216 Norto Carottna Troops, 1861-’65.

was instantly killed, being almost cut asunder by a shell, after
the attack was over. He was then only nineteen. With his
fall perished one of the noblest spirits of the command.

It was at Malvern Hill that private Charles P. Powell, of
Company D, emulated the fearless deed of Luria at Seawell’s
Point. While lying in line under heavy artillery fire, wait-
ing for the order to charge, a shell dropped among us. The
men could not leave their places in the line of battle, so they
flattened to earth while their unwelcome visitor sputtered
away. An instant later the heroic Powell sprung forward,
lifted the shell and deliberately sousing the head in one of
the small water pools of the swamp, put out the fuse. The
fuse must by some error have been cut a trifle long, or after so
much delay it must have exploded in his hands before it
reached the water. This gallant fellow was wounded a little
later in this battle and also at Gettysburg, promoted Adju-
tant and was killed in the “Bloody Angle” 12 May, 1864—an
immortal record, surely. The wounding of Captain Young
left Second Lieutenant Gill in command of the regiment till
he was killed. After his fall the Twenty-third seems to have
had no commissioned officer left on the field.

After the battle we spent several weeks of grateful and
well needed rest near Richmond. When Jackson, followed
later by'the bulk of the army, marched against Pope at Man-
assas, our division was, with McLaws’ left behind to observe
the enemy and guard Richmond. In fact, D. H. Hill’s divis-
ion oftener than any other, was detached on independent ser-
vice of that kind.

When McClellan’s army was withdrawn to reinforce Pope
and safeguard the Federal Capital, we were thrown forward
by forced marches northward. We rejoined the Confederate
army at Chantilly 2 September, three days after the
battle of Second Manassas was over. The earth was yet
encumbered with unburied dead. The most gruesome of our
whole war experience were the many swollen corpses crushed
and mangled by the cannon wheels, which in the urgency of
that fierce and prolonged combat had passed over them. Ar-
tillery must manceuvre somewhere; the dead lay thick nearly

TweEntTy-THIRD REGIMENT. 217

everywhere, and men had been too engrossed wielding the
sickle of death to gather in the harvest.

THE FIRST MARYLAND CAMPAIGN.

At Chantilly we were within a few miles of the scene of
our picket duty the previous Fall, Winter and Spring. But
our pause there was of the briefest. Our brigade formed
Lee’s vanguard in the invasion of Maryland. Moving rap-
idly northward Friday, 5 September, we waded the Poto-
mac near Leesburg, at Noland’s Ford, lower down, we be-
lieve, than the Southern army crossed it before or after in its
many passages. With what bounding hearts did we climb
the opposite banks of the Potomac, looking eagerly for the
support of “Maryland, My Maryland.” Cherishing hopes
which, alas, like so many other Confederate Hopes, withered
on the stem.

Strong indeed must have been the Southern proclivities of
Maryland men to see aught of attraction in a service like ours.
We were a hungry, jaded, weather-beaten, battle-worn set.
In the forced marches to the northward wagon trains had
been outstripped, green corn and apples forming for days al-
most our only food. The fields of “roasting ears,” most of
them now too hard to be really edible, were bought from the
farmers and the men turned in to help themselves. One of
General Hill’s first acts after crossing the Potomac into
Maryland, was to buy a large field of corn and turn in his
division. All supplies obtained during this campaign were
paid for in Federal currency.

A cartoon in Harper’s Weekly represented a Maryland
Quaker woman placing a wash stand at her door and implor-
ing the rebels that if they must possess her house, please to use
that first; while the rebels mistaking this—to them—strange
apparatus for some infernal machine contrived for their de-
struction, skedaddled forthwith. But the lion, though un-
kempt and half starved, was a lion still, as‘the foe diseov-
ered when he threw his 90,000 against our ranks thinned by
battle, disease and the giving out of foot-sore men, to less
than 30,000.