300 The American Civil Warhad ever witnessed. 'I have heard it said that
after the first volley that you forged [forget]
all the dainger,' he elaborated. 'Unless a man
is scart out of his rite sences he knowes what
is going on as well as he did at first.' Still,
combat affected him. 'I know that my flesh
tickeld and flinched all the time expecting to
feel a ball pierce it.'
Two days later, his regiment had to cross
over the hotly contested battlefield in
pursuit of the Rebels. 'Sutch a odor (politely
speaking) I never heard tell of nor ever do I
want smell it again,' he confessed. 'The dead
layed in heaps well it made me so sick that I
had to fall out and laydown beside the road.'
Despite this vivid depiction, the young
private felt he had failed to convey a true
sense of the experience. 'It is no usee,' he
insisted, 'woords have not enuf meening.'
In mid-1863, the 107th New York fought in
two of the greatest battles of the war,
Chanceltorsville and Gettysburg, and Edgerton
was right in the thick of them. At
Chancellorsville, Confederate General
Stonewall Jackson launched a brilliant flank
attack that rolled up the Union XI Corps and
threatened the rear of the XII, to which the
107th was assigned. In the course of the
fighting, Edgerton had his percussion cap box
shot off, and a Rebel ball passed through his
cap. 'I wouldent sware that I kiled aney body,'
he admitted to his father, 'but I am prety shore
that a good maney were hit buy me fore the
most of the time they were not more than
10 or 15 rods [55-82.5yds; 50-75m] off and I
know that I can hit a hat 20 rods off every time
for I have tride it so you can judg for your self.'
At Gettysburg two months later, the
battle 'was as hard if not harder than aney
other that I have been in.' At one point, a
shell fragment knocked his rifle right out of
his hand. Having fought in several major
battles, Edgerton had begun to develop some
seasoning in combat. 'I mad[e] up my mind
that if they wanted me to stop fighting hit me
fir they couldent scare me aney,' he told his
mother after Gettysburg.
Just before Antietam, his best friend, John
Wiggins, deserted, only to return under
Lincoln's amnesty the next April. Edgerton
helped his friend, who had a family at home,
by lending him money, but he would never
have entertained that kind of conduct
himself. 'I dont care about fighting,' he
confessed after Chancellorsville. 'I would
willingly give all I am worth and a good deal
more if I had it to be out of this scrape, but
never the less I am no coward and I never will
disgrace the name of Edgerton by desertion or
Sneeking out of danger like some have.'
That fall of 1863, after the Union disaster at
Chickamauga, the War Department transferred
the XI and XII Corps under Major-General
Joseph Hooker to Chattanooga. It was an
extraordinary logistical achievement; Edgerton
and his comrades endured the ''rufiest rideing'
and a derailment, but they made it in time to
witness the rout of Bragg's army. For a change,
the 107th saw little action, but the regiment's
arrival marked a dramatic change for its men.
Not until the war's end would they return to
Virginia. They soon became part of the
Western Army, with the XI and XII merged to
form the XX Corps under Hooker.
Because of his service in both theaters,
Edgerton offered some valuable insights into
the way that the enemy fought. Federal
commanders, he noticed, preserved the lives
of their men better by placing greater
emphasis on artillery fire. The Rebels, with
inferior artillery, compensated with
aggressive infantry. 'There is one thing that
our goverment does that suits me to a dot,'
he instructed his mother, 'that is we fight
mostly with Artillery, The Rebls fight mostly
with Infantry. They fight as though a mans
life was not worth one sent or in other words
with desperration.' He also believed that the
western Rebels did not tight as well as Lee's
troops. Around Chattanooga, he knew that
the Federals confronted what he described as
two-fifths of Lee's army, including two of
Longstreet's divisions, 'the best fighting men
the World ever saw.' Weeks after the Union
crushed Bragg's army without Longstreet's
troops present, Edgerton measured the
performance of Confederate eastern and
western troops and concluded, 'The rebels in
this country are not such fighting men as
they are in Va. [Virginia].'