winchester, when Early overwhelmed Torbert's division, and drove it from Winchester. In this fight, which Gen. R. E. Lee pronounced one of the most brilliant small battles of the war, Kirkpatrick's battery was hotly engaged all day long, and the captain was wounded, but not seriously. He continued in the campaign in the valley, fighting at Strasburg, and at Waynesboro, and in the spring of 1865, after the surrender of General Lee, started with a force to join General Johnston, but disbanded at Pittsylvania when assured that further action was in vain. From this long and dangerous service he escaped without injury except the wound at Winchester and another, not serious, received at Spottsylvania. Returning to Lynchburg, he resumed the practice of law, in which he had been engaged from his admission to the bar in 1849, to 1861, and though the oath of allegiance was then required, concluded not to take it. During the following years he again became prominent in civil affairs. During four years he sat in the State senate for his district, and was an influential member of that body.

Lieutenant Robert T. Knox, of Fredericksburg, Va., was born in that city July 24, 1837, and was one of six brothers who participated in the military operations of the Confederacy. The father of this patriotic family was Thomas Fitzhugh Knox, a native of Culpeper county, who conducted a large flouring mill and mercantile business at Fredericksburg before the war. He was married in 1832 to Virginia Soutter, daughter of Robert Soutter, a native of Dundee, Scotland, who was prominent as a merchant at Norfolk. She died June 19, 1886, her husband June 24, 1890. Of their fourteen children, seven are yet living. Six of the eleven sons served in the Confederate army—Robert T., James S.,