others) "not only reached this fence, but drove the enemy from it, passed over and far beyond it (some 75 yards)
before Lieut.-Col. S. H. Walkup ordered the regiment to fall back."[1] In the retirement of this regiment, Colonel Manning, a native of Pitt county, was severely wounded, and Col. E. D. Hall succeeded to the command of the brigade. To the left, General Ransom’s brigade of Carolinians drove the enemy from the woods in its front, and then, with grim determination, held, for the rest of the day, that important position, called by General Walker "the key of the battlefield," in defiance of several sharp, later infantry attacks. Ransom s men endured a prolonged fire from the enemy s batteries on the extreme edge of the field. General Walker reports: "True to their duty, for eight hours our brave men lay upon the ground, taking advantage of such undulations and shallow ravines as gave promise of partial shelter, while this fearful storm raged a few feet above their heads, tearing the trees asunder, and filling the air with shrieks and explosions, realizing to the fullest the fearful sublimity of battle." Colonel Ransom, of the Thirty-fifth regiment, left in command of the brigade by the temporary absence on official duty of General Ransom, withstood a serious attack and led his command in a hot pursuit. The Twenty-seventh North Carolina and Third Arkansas regiments, left to guard the gap in the lines already mentioned, fought as an independent little brigade. Their conduct was so conspicuously gallant that it received the special commendation of the commander-in-chief, a corps commander, and two division commanders.
"Thus," comments Palfrey upon Sedgwick’s defeat at the end of the second stage of this great battle, "by 10 o’clock the successes of the morning were lost." The disappearance of Sedgwick ended the serious fighting on the left. But Sumner’s remaining divisions, commanded by French and Richardson, were already on the
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- ↑ Our Living and Dead, I, 330.
