III. HAMPTON. I. THERE was a gentleman of South Carolina, of high position and ample estate, who in 1861 came to take part in the war in Virginia, at the head of a "Legion" of six hundred infantry. This body of men, it was said, he had equipped from his own purse; as he had sent to England and purchased the artillery with which he was going to fight. The "Legion" was composed of brave stuff, and officered by hard-fighting gentlemen-the flower indeed of the great South Carolina race; a good stock. It first took the field in earnest at the first battle of Manassas-as an independent organization, belonging neither to Beauregard's "Army of the Potomac" nor to Johnston's "Army of the Shenandoah." But there it was, as though dropped from the clouds, on the morning of that fiery twenty-first of July, 1861, amid the corn-fields of Manassas. It made its mark without loss of time-stretching out to Virginia that firm, brave hand of South Carolina. At ten o'clock in the morning, on this eventful day, the battle seemed lost to the Southerners. Evans was cut to pieces; Bee shattered and driven back in utter defeat to the Henry-House hill; between the victorious enemy and Beauregard's unprotected flank were interposed only the six hundred men of the "Legion" already up, and the two thousand six hundred and eleven muskets of Jackson not yet in position. The Legion occupied the Warrenton road near the Stone House, where it met and sustained with stubborn front the torrent dashed against it. General Keyes, with his division, attacked the six hundred from the direction of Red-House ford, and his advance line was forced back by them, and compelled to take refuge beneath the bluffs near Stone bridge. The column of General Hunter, meanwhile, closed in on the left of the little band, enveloped their flank, and poured a destructive artillery fire along the line. To hold their ground further was impossible, and they slowly fell back; but those precious moments had been secured. Jackson was in position; the Legion retreated, and formed upon his right; the enemy's advance was checked; and when the Southern line advanced in its turn, with wild cheers, piercing the Federal centre, the South Carolinians fought shoulder to shoulder beside the Stonewall Brigade, and saw the Federal forces break in disorder. When the sun set on this bloody and victorious field, the "Legion" had made a record among the most honourable in history. They had done more than their part in the hard struggle, and now saw the enemy in full retreat; but their leader did not witness that spectacle. Wade Hampton had been shot down in the final charge near the Henry House, and borne from the field, cheering on his men to the last, with that stubborn hardihood which he derived from his ancestral blood. Such was the first appearance upon the great arena of a man who was destined to act a prominent part in the tragic drama of the war, and win for himself a distinguished name. At Manassas, there in the beginning of the struggle, as always afterwards, he was the cool and fearless soldier. It was easily seen by those who watched Hampton "at work" that he fought from a sense of duty, and not from passion, or to win renown. The war was a gala-day full of attraction and excitement to some; with him it was hard work—not sought, but accepted. I am certain that he was not actuated by a thirst for military rank or renown. From those early days when all was gay and brilliant, to the latter years when the conflict had become so desperate and bloody, oppressing every heart, Hampton remained the same cool, unexcited soldier. He was foremost in every fight, and everywhere did more than his duty; but evidently martial ambition did not move him. Driven to take up arms by his princi ples, he fought for those principles, not for fame. It followed him—he did not follow it; and to contemplate the character and career of such a man is wholesome. His long and arduous career cannot here be narrated. A bare reference to some prominent points is all that can be given. Colonel Hampton, of the "Hampton Legion," soon became Brigadier-General Hampton, of the cavalry. The horsemen of the Gulf States serving in Virginia were placed under him, and the brigade became a portion of Stuart's command. It soon made its mark. Here are some of the landmarks in the stirring record. The hard and stubborn stand made at the Catoctin Mountain, when General Lee first invaded Maryland, and where Hampton charged and captured the Federal artillery posted in the suburbs of Frederick City; the rear-guard work as the Southern column hastened on, pursued by McClellan, to Sharpsburg; the stout fighting on the Confederate left there; the raid around McClellan's army in October; the obstinate fighting in front of the gaps of the Blue Ridge as Lee fell back in November to the line of the Rappahannock; the expedition in dead of winter to the Occoquan; the critical and desperate combat on the ninth of June, 1863, at Fleetwood Hill, near Brandy, where Hampton held the right, and Young, of Georgia, the brave of braves, went at the flanking column of the enemy with the sabre, never firing a shot, and swept them from the field; the speedy advance, thereafter, from the Rapidan; the close and bitter struggle when the enemy, with an overpowering force of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, about the twentieth of June, attacked the Southern cavalry near Middleburg, and forced them back step by step beyond Upperville, where in the last wild charge, when the Confederates were nearly broken, Hampton went in with the sabre at the head of his men and saved the command from destruction by his "do or die" fighting; the advance immediately into Pennsylvania, when the long, hard march, like the verses of Ariosto, was strewed all over with battles; the stubborn attack at Hanovertown, where Hampton stood like a rock upon the hills above the place, and the never-ceasing or receding roar of his artillery told us that on the right flank all was well; the march thereafter to Carlisle, and back to Gettysburg; the grand charge there, sabre to sabre, where Hampton was shot through the body, and nearly cut out of the saddle by a sabre blow upon the head, which almost proved fatal; the hard conflicts of the Wilderness, when General Grant came over in May, 1864; the fighting on the north bank of the Po, and on the left of the army at Spotsylvania Court-House; the various campaigns against Sheridan, Kautz, Wilson, and the later cavalry leaders on the Federal side, when, Stuart having fallen, Hampton commanded the whole Virginia cavalry; the hot fights at Trevillian's, at Reanis, at Bellfield, in a hundred places, when, in those expiring hours of the great conflict, a species of fury seemed to possess both combatants, and Dinwiddie was the arena of a struggle, bitter, bloody, desperate beyond all expression; then the fighting in the Carolinas on the old grounds of the Edisto, the high hills of the Santee and Congaree, which in 1864 and 1865 sent bulletins of battle as before; then the last act of the tragedy, when Sherman came and Hampton's sabre gleamed in the glare of his own house at Columbia, and then was sheathed-such were some of the scenes amid which the tall form of this soldier moved, and his sword flashed. That stalwart form had everywhere towered in the van. On the Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the Susquehanna, the Shenandoah, the Po, the North Anna, the James, the Rowanty, and Hatcher's Run-in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania-Hampton had fought with the stubborn courage inherited from his Revolutionary sires. Fighting lastly upon the soil of his native State, he felt no doubt as Marion and Sumter did, when Rawdon and Tarleton came and were met sabre to sabre. In the hot conflicts of 1865, Hampton met the new enemy as those preux chevaliers with their great Virginia comrade, "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, had met the old in 1781. But the record of those stubborn fights must be left to another time and to abler hands. I pass to a few traits of the individual. |