Joseph E. Johnston, asking the name of a Confederate officer who,
on the right of our army at Seven Pines, had made himself most
conspicuous for his daring and indifference to danger. The only
mark of distinction which he could give General Johnston was that
he thought the officer rode a white horse. General Johnston replied
that he supposed the officer referred to must have been General
D. H. Hill. In writing to General Hill about the matter, General
Johnston said: "I drew my conclusion that your horse might very well
have been taken for white and that no man was more likely to expose
himself than you. Do you know that in Mexico the young officers
called you the bravest man in the army?"
When the war with Mexico ended Major Hill resigned his place in
the army to accept the professorship of Mathematics in Washington
College at Lexington, Virginia. Before assuming the duties of that
place he was happily married, November 2d, 1852, to Isabella, oldest
daughter of Rev. Dr. R. H. Morrison, and granddaughter of General
Joseph Graham, who was a distinguished soldier of the Revolution and
the father of Governor William A. Graham. Six years later, he was
invited to take the same professorship at Davidson College, where
for five years he was looked upon as the leading spirit amongst a
corps of able and learned professors.
D. H. Hill was not a politician in the sense of aspiring to office
or attempting to mould public opinion; but when he saw that the
leaders of the North had determined that no Southerner should be
allowed to take his slaves to the territory wrested from Mexico by
the blood and treasure of the South as well as of the North, he
believed that the irrepressible conflict, which Seward declared at a
later day was being waged, had then begun, and would be settled only
upon the bloody field of battle and after a prolonged, sanguinary,
and doubtful struggle.
Fully persuaded that the inevitable conflict was near at hand, and
that it was his solemn duty to prepare the rising generation of his
adopted State to meet it he, in 1859, gave up his pleasant home and
his congenial duties at Davidson College for those of commandant and
manager of the Military Institute at Charlotte.
He harbored no unkind thought against the noble men and women of
the North who held opinions different from his own. He respected
even the honest fanatic, who fairly and openly contended for his
convictions; but he hated cant and hypocrisy, despised duplicity
and dishonesty, and leveled at them his most effective weapons,
ridicule, and sarcasm. For that portion of our Northern brethren who
came to the South to drive hard bargains with our people and cheat
them by false pretenses, he felt and expressed the most sovereign
contempt. For the men of the North who coveted the wealth of the
Southern planter, and the women who envied their Southern sisters
because of the ease and leisure incident to the ownership of slaves,
he made no attempt to conceal his hatred and disgust.
Major Hill brought with him to Raleigh his three professors, Lee,
Lane, and McKinney, two of whom fell later at the head of North
Carolina regiments, and one of whom was the successor of the noble
Branch as commander of one of our best and bravest brigades. He also
brought with him almost the whole corps of cadets, whose services
proved invaluable as drill-masters of the ten thousand volunteers
then in the camp of instruction of which Hill took charge. For his
services in the camp of instruction General Hill was allowed to
select twelve companies to compose the first regiment of volunteers.
The officers of these companies were all leading and influential
citizens, and the rank and file were among the first young men in
the State in intelligence, wealth, and social position. The service
of six months proved a training-school for that splendid body of
volunteers that ultimately placed them at the head of companies,
regiments, brigades, and divisions. Among its original officers were
Major-General Hoke, Brigadier-Generals Lane and Lewis, Colonels
Avery, Bridgers, Hardy, W. W. McDowell, J. C. S. McDowell, Starr,
Pemberton, Fuller, and a score of others, while a number from the
rank and file fell at the head of both companies and regiments at
later stages of the struggle.
In the outset of this discussion of the career of D. H. Hill as
a Confederate soldier, I lay down and propose to maintain the
proposition that from the time when he fought the first fight of
the war with North Carolina soldiers on Virginia soil till the
day he led the last attacking column of Confederates east of the
Mississippi and checked Sherman's advance at Bentonsville, whatever
may have been the general result of any engagement, the command
of General D. H. Hill was never found when the firing ceased at
night in the rear of the position it occupied when the signal of
attack sounded in the morning. Apparently reckless in the exposure
of his own person, no officer in our armies was more anxious about
the health, happiness, and safety of his soldiers. His theory was
that spades were instruments of defensive, bayonets of offensive,
warfare, and whether the emergency demanded the use of the one or
the other, it was to be done with "might and main." When his cadets
had asked him whether they should join South Carolina regiments
before their own State seceded he prophesied that the war would
soon begin and would continue long enough to give every Southerner
an opportunity to display his manhood. He rested his hope of
success upon the belief that every son of the South would rush to
the rescue; that our armies would be supplied by the labor of our
slaves, and that we would thus be enabled to throw a force into the
field sufficient to meet every Northern man who would tender his
services to the Federal Government. Two important elements were
wanting as a basis of his calculations--the Southern loyalist and
the foreign substitute. When, therefore, General D. H. Hill reported
to Colonel J. B. Magruder, then in charge of the Peninsula, and was
assigned to the command of the defenses of Yorktown, he realized, in
a measure at least, the magnitude of coming contest.
It has been said that a man who is himself born to command is quick
to perceive in others the qualities that fit them for leadership.
Colonel Hill seemed almost intuitively to descry in the ranks the
coolness, courage, judgment, and power of prompt decision which
others recognized in his favorites after they had led brigades
and divisions to victory. On assuming command at Yorktown he soon
discovered that the cavalry, which he looked upon as the "eye
and the ear of the army," was inefficient, because the force was
composed of a number of detached companies without a trained or
efficient commander. In this emergency an officer of the old army,
who had been commissioned lieutenant in the regular army of the
Confederate States, reported for duty. Marking him as a man of
promise, Colonel Hill at once caused an order to be issued placing
Major John B. Hood in command of all the cavalry, and waited for
the War Department to ratify the promotion and thus protect him
in practicing a pardonable ruse on the volunteers. That officer
ultimately succeeded Lieutenant-General D. H. Hill as the commander
of a corps, and was still later placed in charge of the army of
Tennessee. The Providence that has provided homes for his orphan
children will in its own good time bring to light all the facts,
and then John B. Hood will stand vindicated before the world as one
of the best and bravest of all our leaders. It was this same gift
that enabled General Hill to select from the lieutenants of his
regiment Robert F. Hoke to be made a major of his regiment over ten
competent captains. It was this intuitive perception of persistent
pluck, dash, and coolness that prompted him to love and honor George
B. Anderson, William R. Cox, Bryan Grimes, Stephen D. Ramseur, and
Robert D. Johnston, and led him later to urge the advancement of
Gordon, Colquitt, and Doles, of Georgia. In June, 1861 (a few days
after the fight at Bethel), in a letter to his wife he said of
Stonewall Jackson, then a colonel in command of a brigade, "I see
that Jackson has had an engagement and taken many prisoners. I have
predicted all along that Colonel Jackson would have a prominent
place in the war."
On the 6th of June, 1861, Colonel Hill, then at Yorktown, was
ordered to make a reconnaissance in force in the direction of
Fortress Monroe, and he moved down with his own regiment and four
companies of Richmond Howitzers under the command of Major G. W.
Randolph (afterwards Secretary of War), to Little Bethel Church.
Receiving information that Butler's forces were preparing to move up
the Peninsula, Colonel Hill fell back to Big Bethel Church, where,
with a small branch of Black river on his front and right flank
and an almost impenetrable forest on his left, he used twenty-five
spades and several hundred bayonets during the night in making an
enclosed work. Ben. Butler had started five thousand men in three
columns, with the confident expectation that two of the detachments
would travel by roads passing north and south of the position at
Little Bethel and form a junction two or three miles in the rear of
it, where the roads traveled by these two detachments came together,
while Duryea's Regiment of Zouaves would engage Hill in front till
the other columns should unite and then press him in the rear in his
expected retreat. Two of the detachments mistook each other in the
night and engaged in a skirmish. The Zouaves, instead of following
immediately upon the heels of the fugitive rebels, as contemplated
by Butler, turned back and fled precipitately on hearing the firing
in front of their own reserve line.
On the next day they again moved forward and attacked the force at
Big Bethel, Colonel Magruder having meantime arrived with Cary's
battalion of infantry. The whole force engaged on the Confederate
side was eight hundred North Carolinians and four hundred
Virginians; on the Federal side, thirty-five hundred, with from
fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred in reserve. After preliminary
skirmishing for about two hours, and an attack that lasted two
and a half hours longer, the enemy retreated in great confusion,
with a loss of probably fifty killed and three hundred wounded,
and were so hotly pursued by our cavalry that they scattered guns,
haversacks and knapsacks till they crossed a bridge and stopped the
pursuit by destroying it. The names of no soldiers of North Carolina
should be inscribed in a more prominent place on the monument to be
erected to her heroic dead than those of Henry L. Wyatt, the first
offering of the South to the Lost Cause, and his three comrades,
who rushed forward in a hail of shot and shell to destroy a house
where the sharpshooters of the enemy had taken shelter. Judging of
its importance by the numbers engaged and the losses on both sides,
the battle of Bethel scarcely rose above the dignity of a skirmish;
yet few events in the early history of the war had a more important
influence upon the contests of the following year. The splendid
bearing of our soldiers sent a thrill of pride to every Southern
heart, and when the first battle of Manassas was fought, less than
a month later, our soldiers moved forward in the confidence that
Southern pluck would again prevail over a foe that had shown so
little dash and confidence in this encounter.
There was on the Federal side at least one stout leader who
displayed the spirit of a hero. When Major Theodore Winthrop fell
within fifteen feet of our line, bravely leading a regiment in the
charge, even a generous foe felt that he was worthy to bear the name
of the two Winthrops by whose courage and judgment Americans had
first gained a foothold in this country.
To know D. H. Hill as the soldier of iron nerve, who rode unmoved in
showers of shot and shell, or rebuked in scathing terms a laggard
or a deserter, was to understand nothing of his true nature. When
the battle of Bethel was over and others were feasting or carousing,
Hill had fallen upon his knees and was returning thanks to Almighty
God, Who, he believed, directed the course of every deadly missile
hurled by the enemy with the same unerring certainty that ordered
the movements of the multitudes of worlds in the universe, and into
whose keeping he daily committed himself, his wife, and little ones,
his staff and his soldiers with the calm reliance of a child, that
as a kind father He would provide what was best for him and them.
On the day after the fight at Bethel he wrote his wife: "I have to
thank God for a great and decided victory, and that I escaped with
a slight contusion on the knee.... It is a little singular that my
first battle in this war should be at Bethel, where I was baptized
and worshiped till I was sixteen years old--the church of my mother.
Was she not a guardian spirit in the battle, averting ball and
shell? Oh God, give me gratitude to Thee, and may we never dishonor
Thee by weak faith!" Still later he wrote his wife: "I look for a
battle about the first of October. Pray for me that I may be well.
(He was then in delicate health).... We are in the hands of God, and
as safe on the battle-field as anywhere else. We will be exposed to
a heavy fire, but the arm of God is mightier than the artillery of
the enemy."
After the battle Governor Ellis issued a commission of
brigadier-general to him, as Governor Letcher had done at an earlier
date in the case of Jackson, but President Davis delayed giving him
the appointment till September, 1861. The response to a letter from
his wife, written during this interval, in which she complained of
the delay, shows how little the outer world understood his character
or his motives: "You must not be concerned about my commission,"
he wrote. "I feel too distrustful of my own skill, coolness, and
judgment. I have never coveted, and always avoided, positions of
trust and responsibility. The offices that I have held have not been
of my seeking."
Upon receiving his commission as a brigadier in September, 1861,
the first work assigned to him was the command of the coast of
North Carolina, with the duty, as far as possible, of constructing
fortifications wherever necessary. Hopeless as was the task
assigned, he brought all of his energies to bear upon it, and during
the few months that he remained in North Carolina did so much to
strengthen our forts and improve the discipline and spirit of the
troops that the public men of the State asked for his return in
every time of peril, until it became the custom of the general
commanding to send him to his department south of the James when
all was quiet on the Potomac, and recall him to the command of his
division in the field when active operations were resumed.
His first connection with the Army of Northern Virginia was when,
early in December, 1861, he was ordered to report to General
Johnston at Manassas, and was assigned to command at Leesburg on the
left of the line. While he was stationed there an incident occurred
which evinced the strength and warmth of General Hill's affection
for his early friends, even in the Federal army. General Stone was
in charge of the force on the opposite side of the river, and after
writing an official letter, sent under a flag of truce, General
Hill appended a postscript to the effect that, if the fortunes of
war should place his old academy chum in his custody he should feel
more inclined to take him into his own tent than to consign him
to prison. This led to the interchange of several kind messages
appended to similar communications. Unfortunately Stone was a
pronounced Democrat, and, like McClellan, was unwilling to recant or
repent. Seizing upon this excuse, Stanton arrested him on a charge
of disloyalty, and gave him no opportunity to vindicate himself till
the close of the war, when he resigned and spent his last days in
command of the army of the Khedive of Egypt.
On the night of the battle of Gaines' Mill, Major Clitz and General
Reynolds, old army comrades of General Hill, were brought as
prisoners to his quarters. He received both very kindly and sent for
a surgeon to dress Major Clitz's wound, while he comforted Reynolds,
who was mortified at being caught asleep, by reminding him that his
gallant conduct in Mexico and on the border would protect his good
name from a shade of suspicion. Both were placed in an ambulance,
paroled to report to General Winder at Richmond, and furnished
with the address of a friend of General Hill's who would honor
their drafts for money. These incidents are reproduced because they
bring to view traits of General Hill's character of which the world
generally knows so little, his warm sympathy for suffering and his
lasting and unswerving fidelity to his friends.
From the moment when Johnston placed Hill, then a major-general,
at the head of a division in March, 1862, till the last shock of
arms at Bentonsville, Hill's position on every march and in every
battle, with scarcely a single exception, was the post of danger
and honor. His was the first division of Johnston's army to enter
Yorktown and the last to leave it and pass with his command through
the reserve line. When the vanguard of the enemy, led by Hancock,
rushed upon our rear at Williamsburg, it was Basil C. Manly, of
Ramseur's Battery, who, seeing that a section of the enemy's light
artillery might beat him in the race to occupy an earthwork midway
between the two, unlimbered on the way and by a well-directed shot
disabled the enemy _in transitu_, and as quick as thought limbered
up again and ran into the fortifications. It was the regiment of
Duncan K. MacRae, of D. H. Hill's Division, that extorted from the
generous and gallant Hancock that memorable declaration, "The Fifth
North Carolina and Twenty-fourth Virginia deserve to have the word
_immortal_ inscribed on their banners." It was this charge which
Early describes as "an attack upon the vastly superior forces of
the enemy, which for its gallantry is unsurpassed in the annals of
warfare."
When McClellan moved his army over Bottom's Bridge, threw a heavy
column across the Chickahominy and extended his line towards the
north of Richmond, General R. E. Lee was then acting as advisory
commander of all the armies of the Confederacy. He concurred with
Mr. Davis in the opinion that McClellan should be attacked on the
other side of the Chickahominy before he matured his preparations
for a siege of Richmond. (_The Rise and Fall of the Confederate
Government_, Vol. I, p. 120.) When General Lee communicated their
views to General Johnston, he told Lee that his plan was to send
A. P. Hill to the right and rear of the enemy and G. W. Smith to
the left flank, with orders to make simultaneous attacks for the
purpose of doubling up the army, and sending Longstreet to cross
at Mechanicsville bridge and attack him in front. McClellan's
line on his right was not then well fortified, and the general
disposition of the Federal forces was more favorable for a
Confederate advance than a month later, when Lee concentrated a
heavy force on the left and turned it. After McDowell's movement to
Hanover Court House, when his vanguard was checked by Branch, the
blows stricken by Jackson in such rapid succession in the valley
had excited apprehension so grave in the mind of Lincoln that,
despite McClellan's protest, he ordered the withdrawal of that
command to Fredericksburg for the protection of Washington City.
For reasons that were unsatisfactory to the President, General
Johnston, after marching and countermarching G. W. Smith's and
Longstreet's Divisions, abandoned his first plan of operations and
ordered the troops to assume substantially their original positions.
President Davis, in his work _The Rise and Fall of the Confederate
Government_, takes the ground that after waiting a week and giving
McClellan the opportunity to fortify, operations should have been
delayed another day till the Chickahominy had risen high enough to
sweep away the bridges and till Huger had had time to move up his
artillery from his position near Richmond.
The popular impression that the bridges across the Chickahominy
had already been swept away when the fight at Seven Pines began
on the 30th of May, 1861, is totally unfounded. The corps of
Heintzelman and Keyes were then south and that of Sumner north
of the Chickahominy. The plan outlined by General Johnston was,
briefly, that Huger should move from his camp near Richmond early
on that morning down the Charles City road and vigorously attack
the enemy's right, and that Longstreet and Hill, moving on the same
road, should attack the center and left of the force south of the
bridge, while G. W. Smith's Corps should advance on the Nine Mile
Road and turn the left of Heintzelman and Keyes, if Sumner should
not have arrived, or engage and prevent the junction of his with
the other corps, if he should cross. Longstreet and Hill were in
position to attack at an early hour, but waited till ten o'clock for
the arrival of Huger, whose division, except two regiments of Rodes'
(which created a diversion by a vigorous attack on the right),
did not arrive in time to participate in the action. Our failure
to destroy an enemy who, by a concerted movement in the forenoon,
would have been utterly routed and driven from the field or captured
was, as is universally conceded, one of the most palpable blunders
of the war, but the question upon whose shoulders the blame rests
still confronts us. No engagement of the war has given rise to more
acrimonious censure and crimination than Seven Pines. Mr. Davis,
General Johnston, General Longstreet, General Smith, and General
Huger have each in turn discussed the conduct of both the active and
passive leaders of that memorable day.
The future historians who shall make up for posterity their verdict
upon the controverted points of the battle of Seven Pines will
find one fact admitted by all of the disputants: that D. H. Hill
was the hero of the occasion, and with his own gallant division,
aided by two of Longstreet's brigades, drove the enemy in confusion
from the breastworks and turned their own guns upon them as they
retreated. Longstreet, who was in command on the right, generously
said in his report: "The conduct of the attack was left entirely to
Major-General Hill. The success of the affair is sufficient evidence
of his ability, courage, and skill." Commenting upon the language
of Longstreet, President Davis said: "This tribute to General Hill
was no more than has been accorded to him by others who knew of
his services on that day, and was in keeping with the determined
courage, vigilance, and daring exhibited by him on other fields."
General Johnston's language was not less unequivocal in according
to Hill the credit of making a very gallant and the only successful
attack upon the enemy's works, when he said in his report: "The
principal attack was made by Major-General Longstreet with his
own and Major-General D. H. Hill's Division--the latter mostly
in advance. Hill's brave troops, admirably commanded and most
gallantly led, forced their way through the abattis which formed the
enemy's external defenses and stormed their entrenchments by a most
determined rush. Such was the manner in which the enemy's first line
was carried. The operation was repented with the same gallantry and
success as our troops pursued their victorious career through the
enemy's successive camps and entrenchments. At each new position
they encountered fresh troops and reenforcements brought from the
rear. Thus they had to repel repeated efforts to retake works which
they had carried, but their advance was never successfully resisted."