Part 49

Graduating in 1842, he was still a second lieutenant when he was ordered with his command into active service in Mexico in August, 1845. During the three succeeding years he participated in nearly every battle fought by our forces under the command of either Scott or Taylor, and always attracted the notice of his superior officers by his conspicuous courage. He soon rose to the rank of first lieutenant, and, for gallant conduct at Contreras and Churubusco, was breveted captain. At Chapultepec he volunteered with the storming party, and so distinguished himself among the scores of brave men who participated with him in that desperate assault as to win for himself a second brevet as major. He was one of the six officers in the whole force employed in Mexico who were twice breveted for meritorious service upon the field. Animosity, envy, and a disposition to indulge in carping criticism have led to many unjust reflections upon General Hill, but the most unscrupulous of his detractors never questioned his courage or his integrity. When the Legislature of his native State provided by law that three swords should be awarded to the three bravest of her soldiers who had survived the war with Mexico, many letters and testimonials from the officers of the old army were voluntarily sent to the Chief Executive, naming D. H. Hill as among the bravest soldiers in the army of the United States. Among a few of these testimonials still extant is the letter from the gallant Bee, who, in exclaiming, a moment before he fell at Manassas, "There stands Jackson like a stone wall," gave to the great leader the pet name by which his soldiers called him and the world knows him, and thereby made himself immortal as its author. The letter addressed to General Dunavant on the 26th of October, 1856, is as follows:

It gives me great pleasure to add my mite of praise to that which has already been given to Mr. Hill by his military superiors. I had the pleasure of knowing him intimately and serving with him in the storming party detailed from Twiggs' Division for the attack on Chapultepec. I can bear full testimony to his gallantry and to his ardent desire to do his duty well. In addition, I can testify to his State pride, evinced in his going up under a heavy fire to congratulate and praise a member of the Palmetto regiment who was behaving under fire most gallantly. For his services on that day he received honorable mention from his immediate commanders and also from Colonel Magruder, commanding a light battery, which battery Lieutenant Hill offered to support when it was menaced by a body of Mexican lancers. He received the brevet appointment of major, and was considered a loss to the service when he resigned.

Your obedient servant,

BERNARD BEE, _Captain U. S. Army._

From the scores of her surviving heroes of the Palmetto regiment and in the regular army the committee appointed by the State authorities selected Hill to receive one of the three swords awarded, and it is still preserved by his family.

After the close of the late war a Federal officer wrote to General Joseph E. Johnston, asking the name of a Confederate officer who, on the right of our army at Seven Pines, had made himself most conspicuous for his daring and indifference to danger. The only mark of distinction which he could give General Johnston was that he thought the officer rode a white horse. General Johnston replied that he supposed the officer referred to must have been General D. H. Hill. In writing to General Hill about the matter, General Johnston said: "I drew my conclusion that your horse might very well have been taken for white and that no man was more likely to expose himself than you. Do you know that in Mexico the young officers called you the bravest man in the army?"

When the war with Mexico ended Major Hill resigned his place in the army to accept the professorship of Mathematics in Washington College at Lexington, Virginia. Before assuming the duties of that place he was happily married, November 2d, 1852, to Isabella, oldest daughter of Rev. Dr. R. H. Morrison, and granddaughter of General Joseph Graham, who was a distinguished soldier of the Revolution and the father of Governor William A. Graham. Six years later, he was invited to take the same professorship at Davidson College, where for five years he was looked upon as the leading spirit amongst a corps of able and learned professors.

D. H. Hill was not a politician in the sense of aspiring to office or attempting to mould public opinion; but when he saw that the leaders of the North had determined that no Southerner should be allowed to take his slaves to the territory wrested from Mexico by the blood and treasure of the South as well as of the North, he believed that the irrepressible conflict, which Seward declared at a later day was being waged, had then begun, and would be settled only upon the bloody field of battle and after a prolonged, sanguinary, and doubtful struggle.

Fully persuaded that the inevitable conflict was near at hand, and that it was his solemn duty to prepare the rising generation of his adopted State to meet it he, in 1859, gave up his pleasant home and his congenial duties at Davidson College for those of commandant and manager of the Military Institute at Charlotte.

He harbored no unkind thought against the noble men and women of the North who held opinions different from his own. He respected even the honest fanatic, who fairly and openly contended for his convictions; but he hated cant and hypocrisy, despised duplicity and dishonesty, and leveled at them his most effective weapons, ridicule, and sarcasm. For that portion of our Northern brethren who came to the South to drive hard bargains with our people and cheat them by false pretenses, he felt and expressed the most sovereign contempt. For the men of the North who coveted the wealth of the Southern planter, and the women who envied their Southern sisters because of the ease and leisure incident to the ownership of slaves, he made no attempt to conceal his hatred and disgust.

Major Hill brought with him to Raleigh his three professors, Lee, Lane, and McKinney, two of whom fell later at the head of North Carolina regiments, and one of whom was the successor of the noble Branch as commander of one of our best and bravest brigades. He also brought with him almost the whole corps of cadets, whose services proved invaluable as drill-masters of the ten thousand volunteers then in the camp of instruction of which Hill took charge. For his services in the camp of instruction General Hill was allowed to select twelve companies to compose the first regiment of volunteers. The officers of these companies were all leading and influential citizens, and the rank and file were among the first young men in the State in intelligence, wealth, and social position. The service of six months proved a training-school for that splendid body of volunteers that ultimately placed them at the head of companies, regiments, brigades, and divisions. Among its original officers were Major-General Hoke, Brigadier-Generals Lane and Lewis, Colonels Avery, Bridgers, Hardy, W. W. McDowell, J. C. S. McDowell, Starr, Pemberton, Fuller, and a score of others, while a number from the rank and file fell at the head of both companies and regiments at later stages of the struggle.

In the outset of this discussion of the career of D. H. Hill as a Confederate soldier, I lay down and propose to maintain the proposition that from the time when he fought the first fight of the war with North Carolina soldiers on Virginia soil till the day he led the last attacking column of Confederates east of the Mississippi and checked Sherman's advance at Bentonsville, whatever may have been the general result of any engagement, the command of General D. H. Hill was never found when the firing ceased at night in the rear of the position it occupied when the signal of attack sounded in the morning. Apparently reckless in the exposure of his own person, no officer in our armies was more anxious about the health, happiness, and safety of his soldiers. His theory was that spades were instruments of defensive, bayonets of offensive, warfare, and whether the emergency demanded the use of the one or the other, it was to be done with "might and main." When his cadets had asked him whether they should join South Carolina regiments before their own State seceded he prophesied that the war would soon begin and would continue long enough to give every Southerner an opportunity to display his manhood. He rested his hope of success upon the belief that every son of the South would rush to the rescue; that our armies would be supplied by the labor of our slaves, and that we would thus be enabled to throw a force into the field sufficient to meet every Northern man who would tender his services to the Federal Government. Two important elements were wanting as a basis of his calculations--the Southern loyalist and the foreign substitute. When, therefore, General D. H. Hill reported to Colonel J. B. Magruder, then in charge of the Peninsula, and was assigned to the command of the defenses of Yorktown, he realized, in a measure at least, the magnitude of coming contest.

It has been said that a man who is himself born to command is quick to perceive in others the qualities that fit them for leadership. Colonel Hill seemed almost intuitively to descry in the ranks the coolness, courage, judgment, and power of prompt decision which others recognized in his favorites after they had led brigades and divisions to victory. On assuming command at Yorktown he soon discovered that the cavalry, which he looked upon as the "eye and the ear of the army," was inefficient, because the force was composed of a number of detached companies without a trained or efficient commander. In this emergency an officer of the old army, who had been commissioned lieutenant in the regular army of the Confederate States, reported for duty. Marking him as a man of promise, Colonel Hill at once caused an order to be issued placing Major John B. Hood in command of all the cavalry, and waited for the War Department to ratify the promotion and thus protect him in practicing a pardonable ruse on the volunteers. That officer ultimately succeeded Lieutenant-General D. H. Hill as the commander of a corps, and was still later placed in charge of the army of Tennessee. The Providence that has provided homes for his orphan children will in its own good time bring to light all the facts, and then John B. Hood will stand vindicated before the world as one of the best and bravest of all our leaders. It was this same gift that enabled General Hill to select from the lieutenants of his regiment Robert F. Hoke to be made a major of his regiment over ten competent captains. It was this intuitive perception of persistent pluck, dash, and coolness that prompted him to love and honor George B. Anderson, William R. Cox, Bryan Grimes, Stephen D. Ramseur, and Robert D. Johnston, and led him later to urge the advancement of Gordon, Colquitt, and Doles, of Georgia. In June, 1861 (a few days after the fight at Bethel), in a letter to his wife he said of Stonewall Jackson, then a colonel in command of a brigade, "I see that Jackson has had an engagement and taken many prisoners. I have predicted all along that Colonel Jackson would have a prominent place in the war."

On the 6th of June, 1861, Colonel Hill, then at Yorktown, was ordered to make a reconnaissance in force in the direction of Fortress Monroe, and he moved down with his own regiment and four companies of Richmond Howitzers under the command of Major G. W. Randolph (afterwards Secretary of War), to Little Bethel Church. Receiving information that Butler's forces were preparing to move up the Peninsula, Colonel Hill fell back to Big Bethel Church, where, with a small branch of Black river on his front and right flank and an almost impenetrable forest on his left, he used twenty-five spades and several hundred bayonets during the night in making an enclosed work. Ben. Butler had started five thousand men in three columns, with the confident expectation that two of the detachments would travel by roads passing north and south of the position at Little Bethel and form a junction two or three miles in the rear of it, where the roads traveled by these two detachments came together, while Duryea's Regiment of Zouaves would engage Hill in front till the other columns should unite and then press him in the rear in his expected retreat. Two of the detachments mistook each other in the night and engaged in a skirmish. The Zouaves, instead of following immediately upon the heels of the fugitive rebels, as contemplated by Butler, turned back and fled precipitately on hearing the firing in front of their own reserve line.

On the next day they again moved forward and attacked the force at Big Bethel, Colonel Magruder having meantime arrived with Cary's battalion of infantry. The whole force engaged on the Confederate side was eight hundred North Carolinians and four hundred Virginians; on the Federal side, thirty-five hundred, with from fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred in reserve. After preliminary skirmishing for about two hours, and an attack that lasted two and a half hours longer, the enemy retreated in great confusion, with a loss of probably fifty killed and three hundred wounded, and were so hotly pursued by our cavalry that they scattered guns, haversacks and knapsacks till they crossed a bridge and stopped the pursuit by destroying it. The names of no soldiers of North Carolina should be inscribed in a more prominent place on the monument to be erected to her heroic dead than those of Henry L. Wyatt, the first offering of the South to the Lost Cause, and his three comrades, who rushed forward in a hail of shot and shell to destroy a house where the sharpshooters of the enemy had taken shelter. Judging of its importance by the numbers engaged and the losses on both sides, the battle of Bethel scarcely rose above the dignity of a skirmish; yet few events in the early history of the war had a more important influence upon the contests of the following year. The splendid bearing of our soldiers sent a thrill of pride to every Southern heart, and when the first battle of Manassas was fought, less than a month later, our soldiers moved forward in the confidence that Southern pluck would again prevail over a foe that had shown so little dash and confidence in this encounter.

There was on the Federal side at least one stout leader who displayed the spirit of a hero. When Major Theodore Winthrop fell within fifteen feet of our line, bravely leading a regiment in the charge, even a generous foe felt that he was worthy to bear the name of the two Winthrops by whose courage and judgment Americans had first gained a foothold in this country.

To know D. H. Hill as the soldier of iron nerve, who rode unmoved in showers of shot and shell, or rebuked in scathing terms a laggard or a deserter, was to understand nothing of his true nature. When the battle of Bethel was over and others were feasting or carousing, Hill had fallen upon his knees and was returning thanks to Almighty God, Who, he believed, directed the course of every deadly missile hurled by the enemy with the same unerring certainty that ordered the movements of the multitudes of worlds in the universe, and into whose keeping he daily committed himself, his wife, and little ones, his staff and his soldiers with the calm reliance of a child, that as a kind father He would provide what was best for him and them.

On the day after the fight at Bethel he wrote his wife: "I have to thank God for a great and decided victory, and that I escaped with a slight contusion on the knee.... It is a little singular that my first battle in this war should be at Bethel, where I was baptized and worshiped till I was sixteen years old--the church of my mother. Was she not a guardian spirit in the battle, averting ball and shell? Oh God, give me gratitude to Thee, and may we never dishonor Thee by weak faith!" Still later he wrote his wife: "I look for a battle about the first of October. Pray for me that I may be well. (He was then in delicate health).... We are in the hands of God, and as safe on the battle-field as anywhere else. We will be exposed to a heavy fire, but the arm of God is mightier than the artillery of the enemy."

After the battle Governor Ellis issued a commission of brigadier-general to him, as Governor Letcher had done at an earlier date in the case of Jackson, but President Davis delayed giving him the appointment till September, 1861. The response to a letter from his wife, written during this interval, in which she complained of the delay, shows how little the outer world understood his character or his motives: "You must not be concerned about my commission," he wrote. "I feel too distrustful of my own skill, coolness, and judgment. I have never coveted, and always avoided, positions of trust and responsibility. The offices that I have held have not been of my seeking."

Upon receiving his commission as a brigadier in September, 1861, the first work assigned to him was the command of the coast of North Carolina, with the duty, as far as possible, of constructing fortifications wherever necessary. Hopeless as was the task assigned, he brought all of his energies to bear upon it, and during the few months that he remained in North Carolina did so much to strengthen our forts and improve the discipline and spirit of the troops that the public men of the State asked for his return in every time of peril, until it became the custom of the general commanding to send him to his department south of the James when all was quiet on the Potomac, and recall him to the command of his division in the field when active operations were resumed.

His first connection with the Army of Northern Virginia was when, early in December, 1861, he was ordered to report to General Johnston at Manassas, and was assigned to command at Leesburg on the left of the line. While he was stationed there an incident occurred which evinced the strength and warmth of General Hill's affection for his early friends, even in the Federal army. General Stone was in charge of the force on the opposite side of the river, and after writing an official letter, sent under a flag of truce, General Hill appended a postscript to the effect that, if the fortunes of war should place his old academy chum in his custody he should feel more inclined to take him into his own tent than to consign him to prison. This led to the interchange of several kind messages appended to similar communications. Unfortunately Stone was a pronounced Democrat, and, like McClellan, was unwilling to recant or repent. Seizing upon this excuse, Stanton arrested him on a charge of disloyalty, and gave him no opportunity to vindicate himself till the close of the war, when he resigned and spent his last days in command of the army of the Khedive of Egypt.

On the night of the battle of Gaines' Mill, Major Clitz and General Reynolds, old army comrades of General Hill, were brought as prisoners to his quarters. He received both very kindly and sent for a surgeon to dress Major Clitz's wound, while he comforted Reynolds, who was mortified at being caught asleep, by reminding him that his gallant conduct in Mexico and on the border would protect his good name from a shade of suspicion. Both were placed in an ambulance, paroled to report to General Winder at Richmond, and furnished with the address of a friend of General Hill's who would honor their drafts for money. These incidents are reproduced because they bring to view traits of General Hill's character of which the world generally knows so little, his warm sympathy for suffering and his lasting and unswerving fidelity to his friends.

From the moment when Johnston placed Hill, then a major-general, at the head of a division in March, 1862, till the last shock of arms at Bentonsville, Hill's position on every march and in every battle, with scarcely a single exception, was the post of danger and honor. His was the first division of Johnston's army to enter Yorktown and the last to leave it and pass with his command through the reserve line. When the vanguard of the enemy, led by Hancock, rushed upon our rear at Williamsburg, it was Basil C. Manly, of Ramseur's Battery, who, seeing that a section of the enemy's light artillery might beat him in the race to occupy an earthwork midway between the two, unlimbered on the way and by a well-directed shot disabled the enemy _in transitu_, and as quick as thought limbered up again and ran into the fortifications. It was the regiment of Duncan K. MacRae, of D. H. Hill's Division, that extorted from the generous and gallant Hancock that memorable declaration, "The Fifth North Carolina and Twenty-fourth Virginia deserve to have the word _immortal_ inscribed on their banners." It was this charge which Early describes as "an attack upon the vastly superior forces of the enemy, which for its gallantry is unsurpassed in the annals of warfare."

When McClellan moved his army over Bottom's Bridge, threw a heavy column across the Chickahominy and extended his line towards the north of Richmond, General R. E. Lee was then acting as advisory commander of all the armies of the Confederacy. He concurred with Mr. Davis in the opinion that McClellan should be attacked on the other side of the Chickahominy before he matured his preparations for a siege of Richmond. (_The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_, Vol. I, p. 120.) When General Lee communicated their views to General Johnston, he told Lee that his plan was to send A. P. Hill to the right and rear of the enemy and G. W. Smith to the left flank, with orders to make simultaneous attacks for the purpose of doubling up the army, and sending Longstreet to cross at Mechanicsville bridge and attack him in front. McClellan's line on his right was not then well fortified, and the general disposition of the Federal forces was more favorable for a Confederate advance than a month later, when Lee concentrated a heavy force on the left and turned it. After McDowell's movement to Hanover Court House, when his vanguard was checked by Branch, the blows stricken by Jackson in such rapid succession in the valley had excited apprehension so grave in the mind of Lincoln that, despite McClellan's protest, he ordered the withdrawal of that command to Fredericksburg for the protection of Washington City. For reasons that were unsatisfactory to the President, General Johnston, after marching and countermarching G. W. Smith's and Longstreet's Divisions, abandoned his first plan of operations and ordered the troops to assume substantially their original positions. President Davis, in his work _The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_, takes the ground that after waiting a week and giving McClellan the opportunity to fortify, operations should have been delayed another day till the Chickahominy had risen high enough to sweep away the bridges and till Huger had had time to move up his artillery from his position near Richmond.