Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/985

Rh he became a member of the Old Dominion Rifles, afterward Company H of the Seventeenth Virginia infantry, at its organization. With this command he went into the field and participated in every battle in which the regiment was engaged until after the bloody contest of Sharpsburg, on September 17, 1862. On May 30, 1862, at the battle of Seven Pines, he received a wound in the head, but speedily recovered from this injury and rejoined the regiment. At Sharpsburg his career as a soldier was ended by four severe wounds, all received within the space of a very few minutes. One bullet entered his right shoulder, another pierced his right arm near the elbow, a third was buried in his hip, and the fourth went entirely through the body, piercing the left lung in its course. It seemed that these wounds would necessarily prove fatal, but his comrades conveyed him to Shepherdstown, Va., where, with the aid of skillful nursing his wonderful vitality triumphed over death, and he recovered, though his wounds left him a helpless cripple so far as the active life of a soldier was concerned. The body wound had caused paralysis of the left arm so that it was almost useless, the right arm had been shattered so that that injury alone would have incapacitated him for service. Nevertheless, he remained subject to the call of the Confederacy and accepted a detail to the postoffice department at Richmond, where he remained until the evacuation of the city. At the close of the war he returned to Alexandria, where he formed a partnership with an old comrade, Edgar Warfield, in the retail drug trade, in which he is still engaged. Mr. Hall is a member of R. E. Lee camp, No. 2, Confederate Veterans, of Alexandria. A modest, unassuming gentleman, his ambitions have never been in the direction of public or official position. The fearless soldier in the days of war has become a model citizen in the time of peace. The fortunes of war were decided against the cause for which he fought, and he accepts the result, with the knowledge that he gave all but life to have it otherwise. We could appropriately paraphrase the inscription upon the Alexandria Confederate monument, and of him say: "He lives in the consciousness of duty' faithfully performed."

Captain Frederick M. Halstead, a prominent and wealthy planter of Norfolk county, who made an honorable record as a soldier of the Confederate States army, was born in the house which he now occupies upon the ancestral farm two miles east of Norfolk, June 30, 1846. His plantation, known as Indian Grove, on account of its location on Indian river, has been in the possession of his family for six generations, and is now one of the most valuable farm properties in southeastern Virginia. His father, Joshua M. Halstead, was born here, and hither brought his bride, Frances Old, who for many years was his trusted and faithful wife. Here, also, their son Frederick was reared and prepared for the continuance of his youthful studies at the Virginia military institute. That famous academy he entered in the year 1860, at the age of fourteen years, and, during his first year's work, learned from the instruction of Prof. Thomas J. Jackson, soon to be famous as "Stonewall," the elements of military tactics. On account of his youth he did not enter the regular service of the Confederacy until 1863, but meanwhile, during Jackson's Valley campaign of 1862, he fought with the entire corps of cadets, in