Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/728

This page has been validated.
674
CONFEDERATE MILITARY HISTORY.

pating in the defeat of the Federals at Shepherdstown August 25th, and fighting gallantly at Winchester, where he was one of the seven distinguished Confederate generals who fell killed or wounded. He returned with his brigade to the Petersburg lines, and on March 25, 1865, was again wounded while leading his command in the sortie of Gordon's corps against Fort Stedman. During the retreat of the army to Appomattox, he was at home disabled by wounds, but when the news of the surrender reached him, he mounted his horse, with indomitable courage, and started out to join the army in North Carolina. He subsequently resumed his law practice at Wytheville, and in 1868 was nominated for Congress, but could not make the race on account of political disabilities. Upon the removal of these he was elected to the Forty-second and Forty-fourth Congresses. On September 5, 1888, he was drowned while attempting to ford a creek near his home. By his marriage to Emma, daughter of Benjamin Wigginton, of Bedford county, in 1852, there are four sons and three daughters, who survive.

Brigadier-General William Richard Terry was born at Liberty, Bedford county, Va., March 12, 1817. After his graduation by the Virginia military institute in 1850, he devoted himself to agricultural and commercial pursuits until the secession of Virginia, when he promptly entered the military service as captain of a company of cavalry organized in Bedford county. He led his men to Manassas, and after serving at Fairfax Court House, participated in the cavalry charge which demoralized the broken right wing of the Federal army on the night of April 21st, continuing until midnight in pursuit of the enemy. His conduct at the battle of First Manassas won the attention of his commanders, and in September following, at the request of General Early, he was promoted colonel and assigned to the command of the Twenty-fourth Virginia infantry, from which Early had been promoted to brigadier-general. In May, 1862, at the battle of Williamsburg, the Twenty-fourth Virginia and Fifth North Carolina regiments made a brilliant and heroic charge upon the enemy's position, and Terry, leading his regiment, fell severely wounded, but earned a reputation as an inspiring and irresistible leader in assault