Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 32.djvu/212

 200 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Forty-eighth Virginia Infantry, captured in the Wilderness, May 5, 1864, by Lieutenant-Colonel Albert M. Edwards, 24th Michigan Volunteers.

[From the Times- Dispatch, Dec. 11, 1904, Jan. g-29, 1905.]

THE BATTLE OF SPOTSYLVANIA COURTHOUSE,

MAY 12, 1864.

"The Bloody Angle." What the 4Qth Virginia and Gen. Pegram's Brigade Did.

EPISODE OF GENERAL LEE TO THE REAR."

Graphic Accounts by Colonel J. Catlett Gibson and Dr. William W.

Smith.

[See also, Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. XXI, pp. 228, et seqJ\

Account by Colonel J. Catlett Gibson.

On the evening of the nth of May, we marched to assist in the repulse of a vigorous assault on the breastworks of our left wing, reaching the point of attack just before sunset; as we fronted to go into position, the dead body of a man was pointed out to us as that of a North Carolina surgeon, who had been killed while dressing a wound of one of his men. This was the first Confederate surgeon known by me to have been killed in line of battle, although I saw Dr. Alfred Slaughter, surgeon of the i3th Virginia Regiment, wounded in an attack we made on Sedgwick's corps, between Marye's Heights and Falmouth. We were marched from our left late in the night of the nth and I2th, and slept on our arms that night the sleep of the just made peaceful, in a woods in a location then un- known to us, but subsequent information showed it to have been not far from the headquarters that were Lee's that morn, and near to the angle that was "bloody" ere night. A little after dawn of the 1 2th, I was aroused from a deep sleep by Frank George, one of General Gordon's orderlies, and was told by him that the Yankees