For the northern trap was sprung. Four full brigades of infantry bolstered by the finest field artillery in North America had hooked into the rebellion’s ragged rear to where a scratch southern force led by a whiskey-sucking foulmouth was the only obstacle left to victory. Now all the day needed was one overwhelming charge and the slaveholders’ rebellion would become a mere footnote to history, a thing forgotten, a passing summer’s madness that would be gone and ended and vanished like smoke in a sudden wind. “God bless you, Boston,” Evans said, for Starbuck had not lied after all, and there was going to be a fight.

The Yankees Came On...

THE YANKEES CAME ON QUICK. THEIR PREDAWN FLANKING MARCH had taken hours longer than their commanders had expected, and now their task was to thrust hard and fast into the rebel rear before the southerners had time to understand just what was happening.

Drums beat the pace as the first northern regiments spread into their attack lines and as cannon unlimbered at the attackers’ flanks. Some guns were deployed on the dirt road, others in the farm at the foot of the slope from where they sent the first shells screaming up toward the wooded ridge where the thin line of Confederate forces waited. The advancing Yankees were confident. They had expected the Sudley Fords would be defended, then had half-feared that the southerners might have fortified an unfinished railway embankment just beyond the fords, but instead they had encountered no resistance as they had steadily advanced into the rebel rear. The surprise of their attack seemed to be total, the ineptness of the southern commanders complete, and all that now stood between the federal forces and victory was this contemptible line of rebel farmboys who edged a wood at the long hill’s crest. “On to Richmond, boys!” an officer shouted as the attack started up the gentle slope, and behind the blue-coated infantry a regimental band swung into the tune “John Brown’s Body,” as though the ghost of that irascible old martyr was personally present to see the two leading regiments, both from Rhode Island, crack the rebel line apart.

More northern troops emerged from the woods behind the advancing Rhode Islanders. Men from New York and New Hampshire joined the attack as the flanking guns jetted clouds of gray-white smoke. Swift fan-shaped patterns of compressed gases rippled the long grass under the guns’ smoke as the shells seared up the slope. The explosions were mighty, ear splitting, terrible. Some shells, fired too high, crashed through the branches above the Confederate line, scaring birds out of the trees and showering twigs and leaves down onto the bandsmen and chaplains and servants and medical orderlies who crouched in the rear. A regiment of regular U.S. Army troops marched out from the trees, deployed from column into line, fixed their bayonets, and advanced uphill with the New Yorkers and New Englanders.