Battle of Ball's Bluff, October 21, 1861

'Twas a calm October morning
Long before the East was gray
That our Chief received the order
Straight to marshall the array.

My brother, oh, my brother !
Brother that I loved so well,--
Other pens must trace the story
How you fought and how you fell!

Early on the seasonably cool early morning of October 21, 1861, the long roll was beat in the camp of the California Regiment at Poolesville, Maryland, and the men prepared to march. After a hasty breakfast of coffee and hardtack, the troops checked their haversacks to make sure that they had one day’s rations on hand. Those fellows lacking provisions obtained whatever they needed from the cooks. This completed, cartridge boxes were filled and accouterments were donned. Medical officers also were hard at work making sure that they were ready for whatever the day might bring. "I have inspected my instruments, dressings, stimulants, anesthetics, etc., for about the twentieth time, and am confident nothing is overlooked," wrote Dr. Charles Bombaugh of the Philadelphia Irish Regiment (69th Pennsylvania). Presently the 569 men and officers of the First Battalion of the California Regiment (Companies A,C,D,G,H,L,N and P; the balance of the regiment was on picket duty along the Potomac River), were in line and ready to march, some wearing overcoats, some carrying their blankets, but all without knapsacks. A column of four men abreast was formed and, at about 4:00 a.m., the Californians disappeared into a night that one soldier recalled as "raw and chilly and dark as pitch." Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Wistar, leading the column for Colonel Baker who had overall brigade command, and his men set of for Conrad’s Ferry, roughly five and one-half miles distant from camp, in what one fellow termed "high spirits."

Presently, as the eastern sky began to brighten, the vanguard of the battalion column crossed the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and continued along the towpath for a short distance before halting at Conrad’s Ferry between 7:00 and 7:30 a.m. The men stacked arms and rested along the banks of the canal awaiting orders. One Californian peered across the dark Potomac which, swollen by recent rains, "flowed with great rapidity and very deep."

Before long, Edward Baker, who had left the column of march earlier that morning to return to Poolesville to bring up his remaining regiments, cantered up to Isaac Wistar. The brigade commander asked his lieutenant, who was sitting on the canal bank, if any orders had been received. Wistar replied that he had been instructed to await orders. "I don’t understand this matter," Baker said. "I had better go down to Stone (Brigadier General Charles Pomeroy Stone, commander of the so-called Corps of Observation], had I not?" "I don’t know; these are my orders," Wistar replied. The senator looked over the Californians and told them that they would have some work to do in a short time. "The sooner the better," was the shouted response according to a member of Company A. Soon the boys were clambering aboard the two small flat boats or scows that bobbed along the river bank. Things looked less than promising at this point. Indeed, the means of crossing the Potomac seemed "altogether inadequate" to one soldier. Nevertheless, Wistar’s men scrambled into the boats and began drifting across the Maryland channel to Harrison’s Island in the middle of the river. Company A already had gained the island when Edward Baker arrived on the scene. It was now perhaps 11:30 and the brigade commander wanted the men shuttled to the island as fast as possible.

Map of Harrison's Island and Ball's Bluff;
the First Battalion of the California Regiment fought on the left of the Union position,
just below the word "Ball's"

Lieutenant Colonel Wistar on Harrison’s Island, and Captain George Ritman (Company C) on the Maryland shore, worked assiduously at getting men across the Maryland channel. Each trip from Maryland to the island took anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes. When they gained the island, the men rushed to the embarkation point for the final leg of the trip to the Virginia shore. Presently, Wistar's men began climbing aboard boats for the trip to the Virginia shore. A member of Company C recalled that before he and his 84 comrades shoved away from Harrison’s Island, Baker told them, "Boys, you have got a fight now….you won’t be able to retreat; all we want is to keep the ground for one hour, by that time the reinforcements will come up and we will be all right, but the odds are against us." After crossing the Virginia channel of the Potomac, the Californians struggled up the steep, roughly 15-foot-high oozy river bank. Some of the men dropped their overcoats and blankets on a pile and everybody hustled down river along the narrow flood plain for a distance of perhaps 190 yards. At this point, Wistar’s troops filed right and began working their way up the 60- to 70-foot-high cliff that was covered with rocks and scrubby trees and bushes. Rifle muskets were slung over shoulders and the men grasped at bushes and branches of trees. When he finally puffed to the top of the cliff, Private Albert Wisner of Company A spotted Colonel Baker, recently arrived on the bluff, resplendent in his dress uniform. "There is a pretty bird!", announced the private to a companion. As the Californians awaited orders they contemplated the terrain on their front and flanks. Extending away from their position along a tree line just beyond the lip of the bluff was a cleared or open field covered with grass, locust trees and scrub oak, about 200 yards deep and 70 yards wide, and surrounded on three sides by a wood-covered ridge that commanded the field. The ledge and Potomac River at their backs had to be a bit unnerving to some of the men.

When Isaac Wistar arrived on the bluff at perhaps 3:30 p.m., he found four of his companies holding the left of the Union position at the edge of the woods facing the cleared field. Three companies were formed in line of battle and one was deployed as skirmishers covering the left flank of the battalion line which lay at the edge of the woods in the southeast corner of the cleared field and close to where the ground descended into a deep ravine that opened to the Potomac. The gully was bordered on its south side by a ridge that overlooked the left flank of the line. Presently Wistar prepared to push a skirmish company, Company A, "an excellent company" according to its former commander, a bit farther toward the ravine on the left. At about this time, "a slight spitting fire" loosed by Confederate marksmen deployed on the wooded ridge that overlooked the cleared field began to take a toll among the Californians lying on the ground. Recently, Corporal Sewell Randall of Company D had described a disturbing dream to a companion. Although his friend chided him for attaching too much significance to a dream, Sewell remained hopeless of his future. The corporal and his comrades had just reached the top of the bluff and gone to ground when the Confederates opened fire. Sewell was one of the first men hit, an agonizing bullet wound to his side.

Isaac Wistar was concerned with his command’s position, particularly what may lay off its left flank. Colonel Baker agreed and ordered his subalternto "send out two of your best skirmishing companies to the front, and feel the enemy’s position, and see what is on our flank; make a thorough reconnaissance." The colonel added that if the skirmishers were attacked, they were to retreat fighting. Wistar thought that he might be outnumbered. "I cannot help it," Baker countered, "I must know what is there." The battalion commander turned to Captain John Markoe, the highly regarded commander of Company A, and said: "You hear what my orders are: do you understand them?" Markoe knew what was required of him and he led his command forward.

Lieutenant Colonel Wistar	Captain John Markoe

Company A was followed by Company D. Because the latter unit was lacking in officers this day, and the "bulk of my command needing no immediate attention," Isaac Wistar took charge of Company D. The two companies, Company A perhaps 30 paces in the advance, trotted into the dense woods on the left. Sergeant John Thatcher and his brother William of Company A advanced together on the left of the line so that if one went down the other could come to the wounded sibling’s aid. It was hard going through the brush and the Thatchers could not see the right of the company line, or what was supposed to be a line. Before Markoe’s command had penetrated very far into the timber, either part of or the entire 8^th Virginia rose up and charged with the bayonet. The Californians opened fire at the Johnnies who fell back a distance and loosed a return fire. For some reason, Private Albert Wisner of Company A, tramping about 10 feet to the front of his command, headed out of the woods and into the cleared field. "Wisner, come back!", Private Jim King called. Wisner looked behind him to see that indeed, he was too far in the advance. At that moment, the private spotted a tall Rebel to his left front rise up, take aim at his head and fire a ball that missed its target. Wisner raised his own weapon, pulled the trigger and dropped the Southerner. At the same time, a Confederate in a tree sent an errant shot by Wisner’s head. John Markoe kept his men, including the charmed Private Wisner, to their task and steadied them by example while Wistar guided Company D in their wake. Both companies delivered what the lieutenant colonel termed "a very hot fire."

Although their ammunition was low, the Virginians sent telling volleys into the men of Companies A and D. At one point in this action, the right flank of the Virginia line loosed a fierce volley into the Californians. Private Henry Allen of Company A was hit in the left leg and started for the rear. Andrew J. Hooper and John Harvey of the same company received shoulder and stomach wounds, respectively. Lieutenant Wade of Company D went down with a serious gunshot wound to the right shoulder. At about this time Wistar placed Companies A and D under Captain Markoe’s command and raced back to the balance of the battalion on the bluff.

The two companies fought gallantly and held their ground for perhaps 15 minutes before Company D on the right began to fall back. John Markoe’s men held for a bit longer but soon succumbed to Rebel small arms fire. The captain was wounded and First Lieutenant H.S.D. Williams who Isaac Wistar recalled as an "energetic and capable" officer, was knocked down. The lieutenant seized a rifle lying nearby, struggled to his feet and returned fire until his was killed. By this time, claimed Wistar, the two companies had lost "all their officers, all their sergeants but two (one of them wounded), all their corporals but three, and two-thirds of their privates." Captain Markoe lay wounded in the woods where he was taken prisoner.

When the action on the left ended, the field became quiet, except for scattered small arms fire and, as recalled by one Californian, the "strains of music from a band on the canal bank." In minutes, the 18^th Mississippi charged across the open field but was repulsed by combined small arms and artillery fire. Now a desultory fire that swept the cleared field just after the Mississippian’s had been beaten back erupted into what Sergeant Alban Paist of Company C remembered as a "terrible fire…opened upon us from the woods." Lieutenant Francis Young wrote that "the bullets fell like hailstones" among the men.

After their charge across the cleared field had been repulsed, the men of the 18^th Mississippi had filed to their right along the high ridge that bordered the south side of the deep ravine. They extended their line almost to the Potomac thereby endangering the left flank of the California battalion. Isaac Wistar, for one, understood what was happening. Three or four of his companies changed front and moved to within 15 yards of the ravine from where they could defend the left flank. The men were instructed to hold their fire until the enemy entered the gully. No sooner had the order been delivered than the Mississippians rushed off the ridge into the chasm. Wistar’s men delivered a volley that cleared the gully of Johnny Rebs. In several minutes a company of Mississippi boys formed a line and charged into the ravine with the same result. A third assault carried the Rebels across the gully to within 10 or 15 yards of Wistar’s companies before another savage volley broke the gray column.

About this time, Wistar received his second wound, a bullet wound to the front of his upper thigh that was quite close to where his leg had been pierced by an arrow during his pre-war days in northern California. It was "but a flesh wound [that] filled my boot with blood so that I was obliged to cut a hole to let it out," he later wrote of the injury. By now the Confederates had gained a toehold on the north side of the deep gully and some of the fighting had evolved into fierce hand-to-hand struggles. Just as he changed the position of two left flank companies to repulse another Confederate attack, Wistar received his third and most serious wound. A minie ball smashed into his right arm shattering the three bones that met at his right elbow "causing a momentary mental confusion and even suspension of sight." The dazed officer stooped to feel about the ground for his sword. As he stood up grasping the blade and a handful of bloody grass, Baker, arrived on the scene and steadied his old friend. "What, Wistar, hit again?", Baker asked, to which the lieutenant colonel replied, "Yes, I am afraid badly this time." The colonel sheathed his subaltern’s sword and called to a nearby soldier in the battalion line: "Here, my man, catch hold of Colonel Wistar and get him to a boat somehow, if you have to carry him." As he was led away, Wistar warned Baker of the threat on the left: "there is a heavy column deployed behind the hill. You must see if you can repel that attack, for it is serious."

Just after Wistar fell, the Mississippians launched several thrusts, each one bringing them a bit closer to turning the Federal left flank. At one point a Californian, not sure of the identity of the men moving through the woods and smoke beyond the flank, called out, "Who are you?" "We are Confederates, you Yankee sons of b____s," was the rejoinder. Alban Paist and other survivors of Company C charged into the timber and drove the Rebels back a distance before they rallied and pushed the Yankees back. Yet the entire battalion line was beginning to waver. Captain Louis Bieral of Company G saw this and shouted to Color Sergeant Thomas Vansant of Company P: "Give me that flag, Sergeant! Give me that flag for I must rush my men through their lines!" "I cannot give up the colors but will go with you," cried Vansant waving the national ensign. Then the captain, without the colors, led his men forward in what Vansant termed "the most daring and successful charge of that disastrous day."

Colonel Baker, who had been standing in the open field, sword in hand, near the right of the California battalion’s line and in front of Company H, observed a mounted Confederate officer ride out of the woods and into the cleared field. The Rebel was shot by a member of the battalion, perhaps Alban Paist who claimed that Baker had directed his attention to the mounted officer. The man turned his horse about and headed back into the timber where he was seen to collapse from the saddle. Baker turned to the Californians, reportedly said, "See, he falls," and seemed to be urging his men forward when the Confederates in the woods delivered a fierce volley and the colonel was felled by at least six balls. Several men described one of the Rebels who allegedly had killed Baker as a tall, red-haired man who had approached to within five feet of the colonel before he fired his revolver at the colonel’s head. In any event, Baker fell heavily to the ground, and, according to one Californian, "expired without a groan."

Colonel Edward Baker

Two impressions of the death of Colonel Edward D. Baker

Colonel Baker’s death was attended by a level of fighting along the battalion front that had heightened into a steady roar, "like the roll of a drum only louder," according to a member of Company A. Throughout, Color Sergeant Vansant stood to the front of the line waving the national colors until the staff was cut in two. One witness to this man’s gallant behavior was certain that Vansant would "doubtless be promoted." "The firing was very hot" at this time, wrote William Burns of the California Regiment, and men continued to fall all about him. His friends William Ploss and Henry Coler went down with gunshot wounds, and James Tallent was shot in the leg. Private William Brunt received a particularly nasty though not life threatening wound to the left eye. Twenty-year-old Corporal Robert Templeton of Company G was shot in the right shoulder and struggled toward the cliff. Color Sergeant Randall C. Wood of Company I was hit in both legs and Private George Suttie, Burns’ close chum, snatched the another standard, perhaps that of the state of California, off the ground.

The men of the California battalion and other Northern regiments on the bluff now were forced to fall back to their original positions near the edge of the bluff. Thomas Vansant gathered the shattered pieces of his flagstaff, rolled up the banner and started for the rear. One Californian, 24-year-old Theodore Stokes of Company A, realized that he had no other chance to escape than to lay down among the dead and wounded. Having done this, Stokes presently found himself serving as a footrest for a Confederate rifleman. This was bad enough, but when the Rebel hit his target and, in a moment of exhilaration, kneed Stokes, the bluecoat lost his composure and bellowed, "Stop! for God’s sake!" The flabbergasted Southern reeled back, looked down at Stokes and shouted, "You sneaking Yankee cuss, git up here!" A group of amused Confederates arrived on the scene and soon Privates Stokes was on his way to the rear. A Californian on Harrison’s Island watched the melee on the bluff. "[S]uch a spectacle as not tongue can describe. Our entire forces were retreating, tumbling, rolling, leaping down the steep heights; the enemy following them, murdering, and taking prisoners."

The generally hasty flight down the bluff was fraught with difficulties other than those posed by the pursuing Confederates. Numerous men leaped off the height only to land on the backs of comrades. Seventeen-year-old Private Randolph Abbott Shotwell of the 8^th Virginia recalled the "Screams of pain and terror [that] filled the air" as the Yankees stumbled and crashed down the cliff. "Men seemed suddenly bereft of reason," he continued. Some of them jumped still clutching their muskets, while others landed on the bayonets of men who had gone before them. Later that evening Shotwell found the body of "A gray-haired private of the first California" whose head had been "mashed between two rocks by the heavy boots of a ponderous ‘Tammany’ man [Tammany Regiment; 42^nd New York], who had broken his own neck by the fall!"

Headlong rush of Union soldiers to the Potomac River

Confusion reigned on the flood plain at the foot of the bluff. Frantic bluecoats clambered onto and finally swamped a boat loaded with wounded men drowning many of its helpless passengers. Men plunged into the cold Potomac water to save those soldiers within reach, and a number of floundering passengers were able to swim back to shore. The boat, now relieved of its load, bobbed to the surface and floated down the river. Many a poor soul found the same fate as Private Oliver Tack of Company C, California Regiment, whose "bullet-ridden form," an old friend later learned, "[found] a resting place beneath the silent waters of the Potomac." The chaos that engulfed the Virginia shore was painfully obvious to those men on Harrison’s Island who could do little more than watch. California Regiment Quartermaster Francis Young was among the helpless onlookers:

A thousand men thronged the further bank. Muskets, coats, and every thing were thrown aside, and all were desperately troing [sic] to escape. Hundreds plunged into the rapid current, and the shrieks of the drowning added to the horror of sounds and sights.

It was every man for himself at the river’s edge. One gray-haired member of the California battalion who had fought hard all day and had two wounds to show for his work including a missing trigger finger, pitched down the cliff to the water’s edge where he began divesting himself of his "surplus clothing." Just then a burly member of the another regiment making for the river drove the Californian into the muddy earth knocking the breath out of the man. Many of the distraught boys simply threw off their equipment, overcoats and other clothing, and jumped into the dark water. Some of the lucky ones were able to swim the swiftly flowing almost 300-yard-wide channel to Harrison’s Island where they struggled up the steep bank shivering with cold. Captain George Ritman of the California Regiment, who had remained on the island, could see "the heads of men above the surface of the water for half a mile. A great many were calling for help, but there was none at hand."

By between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., the Confederate firing had all but ended and the Battle of Ball’s Bluff was over; most of those men who could escape to Harrison’s Island or the Maryland shore had done so. The crestfallen survivors of the California battalion who gathered on Harrison’s Island had been unyielding almost to a man that afternoon and evening. What Isaac Wistar had believed to be little more than a mission to extricate a scouting party sent across the Potomac the night before, had gone sour when, as the lieutenant colonel interpreted events, Colonel Baker realized too late that his command was in the presence of a numerically superior force and in a most untenable position. But all of this would be discussed and decided in the future, and in a different forum. Two days after the fiasco that was Ball’s Bluff, a correspondent with the New York Herald penned the following tribute to the men of Isaac Wistar’s First Battalion of the California Regiment:

"Be it known that this was no Bull Run affair. The bereaved and unhappy families, whose sons and brothers have been slaughtered in the ranks of the California regiment, need not blush for their conduct in that hopeless and murderous encounter."

Colonel Edward Baker lies in state in Washington, D.C.

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