The blasted pine rears its gaunt height above the mountain slope, covered
with trees slashed down to hold the Federals at bay; and here, on June 14,
1864, the Confederacy lost a commander, a bishop, and a hero.
Lieut.-General Leonidas Polk, commanding one of Johnston's army corps,
with Johnston himself and Hardee, another corps commander, was studying
Sherman's position at a tense moment of the latter's advance around Pine
Mountain. The three Confederates stood upon the rolling height, where the
center of Johnston's army awaited the Federal attack. They could see the
columns in blue pushing east of them; the smoke and rattle of musketry as
the pickets were driven in; and the bustle with which the Federal advance
guard felled trees and constructed trenches at their very feet. On the
lonely height the three figures stood conspicuous. A Federal order was
given the artillery to open upon any men in gray who looked like officers
reconnoitering the new position. So, while Hardee was pointing to his
comrade and his chief the danger of one of his divisions which the Federal
advance was cutting off, the bishop-general was struck in the chest by a
cannon shot. Thus the Confederacy lost a leader of unusual influence.
Although a bishop of the Episcopal Church, Polk was educated at West
Point. When he threw in his lot with the Confederacy, thousands of his
fellow-Louisianians followed him. A few days before the battle of Pine
Mountain, as he and General Hood were riding together, the bishop was told
by his companion that he had never been received into the communion of a
church and was begged that the rite might be performed. Immediately Polk
arranged the ceremony. At Hood's headquarters, by the light of a tallow
candle, with a tin basin on the mess table for a baptismal font, and with
Hood's staff present as witnesses, all was ready. Hood, "with a face like
that of an old crusader," stood before the bishop. Crippled by wounds at
Gaines' Mill, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga, he could not kneel, but bent
forward on his crutches. The bishop, in full uniform of the Confederate
army, administered the rite. A few days later, by a strange coincidence,
he was approached by General Johnston on the same errand, and the man whom
Hood was soon to succeed was baptized in the same simple manner. Polk, as
Bishop, had administered his last baptism, and as soldier had fought his
last battle; for Pine Mountain was near.
[Illustration: LIEUT.-GEN. LEONIDAS POLK, C. S. A.]
[Illustration: IN THE HARDEST FIGHT OF THE CAMPAIGN--THE
ONE-HUNDRED-AND-TWENTY-FIFTH OHIO