[Illustration: NORTH BATTERY OF CONFEDERATES AT SHIPPING POINT, POTOMAC RIVER.]
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL E. W. GANTT, C. S. A.]
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL R. E. RODES, C. S. A.]
{ 146} [Illustration: REVIEW IN WASHINGTON, UNDER McCLELLAN, OF EIGHT BATTERIES OF ARTILLERY AND THREE REGIMENTS OF CAVALRY, BY LINCOLN AND HIS CABINET.]
Sumner was just in time to meet the flank attack, which was commanded by Johnston in person. The successive charges of the Confederates were all repelled, and at dusk a counter-charge cleared the ground in front and drove off the last of them in confusion. In this fight General Johnston received wounds that compelled him to retire from the field, and laid him up for a long time. The battle--which is called both Fair Oaks and Seven Pines--cost the National army over five thousand men, and the Confederate nearly seven thousand. It was a more destructive battle than any that, up to that time, the Eastern armies had fought. A participant thus describes the after appearance of the field: "Monday, June 2d, we visited the battlefield, and rode from place to place on the scene of conflict. We have often wished that we could efface from our memory the observations of that day. Details were burying the dead in trenches or heaping the ground upon them where they lay. The ground was saturated with gore; the intrenchments, the slashing, the rifle-pits, the thicket, many of the tents, were filled with dead. In the Fair Oaks farmhouse, the dead, the dying, and the severely wounded lay together. Along the Williamsburg road, on each side of it, was one long Confederate grave. An old barn, near where the One Hundred and Fourth Pennsylvania volunteers first formed, was filled with our dead and wounded; and farther to the right, near the station, beside an old building, lay thirteen Michigan soldiers with their blankets over them and their names pinned on their caps. Near the railroad, by a { 147} log house, the dead and wounded were packed together. Both were motionless; but you could distinguish them by the livid blackness of the dead. We could trace the path of our regiment, from the wood-pile around by the intrenchments to its camp, by the dead still unburied. Those that died immediately could not be touched, but were covered with ground where they lay; the wounded, who crawled or were carried to the barns, tents, and houses, and who died subsequently, were buried in trenches. Our little tent was still standing, though pierced by several bullets. Beside it lay two dead men of the Ninety-eighth, whom we could not identify; for the sun, rain, and wind had changed their countenances. On the bed lay a dead Confederate. At the left of our camp, in the wood, where the Eighty-first, Eighty-fifth, and Ninety-second New York volunteers and Peck's brigade fought with Huger, the dead were promiscuously mixed together, and lay in sickening and frightful proximity; strong and weak, old and young, officer and private, horse and man--dead, or wounded in the agonies of death, lay where they fell, and furnished, excepting the swaths on the Williamsburg road, the darkest corner on that day's panorama."