University of Virginia Library

1. I.

THERE was a gentleman of South Carolina, of high position and
ample estate, who in 1861 came to take part in the war in
Virginia, at the head of a “Legion” of six hundred infantry.
This body of men, it was said, he had equipped from his own
purse; as he had sent to England and purchased the artillery
with which he was going to fight.

The “Legion” was composed of brave stuff, and officered by
hard-fighting gentlemen—the flower indeed of the great South
Carolina race; a good stock. It first took the field in earnest at
the first battle of Manassas—as an independent organization,
belonging neither to Beauregard's “Army of the Potomac” nor
to Johnston's “Army of the Shenandoah.” But there it was, as
though dropped from the clouds, on the morning of that fiery
twenty-first of July, 1861, amid the corn-fields of Manassas.
It made its mark without loss of time—stretching out to Virginia
that firm, brave hand of South Carolina. At ten o'clock
in the morning, on this eventful day, the battle seemed lost to
the Southerners. Evans was cut to pieces; Bee shattered and
driven back in utter defeat to the Henry-House hill; between
the victorious enemy and Beauregard's unprotected flank were
interposed only the six hundred men of the “Legion” already
up, and the two thousand six hundred and eleven muskets of
Jackson not yet in position. The Legion occupied the Warrenton
road near the Stone House, where it met and sustained
with stubborn front the torrent dashed against it. General

Keyes, with his division, attacked the six hundred from the
direction of Red-House ford, and his advance line was forced
back by them, and compelled to take refuge beneath the bluffs
near Stone bridge. The column of General Hunter, mean while,
closed in on the left of the little band, enveloped their flank,
and poured a destructive artillery fire along the line. To hold
their ground further was impossible, and they slowly fell back;
but those precious moments had been secured. Jackson was in
position; the Legion retreated, and formed upon his right; the
enemy's advance was checked; and when the Southern line
advanced in its turn, with wild cheers, piercing the Federal centre,
the South Carolinians fought shoulder to shoulder beside
the Stonewall Brigade, and saw the Federal forces break in disorder.
When the sun set on this bloody and victorious field,
the “Legion” had made a record among the most honourable in
history. They had done more than their part in the hard struggle,
and now saw the enemy in full retreat; but their leader did not
witness that spectacle. Wade Hampton had been shot down in
the final charge near the Henry House, and borne from the field,
cheering on his men to the last, with that stubborn hardihood
which he derived from his ancestral blood.

Such was the first appearance upon the great arena of a man
who was destined to act a prominent part in the tragic drama of
the war, and win for himself a distinguished name. At Manassas,
there in the beginning of the struggle, as always afterwards,
he was the cool and fearless soldier. It was easily seen by those
who watched Hampton “at work” that he fought from a sense
of duty, and not from passion, or to win renown. The war was
a gala-day full of attraction and excitement to some; with him
it was hard work—not sought, but accepted. I am certain that
he was not actuated by a thirst for military rank or renown.
From those early days when all was gay and brilliant, to the
latter years when the conflict had become so desperate and
bloody, oppressing every heart, Hampton remained the same
cool, unexcited soldier. He was foremost in every fight, and
everywhere did more than his duty; but evidently martial ambition
did not move him. Driven to take up arms by his principles,

he fought for those principles, not for fame. It followed
him—he did not follow it; and to contemplate the character and
career of such a man is wholesome.

His long and ardous career cannot here be narrated. A bare
reference to some prominent points is all that can be given.
Colonel Hampton, of the “Hampton Legion,” soon became
Brigadier-General Hampton, of the cavalry. The horsemen of
the Gulf States serving in Virginia were placed under him, and
the brigade became a portion of Stuart's command. It soon
made its mark. Here are some of the landmarks in the stirring
record.

The hard and stubborn stand made at the Catoctin Mountain,
when General Lee first invaded Maryland, and where Hampton
charged and captured the Federal artillery posted in the suburbs
of Frederick City; the rear-guard work as the Southern column
hastened on, pursued by McClellan, to Sharpsburg: the stout
fighting on the Confederate left there; the raid around McClellan's
army in October; the obstinate fighting in front of the
gaps of the Blue Ridge as Lee fell back in November to the line
of the Rappahannock; the expedition in dead of winter to the
Occoquan; the critical and desperate combat on the ninth of
June, 1863, at Fleetwood Hill, near Brandy, where Hampton
held the right, and Young, of Georgia, the brave of braves, went
at the flanking column of the enemy with the sabre, never firing
a shot, and swept them from the field; the speedy advance,
thereafter, from the Rapidan; the close and bitter struggle when
the enemy, with an overpowering force of infantry, cavalry, and
artillery, about the twentieth of June, attacked the Southern
cavalry near Middleburg, and forced them back step by step
beyond Upperville, where in the last wild charge, when the
Confederates were nearly broken, Hampton went in with the
sabre at the head of his men and saved the command from
destruction by his “do or die” fighting; the advance immediately
into Pennsylvania, when the long, hard march, like the
verses of Ariosto, was strewed all over with battles; the stubborn
attack at Hanovertown, where Hampton stood like a rock upon
the hills above the place, and the never-ceasing or receding roar

of his artillery told us that on the right flank all was well; the
march thereafter to Carlisle, and back to Gettysburg; the grand
charge there, sabre to sabre, where Hampton was shot through
the body, and nearly cut out of the saddle by a sabre blow upon
the head, which almost proved fatal; the hard conflicts of the
Wilderness, when General Grant came over in May, 1864; the
fighting on the north bank of the Po, and on the left of the
army at Spotsylvania Court-House; the various campaigns
against Sheridan, Kautz, Wilson, and the later cavalry leaders
on the Federal side, when, Stuart having fallen, Hampton commanded
the whole Virginia cavalry; the hot fights at Trevillian's,
at Reanis, at Bellfield, in a hundred places, when, in
those expiring hours of the great conflict, a species of fury
seemed to possess both combatants, and Dinwiddie was the arena
of a struggle, bitter, bloody, desperate beyond all expression;
then the fighting in the Carolinas on the old grounds of the
Edisto, the high hills of the Santee and Congaree, which in 1864
and 1865 sent bulletins of battle as before; then the last act of
the tragedy, when Sherman came and Hampton's sabre gleamed
in the glare of his own house at Columbia, and then was
sheathed—such were some of the scenes amid which the tall
form of this soldier moved, and his sword flashed. That stalwart
form had everywhere towered in the van. On the Rappahannock,
the Rapidan, the Susquehanna, the Shenandoah, the
Po, the North Anna, the James, the Rowanty, and Hatcher's
Run—in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—Hampton had
fought with the stubborn courage inherited from his Revolution-ary
sires. Fighting lastly upon the soil of his native State, he
felt no doubt as Marion and Sumter did, when Rawdon and
Tarleton came and were met sabre to sabre. In the hot conflicts
of 1865, Hampton met the new enemy as those preux chevaliers
with their great Virginia comrade, “Light-House Harry” Lee,
had met the old in 1781.

But the record of those stubborn fights must be left to another
time and to abler hands. I pass to a few traits of the individual.