“To Substitute Reality for Fancy”: Theron Haight’s Opinion of Allen Redwood’s Famous Sketch of the Rock Throwing Incident at the Deep Cut

Private Allen C. Redwood’s famous sketch of the Federal attack against “Stonewall” Jackson’s troops at the Deep Cut on the afternoon of August 30, 1862, is one of the best-known sketches of the Battle of Second Manassas. In fact, Dan Welch and I liked the image so much that we chose it as the cover image for our book, Never Such a Campaign: The Battle of Second Manassas, August 28-30, 1862.

Redwood shows the moment that soldiers of Brigadier General John P. Hatch’s division reached the unfinished railroad embankment, bringing both sides into a desperate, close-quarters fight. Redwood depicts the Louisiana soldiers defending that part of the line defiantly standing atop the unfinished railroad embankment, rocks in hand, hurling them at the attackers seen charging up to the embankment.

One of those attackers, a man hit by three rocks that afternoon, was Corporal Theron Haight, 24th New York Infantry. When Haight picked up and read his copy of the February 1886 issue of The Century Magazine, Redwood’s image stirred the memories of August 30 in his mind: 

“In that work of art a charge of the Union lines at Bull Run is withstood by a volley of stones from the equally formidable lines of the Confederates at the railroad embankment beyond the deep cut … That there were stones thrown over that embankment both ways on the 30th of August, 1862, I am perfectly well aware, but the ideal picture of the magazine is so ridiculously in contrast with the reality of the occasion that it ought to be corrected at the outset before acquiring the authority of long continued want of contradiction; and I know of no person beside myself whose position on that day enables him to make the correction.”

As Haight recalled, no one stood atop the embankment like Redwood heroically depicted.

“… we lay with our backs against the embankment, as near the top as we dared venture, throwing large stones over our heads backward as forcibly as we could among the enemy. I cannot now tell which side began this method of fighting, but I remember distinctly that we very soon got the worst of it. The big jagged pieces of blasted rock kept falling about us, and some of them took effect, to our sorrow. I was myself hit three times, as I find by a letter written to my parents a few days afterward. But our side of the fight there was conducted under most terrible disadvantages. Bullets from our own troops in the woods were striking around us, and both my immediate companions were soon fatally wounded from that direction. My own haversack and canteen were destroyed by a fragment of shell and a bullet respectively, and looking along the side of the embankment, in both directions, I could see no active participant in the fight. The men of the First Louisiana were invisible to us, and they had no means of knowing that the force opposed to them consisted of one man not seriously wounded, with perhaps a dozen others so sorely struck that none of them could have aimed a musket or thrown a missile to accomplish any object. Yet that was the true condition of affairs at the time the huge fragments were coming over the grade most numerously.”

Haight continued his narrative of the fighting at the Deep Cut, reflecting on Redwood’s sketch and what his Confederate counterparts must have thought about it:

“I imagine that the veterans of that organization [1st Louisiana Infantry] must smile at the sight of the picture, in which they are represented as surging up to their own side of the grade and firing volleys of pebbles at the equally imposing line of troops on the other side. I had never renewed the acquaintance begun with those soldiers on the day here mentioned (but I should like to do so), but it seems to me that their practice with the stones must have been similar to my own. The pieces of rock were probably thrown backward over the head with both hands by men stooping or kneeling close up to the side of the earthwork. And they were dangerous missiles, too, especially to wounded men, such as constituted all the force on the opposite side, with one solitary exception, at that point.”

Having recorded his memories for posterity, Haight sought “to give as clear a picture as possible of a small section of the great battle near Bull Run. … [I]f what I have written shall serve to impart a better understanding of the real acts and feelings of an average soldier in the heat and focus of a terrible battle, as distinguished from the current works of the imagination, and especially to substitute reality for fancy in regard to the fight at the railroad embankment on the last day of the second Bull Run, my ambition in this direction will be gratified.”