McGowan’s Brigade At Spotsylvania To Be Honored May 9
A week into the Virginia Overland Campaign, some of the bloodiest, most intense hand-to-hand combat of the entire Civil War took place on May 12, 1864, at the Bloody Angle. This was one side of the aptly named Muleshoe Salient in the Confederate lines at Spotsylvania Court House. McGowan’s Brigade helped shore up the Confederate defenders of the Bloody Angle, and they paid dearly —451 men were killed, wounded or captured out of the approximately 1,300 men in the brigade, including McGowan, who was shot in the arm as he initially led his brigade into the fight that morning. Something was altogether different, though, about the fighting at the Bloody Angle. As an article by retired NPS historian Mac Wyckoff put it, “What is totally unique in the Civil War was that this fight which pitted about 2,500 Mississippians and South Carolinians against thousands of Federals lasted twenty hours!” Until now, there have been four monuments at the national battlefield for units that fought at the Bloody Angle: 49th New York (placed in 1902), 15th New Jersey (1909) and 126th Ohio (1914). The fourth was placed in 2001 for Confederate Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Ramseur’s brigade comprised of the 2nd and 4th North Carolina State Troops and the 14th and 30th North Carolina Troops. The five South Carolina regiments comprising McGowan’s Brigade were the 1st, 12th, 13th, 14th and Orr’s Rifles. The idea for a McGowan’s monument began with a story Wyckoff told the Brig. Gen. Samuel McGowan Camp 40, Sons of Confederate Veterans, in Laurens, S.C., according to Gary Lee Davis, leader of the camp’s monument project and former camp commander. Wyckoff had written two books about South Carolina regiments and shared an interest in the state’s soldiers with the SCV members. He had worked at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (FSNMP), which includes the Spotsylvania Battlefield. He told the SCV group about a tour of the Bloody Angle he had given nearly 20 years earlier when a man from Columbia, S.C., said it was a shame that there was no marker for McGowan’s Brigade there. After Wyckoff told this story, Davis said the inspiration for the monument struck him. “There was no marker that told the story,” said Davis. The monument idea was first broached with the NPS in 2005, according to a planning document for the monument by Eric J. Mink, NPS historian and cultural resources management specialist for the FSNMP. A Concurrent Resolution passed by the S.C. State Senate on April 11, 2007, urged the federal government to authorize the monument memorializing McGowan’s Brigade. Davis attributes the successful placement of the monument to the rapport he had with Mink and FSNMP Superintendent Russ Smith. Both agreed it was long overdue. Davis also credits five SCV members from Virginia, F. Lee Hart III, B. Frank Earnest Sr., Grayson R. Jennings, Thomas C. Davis Jr. and Division Commander John N. Sawyer, all of whom “helped make this dream a reality.” Lee Dorn, a member of SCV Camp 40 and employee of Furman Architects in Greenwood, S.C., designed the approximately 8-foot high granite monument. Charles Wilson of Wilson Memorials in Laurens, S.C, made it. A 12-pdr. Napoleon and a 20-pdr. Parrott rifle will be fired. “And then — this is the first time it’s been done and the last time it’ll be done from what I understand — we’re going to have a rifle team firing volleys out of a trench,” he said. When asked how he got permission to do something not usually allowed on NPS property, Davis answered, “That goes back to the rapport that has been established with the good people up there.” Historian Gordon Rhea will speak at the ceremony. In his well-regarded book The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7-12, 1864, Rhea wrote, “The Civil War had seen its share of horrors. “The Bloody Lane at Antietam, the stone wall at Fredericksburg, and the Wheatfield at Gettysburg were synonymous with carnage. They paled, however, when measured against the slaughter along the short stretch of earthworks where the salient’s western tip bent south” (pages 291-292). Following the ceremony, Wyckoff will lead a tour at the Bloody Angle of the movements of McGowan’s Brigade as they entered the battle on May 12, 1864. For further information, see the event Web site at mcgowansbrigademonument.awardspace.com/id18.htm (scroll down more than half of the page).
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