122 Southern Historical Society Papers.
was the boy who disarmed him, and his sword hangs over my man- tel now to tell the tale; nor was the flag, picked up by Hancock's men on the field, the Twenty-fourth Virginia's, for behold that now in my possession ever since that fateful day.
General McClellan, with his usual exaggeration when counting Confederate soldiers, reported that Hancock had captured two colo- nels, two lieutenant colonels, and killed as many more. As a mat- ter of fact, he captured none, and the only field-officer killed was the heroic Badham, Lieutenant Colonel of the Fifth North Carolina, a very impersonation of courage itself. They claimed to have killed the writer, also; but in this, as in many other statements, they were greatly in error, for a few weeks afterwards his comrades elected him in reward of his action on this field, to be their Major, and with them, as their Colonel, he was paroled at Appomattox, though on crutches and thought to be permanently disabled from wounds received in battle.
RICHARD L. MAURY, Late Colonel Twenty-fourth Virginia Infantry.
[From the Atlanta, Ga., Constitution, June i, 1894.]
HAMPTON'S DUEL
On the Battle-Field at Gettysburg With a Federal Soldier.
In the breaking dawn of July 2, 1863, 4,000 cavalrymen sat in silence upon their horses on the extreme left of the Confederate bat- tle line at Gettysburg. The field in their front was curtained with a heavy mist, as if kindly nature had sought to veil the appalling traces of the tragedy there enacted. It had been sown with shot and bladed thick with steel on the previous afternoon, and the harvest of death was ungathered, lying in winnows along the ghastly furrows that had been cut by the red ploughshare of war. The infantry line stretched far away to the right, and their gray uniforms, blending with the hazy atmosphere, gave them a very shadowy appearance. Many of the regiments were indeed but shadows of what they had
