The 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery

Captain George A. Gerrish commanded the 1st (and only) Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery (Photo courtesy of William Marvel).

Thick fog shrouded the right bank of the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on the morning of December 13, 1862. Some 40,000 Union soldiers occupied the plain below the city, poised to crush the right flank of the Army of Northern Virginia. As the mists melted away before the rising sun, the great blue host rolled forward. Its objective was the ridge that culminated in the gentle slope of Prospect Hill.

Lieutenant General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Confederate infantry lay waiting along that ridge, with artillery massed at either end. As Maj. Gen. George G. Meade arranged his division of Pennsylvania Reserves to assault Jackson's line, Brig. Gen. Abner Doubleday supported him on the left with another Union division. A pair of guns from Major John Pelham's Confederate horse artillery frustrated the advance for a time with flank fire from the south, and Doubleday moved two batteries up to drive Pelham away.

One of those batteries was the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery, armed with four 3-inch Ordnance rifles. Reports usually referred to the unit simply as the New Hampshire Battery because it was the only field artillery raised in the Granite State during the entire war. Captain George A. Gerrish nominally commanded the battery, but that day he also acted as division artillery chief, leaving operational command to 1^st Lt. Frederick M. Edgell.

Pelham withdrew under the concentrated Union bombardment, and the New Hampshire gunners turned their fire onto Southern batteries on Prospect Hill. Then Meade's Pennsylvanians strode forward, found a rift in the Confederate line and burst through. Too few troops had been deployed to offer Meade sufficient support, though, and soon the frustrated Pennsylvanians retreated from the ridge. Confederate artillery on Prospect Hill erupted against the chastened Yankees, in particular the exposed 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery.

Captain Gerrish fell with a severe shell wound in the leg. Three of his men were killed outright and 11 more wounded, while 16 horses went down in the traces. Doubleday sent Battery B, 4^th U.S. Light Artillery to their aid, and that unit quickly lost eight men and eight horses.

An hour of incessant fire consumed most of the rounds in the New Hampshiremen's limber chests. In direct violation of standing orders, Lieutenant Edgell wheeled his guns about without permission and galloped them back to his caissons. He returned as soon as he had replenished his ammunition, but the duel had subsided and the expected counterattack never came. Edgell's willful disobedience concluded his battery's bravest fight by earning the rebuke of Colonel Charles Wainwright, the corps artillery chief. Even Wainwright acknowledged the courage the New Hampshiremen had shown, but he deplored Edgell's management and discipline.

Frederick Edgell personified the independent spirit so common to northern New Hampshire. He ventured west from his hometown of Orford while still a boy, and was only 17 when he enlisted in a Missouri artillery battery at the outbreak of the Mexican War. With that battery he followed Colonel Alexander Doniphan on his freelance campaign across Mexico. Doniphan's veterans emerged as national heroes after a year of adventures that included the repulse of two superior Mexican forces. When Edgell returned to New Hampshire he had an enviable reputation.

Edgell recruited most of the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery. In the summer of 1861 he personally enlisted more than 100 men, mainly in the textile center of Manchester, but neither his Mexican War service nor his 100-man roster won him command of the new battery. The governor instead appointed Captain Gerrish, a Portsmouth lawyer who, though five years younger than Edgell, claimed valuable artillery experience as a militia lieutenant.

The battery spent the first winter of the war training outside Washington, joining the advance to Manassas and Fredericksburg in the spring of 1862. Its baptism of fire came late that summer. The New Hampshiremen followed the division of Brig. Gen. John P. Hatch to the old Bull Run battlefield to help Maj. Gen. John Pope destroy Stonewall Jackson's command. On August 29, at the crossroads village of Groveton, Hatch and the New Hampshire Battery ran into the flank attack of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's Confederate corps.

Hatch spread the battery across the Warrenton Turnpike and threw the 2^nd U.S. Sharpshooters ahead as skirmishers. A Confederate division bore down and sent them flying. Gerrish stood by his guns, but the Union line crumbled all about him. After two of his men were shot dead and several officers and men wounded, Gerrish finally gave the order to limber up. So many horses had been killed that one gun remained stranded on the roadside. Gerrish stayed with its crew; blasting canister into the gathering dusk until Alabamians swept around the gun and captured the Yankee artillerists.

Lieutenant Edgell guided the rest of the battery back to Washington and on to Antietam, where he supported Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker's unsuccessful attack on Confederate troops in the Cornfield. Captain Gerrish resumed command that fall, after he had been exchanged, and began refitting the battery immediately. His Fredericksburg wound, however, abruptly ended his military career.

Edgell took charge after Fredericksburg. He borrowed enough infantry volunteers to man six guns through the rest of the winter, meanwhile appealing to his adjutant general for recruits from home. But no replacements came. In the spring of 1863 his infantry volunteers went back to their regiments, leaving him about 100 men. On May 15 he surrendered the extra brace of guns, and late in June the battery rolled toward Pennsylvania, dragging only four pieces.

The 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery parked with the Artillery Reserve on the Baltimore Pike on the morning of July 2, just behind Evergreen Cemetery south of Gettysburg. There they remained until late in the afternoon, when Confederate artillery opened on Cemetery Hill. After a couple of hours the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery lunged up the hill to relieve the badly mauled 2^nd Independent Battery, Maine Volunteer Light Artillery. Edgell put his four guns into battery on the western edge of the cemetery. He directed a slow, accurate fire, losing a horse and a wheel in the exchange. In the gloaming, Southern infantry attacked Cemetery Hill from the other side, and it seemed the Union line might break. So the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery raced back down to the Baltimore Pike to cover the expected retreat. The line held after all, but Edgell's men stood by their guns all night.

Early on the afternoon of July 3, Confederate artillery began pounding Cemetery Hill, but much of their fire sailed high and exploded on the lee side, wreaking havoc along reserve troops behind the hill. Shell fragments scudded along Edgell's guns on the Baltimore Pike, and after an hour of it the men welcomed orders to resume their old position by the cemetery. Edgell replied with timed and percussion shell before orders came for the Union artillery to conserve their ammunition for the inevitable infantry assault.

At midafternoon the Southern bombardment finally abated, and long gray lines of infantry emerged from the woods on Seminary Ridge. Edgell called for rapid fire with case shot, angling his muzzles to concentrate on the extreme left of the Confederate line. The case shot was unreliable, but those that did explode scattered shell fragments and musket balls mainly along the Virginians of Colonel John M. Brockenbrough's little brigade. When a small Ohio regiment poured a volley of buck-and-ball into the flank of that battered brigade, it dissolved, and Edgell, now a captain, watched proudly as many Virginians streamed back toward Seminary Ridge.

The repulse of Brockenbrough's brigade began the disintegration of Pickett's Charge. A few minutes later the rest of the Confederate columns advanced so close to the Federal lines that Edgell stopped firing. When the smoke cleared, no Confederates remained except prisoners and the dead.

Edgell had lost three men and two more horses, and he was nearly out of ammunition. When a Massachusetts battery relieved him, its captain found 48 3-inch rounds in the woods where Edgell's limbers had been, and insinuated that the New Hampshiremen had discarded them in order to get out of action sooner. Two other batteries of 3-inch guns had also occupied that spot, but the cloud hung over Edgell, who may have instructed his men to ditch the dubious case shot. Despite another excellent performance, his men again saw their record marred by innuendo.

The rest of the war seemed little more than deadly denouement. Recruits swelled the battery back to six guns that winter, but in the bloody spring campaign of 1864 the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery lost only six men wounded in sporadic fighting from the Rapidan River to the gates of Petersburg. The battery passed most of that summer and fall in forts along the siege lines, where sharpshooters posed the only threat.

The enlistments of the original men expired in September, and a majority of them went home, but enough reenlisted veterans and recruits remained to keep the unit alive as a four-gun battery. In order to complete a regiment of heavy artillery for their state, the battery adopted a new designation - Company M, 1^st New Hampshire Volunteer Heavy Artillery - but it remained in the field as an independent light battery. That administrative trick gave Captain Edgell a promotion to major, and George K. Dakin took over as captain.

Under Dakin, the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery took part in the assault that broke the Petersburg lines on early April 2, 1865. That afternoon the battery supported the division of Brevet Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles at Sutherland Station, where Dakin proved so efficient that he was awarded a brevet promotion in the Regular Army. Remaining with Miles through the rest of that short campaign, the Granite State gunners harassed the Confederate flight all day on April 6, capturing a portion of the fugitive wagon train on the road from Amelia Springs to Sailor's Creek.

Dakin's guns arrived at High Bridge the next morning just in time to prevent Confederate infantry from burning the wagon bridge over the Appomattox River. That enabled the II Corps to cross, and that evening the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery covered an assault on Longstreet's entrenched position at Cumberland Church. Longstreet repelled his assailants with heavy casualties, but the dawn of April 8 revealed that he had withdrawn. Dakin's men limbered up to resume the chase, but they never fired another gun; their war ended the next morning three miles north of Appomattox Court House.

The experience of the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Light Artillery paralleled that of most Civil War units. Forty-two months of service had brought much monotony; endless drudgery and considerable discomfort, all punctuated by brief moments of desperate terror. In the postwar years the battery veterans saw little public recognition, for most of the glory went to the infantry. When the last man who had served with the 1^st Independent Battery, New Hampshire Volunteer Light Artillery died, on April 7, 1943, none of his eulogists even mentioned that he had fought with the light artillery.

This article was taken from: Marvel, William.  “Despite Sturdy Service, the 1^st New Hampshire Battery Remained Unappreciated to the End.” (American’s Civil War, September 2003), 12 and 60. It is used with permission.

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