Chaplain John N. Pierce on the Battle of Seven Pines

     
         
                 On the 49th anniversary of the Battle of Seven Pines [also known as Fair Oaks] in 1911, John Nicholson Pierce, the first chaplain of the 85th Pennsylvania, wrote a remembrance for his local newspaper in Missouri. Pierce got a few of his facts wrong, but the gist of his story is correct. Facts are inserted not to diminish Pierce's narrative but to provide a truer account of events that day.

        It is interesting that Pierce's focus was not solely on the performance of his own regiment in the fray. He also highlighted on the role of two commands of artillery in the engagement, one in Silas Casey's Division and the other in the division of Darius Couch. These two divisions were a part of the IV Corps commanded by General Erasmus Keyes.
        One is left to speculate how Pierce occupied his time during the battle -- whether he stayed on the sidelines or delivered ammunition and/or water as army chaplains sometimes did.
        Pierce left the regiment later in 1862. He lived in Oklahoma after the war before settling in Missouri. He died in 1926 at the age of 91.   

John N. Pierce
Courtesy of Bill Parr

         We skirmished all the way up to Savage Station and Fair Oaks, our division [Casey's] being on the advance. Now we were near enough to Richmond to hear the church bells ring.
          Nearly every day our pickets were fired on, and in this way we lost some men. But the real storm of battle did not break until the last day of May. While our men were at dinner [lunch], a shell fell in our camp near the colonel's headquarters, and the battle was on.
          We had sight guns in our battery, commanded by a fine captain [actually Colonel Guilford Bailey] and supported by the division of infantry.
          When the action was over, one-hundred out of one-hundred and twenty-six horses in the artillery, and the captain and most of his men lay dead on the field. We lost six guns. But in front of those guns, I counted sixty-seven dead men of the seventh Georgia [actually the 6th GA] alone and terrible was the harvest of death on both sides. Some of the bravest and best of the 85th went down on that bloody field.
         Casey's division received the shock of this battle. Couch's division lay nearly half a mile in our rear. They did not join in the fight until we were crushed. But when the Johnnies came up to them they were prepared. Their part of the artillery was commanded by a very young West Pointer [27-year old Robert Mayhew West] , who held his fire until the enemy coming five lines deep, was within three hundred yards, firing as they came, and hurting the infantry supporting the guns.

 Union Artillery at Seven Pines      LOC

        But when the enemy was ready to charge, the guns sent one sheet of terrible flame so effective that the charging host stopped and staggered and before they could reform another volley of grape and canister struck them so terribly that there was little left before those guns but slaughtered men.
        That day there were but two divisions, Casey and Couch, between the Chickahominy and Richmond.
        Lee and Johnston rushed down sixty thousand strong on the two divisions, mustering about fourteen thousand. [Confederate General Joseph Johnston had 60,000 men in his command. He intended to utilize around 50,000 in the attack. Because of miscommunication, just under 40,000 were engaged.]
        The roar of the battle roused our men on the other side of the Chickahominy, which was swollen by the great rains, far beyond its banks.
        Hooker, Heintzelman, and Sedgwick, Sumner and others [Heintzelman was already on that side of the river] by Herculean effort, crossed the river in the night [late afternoon] and turned the tide of battle next morning. We soon recovered all the ground lost the day before and might have gone into Richmond.

Edwin Sumner's Division Crossing Chickahominy River to Seven Pines
Century Magazine, 1885

       That the young men may have some correct notions of what it cost to put down the rebellion, allow me to say that the division that I belonged to had thirteen thousand men reported for duty April 1, forty-nine-years ago. In sixty days marching and fighting the enemy's guns and the malaria of the swamps cut our fighting strength from thirteen thousand to twelve hundred. That is war.

                                                                                                                 ONE OF THE BOYS

The Republican
Clinton, Missouri
May,1911    Page 1