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| Donald Moore, a veteran of the Vietnam War, clears grass from the stone
marker memorializing Anderson Pidcock, a Union soldier killed
while fighting Confederate soldiers in Virginia in 1864. |
19-year-old Union soldier dies during 1864 battle in Virginia
By John L. Moore
In the popular Civil War song, the
crowd would shout “Hurrah! Hurrah!” when Johnny comes marching home. Unlike
Johnny, my ancestor – 19-year-old Anderson Pidcock – didn’t survive the war.
The first cousin of my father’s
grandmother, Anderson enlisted in the Union army in August 1861, shortly after
the Confederates routed the Northern soldiers at the Battle of Bull Run in
Virginia. The apprentice carpenter was 16. For nearly three years, he fought as
a member of the Sixth New Jersey Infantry Volunteers, first as a private and then
as a corporal.
In May 1863, he was wounded in the
arm while fighting in the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia. Gangrene set
in, and he was hospitalized for at least four months. At one point army
surgeons nearly amputated his arm, but the doctors managed to cure him, and his
arm was saved.
Anderson was well enough to return
to his regiment in the autumn of 1863. He died – “killed in action” – while
fighting in Virginia in 1864.
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Photo shows trenches dug by Union soldiers in General
Winfield
Scott’s II Corps along Brock Road in The Wilderness in northern
Virginia in 1864. The Sixth New Jersey was part of II Corps.
|
I decided to visit the battlefield where
he fell, so one sunny weekend in September 2012, a friend and I traveled to
northern Virginia to a place called The Wilderness. Some 62,000 Southern
soldiers commanded by Gen. Robert E. Lee clashed with 120,000 Northern soldiers
led by Gen. U.S. Grant in early May 1864. Two days of fighting occurred there.
We found the battlefield about 20
miles west of Fredericksburg, Va. It was – and is – an immense tract of woods
and swamps. Although developments of residential and retail complexes now cover
much of it, the National Park Service has preserved significant sections of The Wilderness.
2 days of close fighting, wildfires
The two days of fighting here began
on Thursday, May 5, 1864, when Union troops clashed with Confederates along a
road called the Orange Turnpike. Lee
ordered more Southern forces into the battle to halt the Union advance on
Richmond, about 70 miles away.
Fighting resumed early on the
morning of Friday, May 6, in a heavily wooded section. Union soldiers in Gen.
Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps, which included the Sixth New Jersey, attacked
Gen. A.P. Hill’s division of Confederates at 5 a.m. The charge took place to
the south of the Orange Plank Road, just west of its intersection with Brock
Road.
Anderson’s regiment was up front. “He’s
in the second line going forward,” Park Ranger Beth Parnicza told us as she
looked at a map that showed the location and movements of specific units on
that fateful day. “He’s going to be in the thick of everything.”
The battle raged, then slowed. In
late morning the Confederates mounted a counterattack: 4,000 rebel soldiers under
Gen James Longstreet moved east along an unfinished railroad line that let them
go around the side of Hancock’s force.
“The Sixth New Jersey would have
borne much of the weight of Longstreet's flank attack at 11 a.m., but perhaps
not the brunt of the attack, since they were not on the end,” the ranger said. The
soldiers in “the regiment would have found themselves struggling to hold their
ground in such a situation and probably would have been swept up in the attack.”
At some point, Anderson was killed.
Around 4 in the afternoon, Lee ordered a major attack on Hancock’s line
along Brock Road, and the offensive
hit Pidcock’s regiment “He’s probably fallen by then. … He’s really in the
thick of a lot of it,” Parnicza said.
This section of The Wilderness
caught fire that day. Sparks from soldiers’ campfire and flames from the
barrels of thousands of muskets set the brush and dry leaves afire. According
to the ranger, the fires had begun “during the Confederate assault, and the
wind blew the fire back into the faces of the Union forces. … It is
definitely something your ancestor faced if he was still on the line at that
time.”
By coincidence, Anderson’s distant
cousin Hiram Pidcoe from Williamsport, Pa,, was also fighting in this section
of The Wilderness. Pidcoe, who survived the war, belonged to the First
Pennsylvania Light Artillery. The two cousins likely didn’t know each other.
Pidcoe wrote about this battle in his journal, which a descendant recently
published, but his entry for this battle doesn’t mention meeting up with
Pidcock.
Parnicza and another ranger gave us
directions that let us find the place where the Sixth New Jersey had fought
that day. It remains heavily wooded. We walked through the trees and brush
where the fighting occurred. There were few other visitors that afternoon, and
our feet made little noise as we followed a path maintained by the park service.
I remember the occasional chirping of birds and the sounds of cars and pickup
trucks driving along Brock and Orange Plank roads nearby, but otherwise, the
woods were quiet. Along Brock Road we saw the remains of hurriedly dug trenches
that Hancock’s men had made.
In terms of statistics, The Battle
of The Wilderness resulted in 26,000 casualties, a figure that includes both
dead and wounded. Of these, 8,000 were Confederate soldiers, and 18,000 were
Union men.
Many soldiers who died there were
buried in the Fredericksburg National Cemetery after the war, but Anderson
Pidcock’s name doesn’t appear on the cemetery’s roster. The New Jersey cemetery
where a small stone marker bears his name wasn’t established until 1878, and its
records don’t list burials.
I don’t know where Anderson Pidcock
was buried. I learned in Virginia that the bodies of hundreds of soldiers who perished
at The Wilderness were never identified. It’s possible that Anderson was one of
these unknown soldiers.
Be that as it may, the fighting at
the Wilderness had slowed, but not stopped, Grant. On Saturday, May 7 – the day
after Anderson Pidcock died – the general resumed his march toward Richmond. When
his soldiers realized they were heading south, they cheered.
John
L. Moore is a writer based in Northumberland, Pa. He is the historian of the
Pidcock Family Association.
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| Anderson Pidcock's marker is located in the Holcombe Riverview Cemetery. |
