May 16th 1864

June 2nd 1864

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                                                                            William H Tatum

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    Hanover Co. near Cold Harbor
    June 2nd 1864
    It really seems hard to realize that I am in fours hours walk
    of home. From present appearances, I had just as well be far distant

    for all purposes of visiting.
    I enclose some private notes, as before, which please preserve.
    You see I have been some little under fire but none of any account.
    My piece is at present in position in rear of where the fighting
    occurred on yesterday & out of sight. The enemy take about 200
    yards of our works. We had no artillery at the point. Our acting on
    the defensive enables them to concentrate heavily at any one point
    & we must not expect to be uniformly successful in repelling these
    attacks when they come as they did on -yesterday in overwhelming numbers.
    It was a small affair however though they will magnify it to a big victory.
    It is now my turn to complain of you for not writing. Write
    often. One of our number, John Mosely was killed 31st. He
    was a good fellow & went out from Richmond with us in .61. Another
    “Carey Eggleston”, who lost an arm at Spotsylvania, died
    last Sunday. Our wounded are doing well. May these dispensations of
    God's providence be sanctified to the good of our souls.
    There has been skirmishing all the morning but no attack. Our
    rations of meat has been doubled so we get plenty to eat. Tell T. to
    come & see us, we will put him in a ditch where the balls wont hit
    him. John has the greatest curiosity about everything, at Spot. CH a
    shell came over & struck in the
     ground to our rear fifty yards, out he runs & digs it up to see what
    sort of a thing it was, there was little firing at the time. He is
    driving a t present & as we usually send the horses to the rear, he is
    not apt to be in as much danger as some of the rest of us. He is also
    enabled to carry our baggage on a march on his horses. But do not let
    us think too much of safe places, but rather trust in God & that His
    all seeing eye is upon us wherever we are. Write & don't copy my style
    in writing public news but write home news.
    With tender love to all.
    Your affectionate brother,
    William

    
    P.S. I am now sitting under five fine cherry trees, and I have just
    eaten just as many as I wanted. Our guns are about half a mile in the
    rear of the fighting and of course some balls come over here, but I
    have a deep hole by the side of my horses to get in. I will give you
    some idea how fast the guns have been shooting this morning, just as
    fast as I can count.
    I would like very much to see you all but there is no chance to go
    home while the fighting is going on. I would like very much if T.
    could come to see us but I don’t know where he is so we are our selves
    let lone directing him.
    J . C. Tatum

    
    

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    I guess with my Great Grand Dad Digging up cannon balls, I can consider myself luck to be here !

    DT.

A note from JC Tatum

"We Confederates did our Duty" !

His Parole ! From Appomattox !

Return The Flags !

Demand the VMFA return the Confederate Battle Flags to the portico of the Confederate War Memorial

Confederate flags had flown over the grounds since the opening of the Old Soldiers Home in Richmond, VA in 1885. They were placed there by Confederate Veterans, to memorialize the Confederate dead, and honor the living. On the eve of the Sesquicentennial Commemoration of the War Between the States, June 1st, 2010, Confederate Battle Flags were forcibly removed from the Confederate War Memorial/Pelham Chapel by a restriction in the lease renewal, at the insistence of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

As citizens of Virginia and descendants of Confederate soldiers who gallantly answered Virginia’s call to defend her, we demand that the VMFA remove these blatantly prejudicial restrictions and allow the Confederate Battle Flags to once again fly on the Confederate War Memorial.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/918/949/849/

FROM THE RAPIDAN TO RICHMOND

FROM THE RAPIDAN TO RICHMOND

AND

THE SPOTTSYLVANIA CAMPAIGN

A Sketch in Personal Narrative of the
Scenes a Soldier Saw

By

WILLIAM MEADE DAME, D. D.

Private, First Company
Richmond Howitzers

A Useful Discovery

In this fight, necessity, the mother of invention, put us up to a device that served us well here, and that we made fullest use of, in every fight we had afterwards. When we had kept up that rapid fire, with a scant gun detachment, in plowed ground, and under a hot sun, for an hour, we were nearly exhausted. After Hardy was wounded, and left us, it was still worse. The hardest labor, and what took most time, was running up the guns from the recoil. We had stopped a moment to rest, and let the gun cool a little, and were discussing the difficulties, when the idea occurred to us. There was an old rail fence near by. Somebody said “let’s get some rails and chock the wheels to keep them from running back.” This struck us all as good, and in an instant we had piled up rails behind the wheels as high as the trail would allow. The effect was, that when the gun fired it simply jerked back against this rail pile, and rested in its place, and so we were saved all the time and labor of running up. We found that we could fire three or four times as rapidly, in this way. So that a chocked gun was equal to four in a fight. We found this simple device of immense service! We were told by the knowing ones that we ran the greatest possible danger. The ordnance people said that if a gun was not allowed to recoil it would certainly burst. But we didn’t mind! A device that saved so much labor, and enabled us to deliver such an extraordinarily effective fire on the battlefield, we were bound to try. We found it acted beautifully. We then knew the guns wouldn’t burst for we had tried it.

We used it afterward in every fight. The instant we were ordered into position, two or three cannoneers would rush off and get rails, or a log or two, to chock the guns. And on two or three very desperate emergencies, during this campaign, this device enabled us to render very important service. It made a battery equal to a battalion, and a good many other batteries took it up, and used it. I believe it added greatly to the effectiveness of our artillery in the close-range fighting of this campaign!

Charles Girard

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  Charles Girard who was a French military supplier to the Confederacy noted:
  
  "Even the Southern Slaves fight with their masters for their way of life,
  in preference to dying of hunger in Northern cities, as prey of the invader.
  
  From Paris pays / May 13, 1861.

A pretty smart guy said -------

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  “Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.”…   Charles Dickens