Annoyed Union artillery captain personally targets enemy battery at Fredericksburg

As the Pennsylvanians commanded by George Gordon Meade charged across the plain toward Prospect Hill south of Fredericksburg on Saturday, December 13, 1862. some 150-200 yards away Capt. James A. Hall sat coolly in the saddle as his 2nd Maine Battery gunners steadily loaded and fired.

Under orders from Col. Charles S. Wainwright (I Corps’ artillery commander), Hall had unlimbered his six 3-inch ordnance rifles in a cornfield south of the Richmond Stage Road at 9 a.m. Immediately “a battery of the enemy” started “playing upon us, and did us considerable harm for a short time,” Hall commented. At this time the fire from the enemy’s artillery was accurate and well sustained, occasioning losses to this battery,” agreed Capt. George Leppien, the 2nd Division’s acting chief of artillery, seconded from his regular command of the 5th Maine Battery.

Now 27, Hall had joined the 2nd Maine Battery as a first lieutenant in late 1861, reporting to Capt. Davis Tillson of Rockland. Hall became the battery’s captain with Tillson’s promotion to major in May 1862. The unflappable Hall led the battery at Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas; right now, he searched for the annoying Confederate artillery battery with his field glasses.
Billowing smoke revealed that battery’s location “1,600 yards diagonally on our right flank” toward Deep Run, Hall noted. Ordering his guns swung to the northwest, he called the distance and elevation. The first 3-inch ordnance rifle boomed. Another rifle fired, then a third, and Hall’s gunners settled into their routine.

Combat and disease had thinned the battery’s original ranks; Hall would have been seriously under strength today if 38 men from the 16th Maine Infantry Regiment had not transferred to his battery on detached duty about three weeks earlier. Hall had pleasantly discovered that “these men proved to be of the best quality.”

His view obscured by “considerable smoke” and thinning fog, Hall watched his gunners hurl shells at the distant Confederate battery. “They soon ceased firing, or turned their fire in another direction,” he realized. “It was difficult to tell the effect of our shots upon them.” Hall looked elsewhere for targets. Cannonballs suddenly struck around his battery as a Southern battery “700 yards directly on our left (southern) flank … opened with a rapid and well-directed fire of solid shot, which was very galling,” he said.

With Meade’s Pennsylvanians between hither and yon, Hall could not return fire on the 10-cannon enemy battery. Ordered to cease firing, he watched as the Keystone State brigades advanced toward the railroad embankment and Prospect Hill.

Already thawing with the rising air temperature, the partially frozen cornfields turned muddy under the December sun. “Captain Hall, sitting his superb horse as calmly as if on parade, was watching closely the work of his battery,” observed 1st Lt. Abner Small, a 16th Maine officer serving temporarily as an aide to Col. Adrian Root, commanding the 1st Brigade to which the regiment was attached. Now and then he shouted a remark” to Root and Lt. Col. Charles R. Tilden (the 16th Maine’s commander) as they rode near his guns, Small said. The officers bandied several comments until “a solid shot came hurtling between the captain and the colonels.” The cannonball “hit with a mighty thud a caisson … smashing it and exploding the magazine in a howling ball of flame,” according to Small.

Dismounting, the “annoyed” Hall “walked over to one of his guns, and sighted it.” He raised, then dropped his hand. A cannoneer yanked the lanyard, “and an iron missile sped for the mark,” the impressed Small followed the shell’s flight with his field glasses. A crash and a roar, and in the midst of a rebel battery there was a sudden upheaval of bursting shells, wheels, splinters, and human flesh,” he reported, perhaps with some hyperbole.

Satisfied, Hall remounted his horse, turned its head toward Root and Tilden, “and went on with the interrupted talk.”

Sources:

Maj. A.R. Small, Sixteenth Maine Regiment in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865, Vol. I, Peter and Cyndi Dalton, editors, Portland, ME, 1886, p. 65; Capt. George F. Leppien, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 21 (1), No. 223, p. 482; Charles Hamlin, Historical Sketch of Second Maine Battery, Maine at Gettysburg: Report of Maine Commissioners, Portland, ME, 1898, p.30; Capt. James A. Hall, OR, 21 (1), No. 224, pp. 483-484; Abner R. Small, The Road to Richmond, Harold Adams Small, editor, New York, 2000, pp. 64-65