Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/891

Rh his haversack was perforated with twenty-seven holes and he was struck by a ball which fortunately his belt and haversack prevented from seriously injuring him. At Five Forks, April 1st, he was again captured and was confined at Point Lookout until the following June. At the close of the war he was third sergeant of his company. Sergeant Dashiell was born in Accomack county, March 1, 1839, son of George H. and Atalanta (Feddeman) Dashiell. The father was a native of Maryland, was a farmer by occupation, and died in Norfolk county in 1870. The son was reared in Norfolk county, and for three years before the war held a clerkship in the Portsmouth postoffice. On his return in 1865 he spent eighteen months at the farm residence, and then made his home at Berkley. From 1867 to 1870 he was in the service of the Bay Line steamship company, during the following year was with the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio railroad company, and then returned to the Bay Line company, with which he has since been associated. In 1890 he removed to Portsmouth, and became the agent of the steamship company. He is a member of Stonewall camp, the Episcopal church, the Knights of Pythias and Knights of Honor. On December 31, 1868, he was married to Alexenia Nash Portlock, who died October 25, 1884, leaving one son, Thomas Edward Dashiell, and a daughter, Kate Atalanta, who died January 6, 1893.

Samuel Boyer Davis, of Alexandria, Va., whose service in the cause of the Confederate States was one of the most romantic in the history of the war, was born at Wilmington, Del., December 5, 1843. Early in life his home was made at Baltimore and, with other young Marylanders, his sympathies were earnestly with the South at the opening of the war in 1861. In his nineteenth year, July, 1862, he enlisted in the Confederate service, as a member of Latimer's battery of artillery, in time to participate in the important engagements of Cedar Run, Second Manassas and Sharpsburg. Subsequently his intelligence and efficiency caused his promotion to the position of orderly with Colonel Hoke, then in command of Trimble's brigade, and he afterward served as aide-de-camp upon the staff of General Trimble, who was promoted major-general and put in command of a division of the Second army corps. While serving in this capacity, in the support of Pickett, during the third day's fight at Gettysburg, he was shot through the lung and taken prisoner by the advance of the Federal forces. Though assured by a surgeon that he would die, he was carried to a field hospital and soon was under care at the Chester hospital, Pennsylvania. His determination to live was no sooner clearly in prospect of realization than he formed a plan to escape before being transferred to a prison. He found a sympathizing comrade in Captain Slay, of the Sixteenth Mississippi, and bribed a guard to permit them to escape on the night of August 16, 1863. After some hairbreadth escapes from detection, they reached Dover, Del., greatly fatigued, the next night, and there received aid in their effort to reach the Potomac. Crossing Maryland, they received help from friends and finally took a boat over the Potomac and reached the Confederate lines. After arriving at Richmond, both were prostrated by the forced march they had made from the Pennsylvania hospital and were for a long time sick with typhoid fever. Late in October, Lieutenant Davis reported