Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 4.djvu/522

 he led the Second Iowa in the thickest of the fight and it was the first to pierce the enemy's lines. This charge was one of the most brilliant feats of that great victory. At the Battle of Shiloh Colonel Tuttle commanded a brigade which fought most gallantly at the “Hornet's Nest.” On the 9th of June he was promoted to Brigadier-General. In 1863 General Tuttle was nominated by the Democratic State Convention for Governor. He issued an address to the voters of the State but was defeated by Colonel Wm. M. Stone, the Republican candidate. He remained in the army until the spring of 1864, commanding a division a portion of the time. In 1866 he was the Democratic candidate for Congress against General Dodge, Republican, but was defeated. In 1872 he was elected to the House of the Fourteenth General Assembly. In 1882 he became a Republican and was elected the following fall by that party to the Legislature. He died in Arizona, October 24, 1892. VOLTAIRE P. TWOMBLY is a name that will ever stand prominent on the “roll of honor” among the heroic young soldiers of Iowa who, in the War of the Rebellion, brought imperishable renown to the “Hawkeye State.” Mr. Twombly was born near Fannington, Van Buren County, on the 21st of February, 1842, and received his education in the common schools, finally taking a course in a commercial college at Burlington in 1865. As a boy of nineteen he enlisted under the first call for volunteers, after the firing on Fort Sumter and was mustered into the United States service as a private in Company F, Second Iowa Volunteer Infantry, on the 27th of May, 1861. October, 1861, young Twombly was promoted to seventh corporal and detailed as color bearer. At the Battle of Fort Donelson, the first great Union victory, the Second Iowa was pronounced by Major General Halleck, to have “proved itself the bravest of the brave,” and had the honor of leading the column which first entered Fort Donelson. In one of the most brilliant charges of the war the Second Iowa swept everything before its resistless charge, losing forty killed and one hundred sixty wounded. As the storm of shot and shell rained on the advancing column, Sergeant H. B. Doolittle who was bearing aloft the colors, fell pierced with three bullets; Corporal G. S. Page caught up the flag and soon fell shot through the head; Corporal J. H. Churcher seized the trailing banner and bore it forward but he was shot through his arm; Corporal H. E. Weaver sprang forward and held aloft the stars and stripes, but soon fell mortally wounded; then Corporal J. W. Robinson, without a moment's hesitation seized the fatal flag and waved defiance to the enemy, when he too was shot down; then Corporal Twombly caught it up and on swept the invincible Iowa regiment through a deadly storm of missiles, never stopping to fire a shot, when down went the flag again, as its youthful bearer was prostrated by a partially spent ball; the next moment he was on his feet bearing aloft the colors, as with a mighty