Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 21.djvu/229

 />tlf(/f AVAor.- from Sl.il nl,.

221

During the terrific bombardment on the evening of the ninth day of the siege, April 4, 1865, this gun was pointing towards the Indiana Battery, when struck on the right trunion from behind by a twenty- pound parrot shot, which must have come from Mack's Battery, that was on our right rear as the gun stood. About the same time another shot from the direction of the Indiana Battery, passing under the gun, between the cheeks of the carriage, shattered the elevating screw. The gun was thus doubly disabled. Fortunately an iron handspike had been run under its breech, resting on the cheeks of the carriage, and the gun was thus kept in place, horizontal, mena- cingly deceiving the enemy as to its condition. The work around it was almost leveled by the terrible concentrated fire poured into its position, for though the fore-mentioned batteries, by continual exchange of shots with it, were more likely to have an accurate aim, they were joined on this occasion by every battery within reach of this devoted gun. Since the beginning of the seige the Lady Slocomb had been a terror to them all.

With a broken trunion, the gun had to be dismounted. This was done that night, and the night after another Columbiad was mounted in its place. More than twenty- five years after the Lady Slocomb was found, where it had been thrown from its carriage by the Fifth Company.

Most of the artillery companies in the fort were relieved during the siege, but the Fifth Company declined to take advantage of an offer to that effect from General D. H. Maury, claiming the honor of fight- ing out to the end, and so it did. On the night of the evacuation it was the last to spike its guns, being instructed by General R. L. Gibson to fight them to the last should the enemy discover the retreat and assault before it was accomplished. It passed out into the sea marsh among the very last that left the fort Two killed and eleven wounded marked its devotion to duty in its last fight. On the many battlefields it saw the Fifth Company encountered most of the famous Federal batteries in their western armies. It has sustained very lively recollections of stubborn contests at Perryville, with Loomis' First Battery Michigan Light Artillery, and with Simonson's Fifth Indiana Battery. The men of Loomis' Battery captured at Chickamauga inquired after the "White Horse Battery," as the Fifth Company was designated by the foe during Bragg's Kentucky campaign. Within full view of each other on hillsides, with open fields and