We were mowed down like grass

Early on July 31, 1864, the morning following the debacle at the Battle of the Crater, the 115th fell in with thousands of Union troops marching north toward the Appomattox River. “The roads were black with troops as far as the eye could reach and dense clouds of dust swept over the country like a tornado,” remembered Lieutenant James Clark. The very hot day followed a stretch of arid weather that left most wells and streams bone-dry and made the march an extreme hardship. Few men could keep up with their companies, and many straggled behind. Sunstroke felled scores, and attempts to transport the stricken overburdened all available ambulances and wagons. The hazard was real, no mere soldier’s dodge--three men died.

The scorched troops reached the Appomattox in the afternoon. “Although the water was the color of mud and as hot as though heated on a stove, yet the soldiers made for it as though struggling for dear life, and hundreds drank down the sickening liquid,” recalled Clark. After a frolic in the murky Appomattox, the column re-formed and crossed the river on the Point of Rocks pontoon bridge, arriving at the familiar Bermuda Hundred lines before dark. The return to the campgrounds they had left in June felt almost like a homecoming to the men after their weeks in the Petersburg trenches. “But it seemed strange not to hear the usual picket firing and the stray bullet wizzing here and there, as there has not been an hour for the last 37 days in which we have not been under fire,” recorded Nicholas DeGraff.1
Northern and southern troops manning the Bermuda Hundred lines maintained an informal truce. The soldiers’ cease-fire and the a lack of offensive thrusts by either side kept things quiet. The deadly adversaries sat and talked together at a brook running between the lines and kept up a lively commerce in newspapers, coffee, and tobacco. “For several days the most perfect harmony prevailed between Blue and Grey,” declared Clark. Men of the 115th became acquainted with the 3rd Virginia Infantry, a unit of Confederate General George Pickett’s seasoned division. One day the Virginians left a sign at the brook that read, “Friends at the spring, enemies in battle.” Corporal Reid later wrote, “These sentiments were literally carried out in both particulars. For more than a month on the Petersburg lines we had been under fire continually, creating a frightful casualty list, but now we were fraternizing with a foe equally as hostile--Pickett’s veterans of Gettysburg fame.”2

Given the respite of a few quiet days, the regiment set up a new camp and erected a log chapel for Chaplain Clemens. The peace held for nearly two weeks before marching orders signaled its finish early on August 13 and the 115th packed up and struck its tents. The troops then waited all afternoon and evening before finally moving out at 11:00 p.m. Through the night the column marched down the Bermuda Hundred peninsula, reaching the tip of Jones Neck on the James River at daybreak. A pontoon bridge crossed the river from Jones Neck to Deep Bottom on the northern shore where Union forces held a few acres of ground. Richmond stood only ten miles northwest of Deep Bottom, and the Confederate capital’s defenders lay entrenched around the federal bridgehead.3

* * * * *

The 115th New York was en route to take part in General Grant’s second offensive north of the James. The first had occurred as counterpoint to the Union attack at the crater just two weeks earlier. This second push by Grant across the James was prompted by his desire to prevent Lee from reinforcing General Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley. Early’s command had wreaked havoc by advancing to within sight of Washington, D.C., and burning Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Grant responded by consolidating an army under General Philip Sheridan and sending it to destroy Early. Lee, in turn, drew men from the stalemate around Richmond and Petersburg to send reinforcements to Early. Grant launched his August 1864 attack across the James to force Lee to return those troops to Richmond or, at minimum, to stop him from sending additional men to the Shenandoah.4

The Union offensive was led by General Winfield Scott Hancock with forces consisting of his own Second Corps and the Tenth Corps, now under the command of Major General David B. Birney. Birney replaced Quincy Gillmore after Gillmore’s ouster following the failed initial Union attacks on Petersburg in June. The Tenth Corps contingent included two infantry divisions, the first led by Brigadier General Alfred Terry, and the second, to which the 115th belonged, under Brigadier General William Birney, elder brother of the corps commander. Terry’s Tenth Corps division marched across the pontoon bridge around midnight and engaged rebel skirmishers at 5:00 a.m. on Friday, August 14. The Second Corps, in a ploy meant to deceive the enemy, marched to City Point then boarded transports and steamed several miles down the James toward the Chesapeake, only to double back and disembark at Deep Bottom.

Seven Confederate brigades, approximately 7,000 men, guarded entrenched lines facing the Deep Bottom bridgehead. Their position ran northward along Bailey’s Creek from Deep Bottom to Fussell’s Mill and westward from Deep Bottom along Fourmile Creek and New Market Heights. Terry’s Tenth Corps division advanced from the pontoon bridge and assailed the rebels along Fourmile Creek. Later in the morning the Second Corps shuffled off the transport ships and moved to Terry’s right, engaging the southern lines stretching toward Fussell’s Mill.5

* * * * *

As this fighting got under way, the 115th and the rest of William Birney’s Tenth Corps division crossed the James River. The Deep Bottom pontoon bridge consisted of a series of flat-bottomed thirty-one foot long boats anchored parallel to one another across the river. Planks spanning their gunwales formed a continuous deck from shore to shore. Reid accurately termed it a floating roadway. The men of the regiment could not resist the fun of causing the bridge to sway by marching across in cadence, in spite of officers’ entreaties to stop. Once on the northern bank the 115th’s brigade moved into position on the left of the Tenth Corps line. About half of the 115th deployed as skirmishers. In midafternoon the 115th was ordered to the right and marched some distance before the order was countermanded and the New Yorkers returned to their original position. Similar frustrating marches and countermarches would mark the next three excessively hot days.6

Assorted federal attacks on August 14--none of which involved the 115th--failed to dislodge the rebels. General Hancock then devised a plan to extract the Tenth Corps from its position on the Union left and march it several miles around behind the entire Second Corps to surprise and envelop the weaker Confederate left flank near Fussell’s Mill. The ambitious flanking maneuver was to take place during the night with the assault to take place the next morning, August 15. As a result the 115th roused from slumber at 11:00 p.m. on August 14 and marched into the wooded darkness.7

The weary trek continued until 1:30 a.m. “We didn’t know where we were, and in fact didn’t care, and dropping down were soon asleep,” recalled Reid. At 5:00 a.m. a rainstorm wakened Reid for the day. Dr. Macfarlane complained about an interrupted night’s sleep, but noted that he had grown accustomed to open air catnaps: “I would wind myself in my blanket and lie down anywhere, almost under my horse’s feet. I don’t know but I can sleep as soundly in the middle of the road with my canteen for a pillow, as I ever did in the widest and softest of beds.”

The march toward the Union right resumed at 8:00 a.m. The sun came out and turned the day hot and sultry and sunstroke felled many, including Private Harry Thorne, who staggered and fell to the ground unconscious before friends could help him. “We all remember the day as one of suffering and exhaustion,” recalled a comrade. Seemingly aimless and endless marching compounded the agony. The timetable for the flanking maneuver proved hopelessly optimistic as officers struggled to lead their drained men over rugged and unfamiliar terrain in the searing heat. Much of the day passed before the Tenth Corps got into position. Its assault on the Confederate left was postponed until the morning of August 16.8

* * * * *

The soldiers of the Tenth Corps rose and readied for battle at 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday August 16, a day that was to grow even hotter than the previous scorching days. General Terry’s four brigades advanced first, leading the way through a dense forest of oak and pine. After driving rebel skirmishers out of one deep ravine, the advancing federals encountered an entrenched rebel line on the opposite crest of a second ravine. The rebels had felled trees for fifty yards in front of their thinly manned works, creating a tangled slashing that slowed the Yankees as they descended into the ravine then climbed the opposite slope toward the southerners. But the blue troops hacked through and routed the outnumbered Confederates from their trenches after hand-to-hand fighting. The triumphant Union troops drove on for several hundred yards, ultimately halted by stiffening Confederate resistance and another steep walled ravine running obliquely northwest from the second ravine.

At the apex of that assault, the troops in the center of the Union line advanced beyond those on their left and right, forming a semicircular salient bulging into the rebel line. Federal units on the left could not advance due to both the sheer terrain and enemy resistance near the confluence of the second ravine and the oblique ravine. On the right, the Union line bent back to anchor on the trenches at the second ravine. The northerners held this salient for thirty minutes. Meanwhile several brigades of Confederate reinforcements converged in response to the emergency. Then with General Lee himself on the field, the southerners advanced and enveloped the salient of Yankees. Pressed in a deadly crossfire, the Union men retreated to the captured rebel works at the second ravine.9

As this action took place General William Birney’s Tenth Corps division arrived at the first ravine, nearly a half mile behind the captured rebel works at the second ravine. Bell’s Brigade of the 13th Indiana, 9th Maine, 4th New Hampshire, and 115th New York led the division.10 The musketry to their front grew heavy and captured Confederates began streaming through to the rear. One of the prisoners abruptly stopped and called out “Captain Smith!” With outstretched hand he approached Captain Solomon Smith of Company H. The regiment watched as “the captain grasped the extended hand and they shook cordially.” The friendly Confederate had been taken captive the previous April by Smith and his volunteer detail at Fort Gates near Palatka, Florida. Since then the Georgian had been exchanged and returned to Confederate service. As the brief conversation ended, the prisoner warned Smith, “Look out, Captain, that is a dangerous place in there.”11

Due to the absence of Colonel Bell, Colonel Francis Osborn of the 24th Massachusetts commanded the brigade on this day. As Osborn ordered his regiments into battle line he suddenly raised a hand to his neck and reeled in his saddle, struck by a stray bullet from the front. As the senior officer remaining in the brigade, the 115th’s Major Walrath assumed command. He immediately sped the brigade toward battle, not even allowing the troops time to shed their knapsacks. As Walrath ordered his men to double quick, word spread that their help was needed up front to hold a captured line of works. “And right gallantly did the 115th respond,” bragged DeGraff. “We took the run for about a half mile through dense woods.”

The regiment rushed through the forest to the steep second ravine and into the slashing in front of the captured rebel trench line. Several dead Union soldiers stood within the slashing, their lifeless bodies held upright by the webbed foliage. These men were fatalities of the earlier advance by Terry’s Division that dislodged the enemy from their works. The 115th passed the standing corpses and worked their way up the slope through the snarled vegetation to the captured works, winded and disorganized from the dash through the thick woods and across the tangled ravine, carrying full packs in the midday heat. As they stopped and reorganized, northern troops retreating from the murderous Confederate counter-offensive streamed toward the same position from the opposite direction. “The troops in front were coming back in confusion and passed through our column in haste to the rear,” remembered Reid.12

There would be no rest for Walrath’s fatigued brigade. Division commander William Birney immediately ordered Walrath to take his lone brigade forward into the maelstrom of enemy troops that had just dispatched the four brigades of Terry’s initial assault force. Birney’s directive proved costly, the task futile. “We are subjected to another official blunder to our undoing,” moaned Lieutenant DeGraff, blasting Birney for sending “troops already exhausted on a fool charge for a forlorn hope.” Declared Reid: “It was a reckless order at all events, and appeared to have been made without even a slight investigation of what was to be accomplished.”13

Nonetheless the 175 men of the 115th sprang over the works with a cheer and charged across a cornfield. “They opened on us as soon as we were in sight, a withering fire from every point. We moved forward on the double quick. Men falling on every side,” recalled Sergeant Reardon. The 115th held the left flank of the brigade line and somehow became separated from the other regiments. Confederates fired into the New Yorkers’ front and both flanks from the edge of the oblique ravine which curled around the far edge of the cornfield. "Our loss in crossing the field is heavy,” continued Reardon. “I think I never saw or heard the firing more rapid or continuous. The bullets passed in and around us like hail. They cut the ground and corn stubble something terrible. The woods seemed to be full of rebels.” Seventy-three men of the 115th were shot down, sixteen fatally. “We were mowed down like grass,” wrote DeGraff.14

The regiment pushed on for several hundred yards, crossing the open field to some trees edging the oblique ravine. Here they halted and the men sidled to the right and over a fence to find shelter in a more thickly wooded area. As at Port Walthall Junction the previous May, the unit suffered many casualties in scaling a fence in an exposed position. “After getting over the fence, the regiment was very much broken up as they reached the woods,” recalled Lieutenant Charles L. Clark, commanding Company E. Clark then directed his men to rally on the colors, another unfortunate order since the vicinity of the 115th’s flags may have been the hottest spot on the field.

Color Sergeant Peter Keck, recently recovered from a wound suffered while crossing the fence at Port Walthall Junction, had carried the flag across the cornfield without mishap, but just as Clark issued his order, Keck took a ball in the right knee. He found Lieutenant Clark and reported his wound. Clark told him to give the flag to one of the corporals and head for the rear. Keck relinquished the prized banner to Corporal James Himes, but Himes soon suffered a fatal bullet in his chest. Corporal Abbot Musgrove next grabbed the flag, only to fall when a bullet “crashed through his brain.” Himes and Musgrove both hailed from Cohoes, New York, and were still teenagers when they enlisted in the 115th.15

Facing fire from three sides, the regiment’s battle line now bent in a semicircle. The beleaguered men could not hold on. “Our position soon became too hot and without support we must abandon the ground,” explained Reardon. The men moved farther right into the trees and headed back to their starting point, the captured rebel trench at the second ravine. The 115th fled the field leaving the ground covered with dead and wounded while the rebels continued “firing and yelling like Indians.” Wrote Captain McKittrick of Company C, “I think if we had stayed at the front much longer we would all have been captured.” The regiment conducted their retreat in good order, the men careful to note that there was no evidence of panic. They were defeated but not dispirited, some men even voicing their disdain for the rebels by singing We’ll Rally Round the Flag, Boys as they fell back.16

By the time the 115th returned to it, the second ravine had become a very hot place. Rebel forces had recaptured the works on the Union right and commenced an enfilading fire on the New Yorkers from that direction. This fire caused the regiment to retreat briefly from the works and move toward the rear and southward away from the rebel enfilade. But the regiment soon moved forward again into the works only to discover a new threat from the other direction--the left end of the line had also been recaptured by the advancing enemy. “We had not been there but a little while,” recorded McKittrick, “when the left of the line gave way.” Fortunately just as the 115th began to take fire from rebels pouring into the works on its left, help arrived on its right in the form of the 9th U.S. Colored Troops. “They came in finely and deployed to our right and stopped the fire from that direction,” recalled McKittrick, “but we were still getting it from the left. The Rebs advanced their line so that they got a raking fire along our whole line.”17

Moments later orders came to withdraw. “It was an order easy to give but not so easy to accomplish,” continued McKittrick, “for we had to pass through the slashing again, and every man had to get out of it the best way he could, and of course as soon as we started the Rebs opened fire heavier than ever.” The survivors worked their way back and the 115th rejoined its brigade at the point they had started from that morning.18

* * * * *

In the 115th’s fight near Fussell’s Mill, part of the battle that history now calls Strawberry Plains or Second Deep Bottom, 42% of the soldiers of the regiment became casualties--16 dead, 35 wounded and 22 missing out of approximately 175 men who entered the cornfield. Major Walrath headed the list, his tenure as brigade commander cut short by a shell fragment that entered his side during the advance. Captain Solomon Smith, whose Confederate acquaintance had warned him of the danger ahead, had his left elbow shattered by a rebel bullet. Smith’s arm was amputated and he was lost to the 115th, returning home to Clifton Park in Saratoga County. Lieutenant Francis Francisco, a twenty-nine-year old from Wells in Hamilton County, was killed while leading Company K into the fight and later buried nearby under a flag of truce.19

A Confederate minie ball pierced the temple of First Lieutenant John Van De Sande, a lawyer from Fort Plain in Montgomery County. Sent to Fortress Monroe for treatment, he clung to life for over two weeks. His father and brother traveled to his side and were with him when he died on September 3, but Van De Sande never regained consciousness, never passed a final word with his grieving family.20

Sergeant Frank Conover of Company D was killed as the regiment crossed the cornfield. His younger brother Seely, a corporal in Company B, rushed to his side. Unable to revive his lifeless sibling, Seely pushed on only to be shot during the retreat and captured by the enemy. Later exchanged, he lay in a U.S. Army hospital in Annapolis and recounted memories of his brother in an anguished letter to a friend at home:

I awake in the still hours of night and lay thinking of times agone. Will I ever forget them? Ah no, they are too deeply graven on my soul as with a pen of iron.... The last I saw of Frank was...with the missiles of death hurtling and hissing around us. Ah! too well I remember his face, as calm as in life but oh so limp as I shook and called him by name. Frank! Frank! shall I never see you more?21

The oppressive heat also served to thin the ranks of the Union attackers, sunstroke felling many, including James Reid, John Reardon, and Nicholas DeGraff. All were assisted to safety. DeGraff awoke in a rear area where he saw a burial party at work. They had gathered fifty bodies and dug a long trench in which the slain were lain side by side and covered with blankets. One man among the dead wore an “excellent pair of high top new boots.” The men of the burial detail knew that Chaplain Clemens, who was there working among them, needed new footwear, and so removed the unlucky soldier’s boots and gave them to the cleric. DeGraff later went to the field hospital and walked among the rows of wounded men, searching for members of his company. Amidst the surgeons hard at work amputating limbs he again came across Chaplain Clemens, who was using a barn lantern to search among the wounded for those who had died. A detail of men stood by waiting to carry them away for burial. DeGraff called it “a scene never to be forgotten.”22

Dr. Macfarlane recorded one additional casualty of the 115th’s participation at Second Deep Bottom. In an August 22 letter home Macfarlane enclosed a piece of the regimental flag that had been torn off during the action. “There is nothing left of the old flag now but tatters,” he wrote. “It will hardly hold together to be unrolled. The flagstaff has been shot in two several times and in the last battle on the 16th two corporals were shot dead and a sergeant wounded while carrying it.”23

* * * * *

The August 16 fight at Deep Bottom would stand as another bitter defeat for the regiment although the men were satisfied that they had performed their duty well. James Reid felt that “probably no better fighting was done in any campaign than the fearless charges on the 16th.” The soldiers blamed defeat on their leaders, chiefly division commander William Birney, for recklessly sending Walrath’s Brigade on “a fool charge.” That night an angry DeGraff wrote in his diary, “`Tis the old story. The generals know nothing about what is going on on the front. They send us forward. After that we must take care of ourselves. At 12 noon we had their breastwork, had driven them into their second line. At 3 p.m. we were whipped at all points.” Still fuming two days later, DeGraff penned a letter to his father. “But what good does it do to fight well and to have the best men killed because they go the farthest to the front?” he asked. “Father, isn’t it time I was getting discouraged? The 115th has been the victim of Blundering Generals in five different engagements. A regiment never was composed of better men, but every time we are ordered into some Reble nest and are repulsed.” 24

The lieutenant’s frustration is understandable. In two years of service the regiment in which he took such pride had suffered surrender at Harpers Ferry, imprisonment at Chicago, the ignominy of the Camp Douglas fire, and an idle year in the south. It had been in several pitched battles, each time on the offensive and each time performing well. And each time, its side had been defeated. At Olustee the 115th lost half its men through Truman Seymour’s foolish piecemeal tactics. The regiment endured abysmal leadership at Bermuda Hundred and again at the Battle of the Crater. At Cold Harbor they scored a breakthrough against the enemy but, unsupported, were forced to withdraw. Now they had been chased from the field at Deep Bottom with barely 100 healthy men remaining with the unit.

In spite of everything, DeGraff stayed hopeful. “But I will cheer up hoping that this is the last.... I hope and trust that fighting for the 115th is over for this summer.” But Deep Bottom would not be the regiment’s last fighting nor its last disappointment. The 115th would eventually have its day of glory, but it would come far from Virginia and not before the regiment took part in two more fruitless, costly offensives north of the James.25

* * * * *

1. Clark, Iron Hearted Regiment, p. 156-157, DeGraff Memoir, p. 280; DeGraff, letter of August 3, 1864; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 66. None of the three men who died from sunstroke were in the 115th; they were from other units in the same division.

2. Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 66; Reardon Memoir, August 8, 1864; Clark, Iron Hearted Regiment, p. 157-158.

3. Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 66; Clark, Iron Hearted Regiment, p. 158; DeGraff Memoir, p. 290; Reardon Memoir, August 8, 1864.

4. Trudeau, The Last Citadel, p. 146; Grant, Personal Memoirs, Vol. II. p 321; O.R., Vol. XLII, Part II, p. 136.

5. Trudeau, The Last Citadel, p. 67, 145-152; John Horn, The Destruction of the Weldon Railroad: Deep Bottom, Globe Tavern and Reams Station, August 14-25, 1864 (Lynchburg, Virginia: H. E. Howard, Inc., 1991), p. 9-16; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 68. Hancock was a West Pointer and career officer who served prominently throughout the Civil War. William and David Birney were sons of an anti-slavery Alabamian who moved his family to Cincinnati in 1838. Both were lawyers and volunteer officers. Terry was a Connecticut militia officer who stayed in the regular army after the Civil War. He was George A. Custer’s commanding officer during the 1876 Little Big Horn campaign. (Warner, Generals in Blue, p. 54-55, 202-204, 497-498).

6. Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 68; DeGraff Memoir, p. 290; O.R., Vol. XLII, Part II, p. 188; Macfarlane, Army Surgeon, p. 61; Reardon Memoir, August 14, 1864.

7. Trudeau, The Last Citadel, p. 153; Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 20; O.R., Vol. XLII, Part I, p. 218; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 68.

8. Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 68; Macfarlane, Army Surgeon, p. 61; DeGraff Memoir, p. 290; Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 24.

9. Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 26, 31-41; Trudeau, The Last Citadel, p. 155-157; O.R., Vol. XLII, Part I, p. 688, 728, 755. One Second Corps brigade operated with the three brigades of Terry’s Division on August 16.

10. The 169th New York, also part of Bell’s Brigade, was on detached duty at Dutch Gap at this time.

11. DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 69; O.R., Vol. XLII, Part I, p. 765.

12. DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 69; Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 41. Major Walrath had commanded the 115th since Colonel Sammons’s wounding at the Crater. Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, though released from arrest on July 28, had not yet rejoined the regiment.

13. Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 41; DeGraff Memoir, p. 292-294; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 69.

14. Clark, Iron Hearted Regiment, p. 159; Reardon Memoir, August 16, 1864; DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 69; O.R., Vol. XLII, Part I, p. 120; Phisterer, New York in the War of the Rebellion, Vol. IV, p. 3347.

15. DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864; Reardon Memoir, August 16, 1864; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 69-70; Charles L. Clark, affidavit dated July 27, 1887, in Peter J. Keck Pension File, National Archives; James H. Clark, “At Their Country’s Call,” p. 22.

16. Reardon Memoir, August 16, 1864; DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 69-70. Captain McKittrick’s words are from a letter of his that is quoted at Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 70. Reid does not give the date of McKittrick’s letter, but it had to date from between August 16, 1864, when the described action took place, and September 29, 1864, when McKittrick was killed in action.

17. William McKittrick, letter in Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 70; DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864; Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 43-45.

18. McKittrick, letter in Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 70.

19. Phisterer, New York in the War of the Rebellion, Vol. IV, p. 3347; Clark, Iron Hearted Regiment, p. 159, 236-237, 246-248, 266; DeGraff Memoir, p. 296.

20. Clark, Iron Hearted Regiment, p. 261-262.

21. DeGraff Memoir, p. 292; Reardon Memoir, August 16, 1864; Seely Conover, letter of December 28, 1864, collection of Lance Ingmire.

22. DeGraff Memoir, p. 292, 295.

23. Macfarlane, Army Surgeon, p. 61-62.

24. Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 70; DeGraff Diary, August 16, 1864; DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864.

25. DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864.

26. Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 48; Proceedings of General Court Martial in the Case of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan J. Johnson, September 4, 1864, in N.J. Johnson Service Record, National Archives (hereinafter: Proceedings of Johnson’s Court Martial), p. 6; DeGraff Diary, July 28, 1864.

27. DeGraff Memoir, p. 296; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 70; Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 49; N.J. Johnson, letter of September 30, 1864, in N.J. Johnson Service Record, National Archives.

28. Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad, p. 49; Trudeau, The Last Citadel, p. 160-161; O.R., Vol. XLII, Part I, p. 220, 678.

29. DeGraff, letter of August 24, 1864; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 70; Proceedings of Johnson’s Court Martial, testimony of William Shaw (p. 3), written statement of Nathan Johnson (Appendix A, p. 1A), testimony of Captain Thomas B. Eaton, 169th New York (p. 18), testimony of Captain Egbert B. Savage, Company G, 115th New York (p. 24). Shaw was senior captain of the 115th and therefore in command of the regiment at this time because Lieutenant Colonel Johnson headed the brigade and Major Walrath remained absent due to his August 16 wounding.

30. Proceedings of Johnson’s Court Martial, testimony of Captain George B. Dyer, 9th Maine (p. and Lieutenant Hugh S. Sanford, 115th New York (p. 20); Private John Reed’s account of his scout with Lieutenant Colonel Johnson appears in Corporal James Reid’s “War Against Secessia.” James Reid and John Reed first became acquainted during the 115th’s original muster at Camp Mohawk when James responded to John’s name at roll call (Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 70-71).

31. DeGraff, letter of August 24, 1864; Proceedings of Johnson’s Court Martial, testimony of Captain Julius Weiss (p. 12).

32. Proceedings of Johnson’s Court Martial, testimony of Weiss (p. 12-13), Brastow (p. 7) and Dyer (p. 9), and statement of Johnson (Appendix A, p. 2); DeGraff, letter of August 24, 1864; Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 71; DeGraff Memoir, p. 296-298.

33. Proceedings of Johnson’s Court Martial, especially testimony of Shaw (p. 3, 5-6), Dyer (p. 9-10), Weiss (p. 13), Captain Fred Mosher, 115th New York (p. 6), and Captain Robert Gray, 9th Maine (p. 6); Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 71; DeGraff Memoir, p. 296.

34. Reid, “War Against Secessia,” p. 71. Within a few days the regiment’s strength climbed back up to 132, according to Private Joseph Abeel of Company C (letter of August 23, 1864 to “Friend Morgan,” collection of Lance Ingmire).

35. DeGraff, letter of August 18, 1864; Horn, Destruction of the Weldon Railroad