9, Union general Nathaniel Banks took the situation into his own hands. Believing that a delay would allow the Confederates to amass more troops, he decided to attack.
Just before five o’clock on the evening of August 9, Banks ordered his men to prepare to advance. Col. George D. Chapman, leading the Connecticut 5th, took his post behind the regiment’s colors and spoke encouragingly to his soldiers, telling them “to remember their good name and to be sure to do credit to themselves and the state.” One of the color sergeants saw that the colonel wasn’t wearing a sidearm, and offered him his own revolver. “The Colonel refused it, telling the sergeant that his life was just as valuable.”
Then the order came: “Fix bayonets and charge,” “Charge, charge and yell”—and “the whole brigade sprang over the fence.” As the troops moved swiftly forward into the stubble of a wheat field, they entered a storm of bullets from the Confederates hidden in the woods before them. “Color Sergeant Jones, carrying the stars and stripes, fell on his face, killed outright … Captain Corliss … caught up and bore on the flag, until he was brought to the ground with a bullet … Sergeant Luzerne A. Palmer took it from Captain Corliss and bore it to the front again, until he fell wounded.”45 According to one of its lieutenants, seven of the 5th Regiment’s color-bearers gave their lives for the flag that day; two more fell wounded.
Color Sergeant James Hewison, bearing the State colors, was wounded early in the charge, but kept along, bearing the colors till … he was again severely wounded and fell, unable to go further. Many were falling about him at the time, and his fall was unobserved till the line had passed on and he was left among the dead and dying with the flag in his possession.
After the first shock of his wound had passed and he had regained some strength he resolved that neither himself nor it should fall into the hands of the enemy if he could prevent it, and carefully tearing it from the staff, he wrapped it about his person beneath his uniform; then he crawled from the field on his hands and knees, as rapidly as his wounds would permit, and he was taken by comrades to a hospital, wearing the flag, and so he saved it.46
Through the galling fire the brigade came on, until the blue-clad Union soldiers entered the woods and were in the midst of the Rebels. A section of the Confederate line gave way quickly, the soldiers fleeing to the rear, which allowed the 5th Connecticut boys to break through “surging into the woods through this gap thus made and swinging to the left as they advanced … our ranks, which had now become a furious yelling line, sweeping right forward towards the rear of the enemy’s line … From this point on, for the next fifteen minutes, it was a hand to hand encounter. There were few loaded guns on either side and very little chance to load them. Clubbed muskets and bayonets were the rule.”47
But in a matter of minutes, the tide turned. Stonewall Jackson galloped forward, waving a battle flag, and his brigade rallied to him, charging the Union line. The Rebels, already in retreat, turned and reformed, and A. P. Hill’s troops rushed forward to reinforce them. The Confederates now outnumbered the Union troops two to one. The 5th Connecticut men and their comrades rallied, making a stand in the woods while they prayed for reinforcements to arrive.
The report of their brigade commander, General Crawford, described “vastly superior numbers of the enemy.” Of his own troops, Crawford wrote: “Their field officers had all been killed, wounded, or taken prisoners, the support I looked for did not arrive, and my gallant men, broken, decimated by that fearful fire, that unequal contest, fell back again across the space, leaving most of their number upon the field. The slaughter was fearful.”48
That night, the soldiers of the shattered regiment tried to regroup. Henry Daboll, twenty-eight, had been the regiment’s eighth-ranked captain that morning. Now, with so many officers dead or wounded, Captain Daboll found himself in command of the 5th Connecticut—or what was left of it.49
As the battered men of 5th Connecticut stumbled in to their regiment after the battle, there was no sign of one of their most respected officers, Maj. Edward Blake.
The major, called Ned, came from a large and close New Haven family. As a student at Yale, he’d gained his classmates’ esteem without trying. “Whoever knew Blake loved him,” declared the Class Record; “nor was it difficult to know him, for he carried his heart in his hand. A man of fine physique and of the most exuberant spirits, he delighted and excelled in out-door sport.”50 A member of Yale’s crew team, Ned had also joined the mysterious Skull and Bones society, proudly wearing a gold pin with the group’s insignia.
Before leaving New Haven to join his regiment, Ned Blake faced the camera with the honest, open gaze that characterized him.
When the war began, Ned was in law school and did not immediately enlist. After much reflection, he decided that the rebellion was “a war on which the most immense results for the whole world depended,” a friend related.51
“Naturally of a mild gentle and peaceful disposition, a military career was the very last thing he would have selected if it had not been for the voice of duty sounding in his ears,” said his brother.52 The governor appointed Blake adjutant of Connecticut’s 5th Regiment; three days later, Ned left Connecticut for Maryland.
It was a hard winter for the 5th Regiment, full of exhausting marches. Maj. Henry B. Stone described one of the most grueling:
When I tell you that the snow was driving all day, and ankle-deep; that the men had just marched one hundred and thirty miles with scarcely two days’ rest; that their feet were sore and blistered, many of them without shoes, and using handkerchiefs and old rags to tie up their feet and keep them out of the snow,—you may appreciate the march, and the indomitable perseverance of our men to accomplish it. Some of the boys were compelled to fall out from exhaustion; and the poor fellows wept bitterly because they were unable to stand up longer.53
That spring, the 5th Regiment’s brigade drove Stonewall Jackson’s troops out of Winchester, Virginia, only to find the tables turned less than three months later. With their brigade cut off from the rest of the army and in imminent danger of capture, the men of the 5th made a forced march of forty-three miles, reaching the Potomac River near midnight. Instead of riding a horse as officers usually did, Ned Blake marched with his men.54
Weeks later, Blake received a promotion to major. In early August, his regiment went into battle at Cedar Mountain with him on horseback, leading his troops in the charge. Forced to dismount when his horse was wounded, Major Blake fought on foot with his men. Then the flow of battle changed; Union troops were forced to retreat, and the 5th Connecticut became divided. It was impossible to know who had been wounded, killed, or captured.
The next day both sides began to bury their dead. With the temperature nearly 100 degrees, bloating and decomposition quickly made many of the young men’s bodies unrecognizable. In addition, many bodies had been pillaged of their clothing and personal effects.
No one had come across Major Blake. He wasn’t among the Union prisoners, nor with the wounded. Yet no one had found his body on the field, either.
In the weeks that followed, Ned’s parents and siblings suffered in excruciating uncertainty. Telegrams and letters flew back and forth between the family and Ned’s regiment. Then an officer in the same brigade, who’d been wounded and taken prisoner, “stated that the body of a major, near where he lay, was rifled by an enemy officer, who showed him among other things a gold pin (skull and crossbones) which he had appropriated.”55
Soldiers
