wounded at the first fire after the infantry had rallied in support of the cavalry attack, and the two small regiments were overwhelmed and compelled to surrender as soon as the cavalry had ceased to be a factor.

Colonel Washburn had been shot in the mouth and sabred as he fell from his horse. He was found on the field with the other dead and wounded the next day, when the advance of the Army of the James came up. He was taken to the hospital at Point of Rocks but insisted upon being sent to his home in Massachusetts, where he died in the arms of his mother. Before his death, he was, at Grant’s request, brevetted as Brigadier General.

Of the other officers, Lieutenant Colonel Jenkins was severely wounded, as were Captain Caldwell and Lieutenants Belcher and Thompson. Captains Hodges and Goddard were killed, and Lieutenant Davis shot after having been made a prisoner, for resenting an insult offered him by a rebel officer. The adjutant, Lieutenant Lathrop, after his horse had been killed under him, was taken into the woods to be shot, because his captor asserted that he had slain his brother in the fight. Fortunately a Confederate staff-officer observed the proceeding, and rescued him from his would-be murderer.

Happily, the casualties among the enlisted men were much less in proportion than among the officers. They had to a man fought with the most desperate valor, keeping up the struggle after all the officers were down, until absolutely ingulfed in the masses of the enemy.

In telling of the practical annihilation of a body of troops, the statement that their standard was saved from capture seems almost incredible; yet such was the case in this instance. The color sergeant, a gallant soldier from Hingham by the name of Thomas Hickey, had carried the standard through the hottest of the battle. At the last moment, seeing that it was impossible to save it from capture except by destroying it, he managed to elude the enemies who were closing in upon him, and putting spurs to his horse, flew toward a hut which he had observed in the woods, and threw himself from his charger just as he reached it, with his foes close upon him. Rushing it, he thrust his precious battle flag into a fire which was blazing on the hearth. The painted silk flashed up in flame, and by the time that his pursuers broke in, it was ashes!

His life was spared in consideration of his devoted bravery, and he subsequently received a commission from the Governor of the Commonwealth, in recognition of his heroic deed.

The losses of the Confederates in this action were at least a half greater in number than Washburn’s whole force. By their own report, there were a hundred killed and wounded, among them a general, one colonel, three majors and a number of officers of lower grade.

The Battle at High Bridge was at first thought to have been a useless sacrifice. It was a sacrifice indeed, but it unquestionably hastened the termination of the war, by days, and perhaps weeks.

After the surrender, Lee’s Inspector General said to Ord,

“To the sharpness of that fight, the cutting off of Lee’s army at Appomattox was probably owing. So fierce were the charges of Colonel Washburn and his men, and so determined their fighting, that General Lee received the impression that they must be supported by a large part of the army, and that his retreat was cut off.”

Lee consequently halted and began to intrench; and this delay gave time for Ord to come up, and enabled Sheridan to intercept the enemy at Sailor’s Creek.

The Confederate General Rosser said to a member of the regiment whom he met after the war:

“You belonged to the Fourth Massachusetts Cavalry? Give me your hand! I have been many a day in hot fights. I never saw anything approaching that at High Bridge. While your colonel kept his saddle, everything went down before him!”

The Confederate troops at High Bridge were Rosser’s and a part of Fitz Hugh Lee’s divisions.

“Was your colonel drunk or crazy this morning, that he attacked with less than one hundred men the best fighting division of the Confederate cavalry?” asked a rebel officer of a wounded captain of the Fourth; “We have seen hard fighting, but we never heard of anything like this before!”

The Confederate officers had at first utterly refused to credit the stories of their prisoners, insisting that the small force would never have fought so fiercely unless it had been the advance of a strong column.

Grant says in his memoirs.

“The Confederates took this to be only the advance of a larger column which had headed them off, and so stopped to intrench; so that this gallant band had checked the progress of a strong detachment of the Confederate army. This stoppage of Lee’s column no doubt saved to us the trains following.”

Major Atherton H. Stevens
4th Mass. Volunteer Cavalry

The First United States Flag Raised
In Richmond After the War.

By Mrs. Lasalle Corbell Pickett,

Wife of Major-General George E. Pickett, C. S. A.

The first knell of the evacuation of Richmond sounded on Sunday morning while we were on our knees in St. Paul’s Church, invoking God’s protecting care for our absent loved ones, and blessings on our cause.

The intense excitement, the tolling of the bells, the hasty parting, the knowledge that all communication would be cut off between us and our loved ones, and the dread, undefined fear in our helplessness and desertion, make a nightmare memory.

General Ewell had orders for the destruction of the public buildings, which orders our Secretary of War, Gen. J. C. Breckenridge strove earnestly but without avail to have countermanded. The order, alas! was obeyed beyond the “letter of the law.”

The terrible conflagration was kindled by the Confederate authorities, who applied the torch to the Shockoe warehouse, it, too, being classed among the public buildings because of the tobacco belonging to France and England stored in it. A fresh breeze was blowing from the south; the fire swept on in its haste and fury over a great area in an almost incredibly short time, and by noon the flames had transformed into a desert waste all the city bounded by Seventh and Fifteenth Streets, and Main Street and the river. One thousand houses were destroyed. The streets were filled with furniture and every description of wares, dashed down to be trampled in the mud or buried where they lay.

At night a saturnalia began. About dark, the Government commissary began the destruction of its stores. Soldiers and citizens gathered in front, catching the liquor in basins and pitchers; some with their hats and some with their boots. It took but a short time for this to make a manifestation as dread as the flames. The crowd became a howling mob, so frenzied that the officers of the law had to flee for their lives, reviving memories of 1781, when the British under Arnold rode down Richmond Hill, and, invading the city, broke open the stores and emptied the provisions and liquors into the gutters, making even the uninitiated cows and hogs drunk for days.

All through the night, crowds of men, women,