The Federals struck Winder on his exposed flank, doubled up his two left brigades, the First and Second, and sent them back behind the right of the division. Just at that minute a Federal line of battle was marching straight across the open fields against Winder's right and, with the broken brigades and Federals in the rear and the attack in front, they would have been crushed and Jackson ruined. Andrews, without waiting for orders, took his old battery, the First Maryland, across the front of the two brigades in a sweeping gallop, whirled them into battery on a hillock five hundred yards from the charging line of battle and opened on it with grape and canister with such bitterness, vigor and intensity, that human nature could not stand it, and in three minutes the charge became a rout and the field was filled with fugitives. It is the only case on record of a line of battle being charged by a battery of artillery. But though the service was the most brilliant and valuable done that day, it was more than paid for. As Winder was attempting to rally his broken brigades, a shell knocked him from his horse dead, and as Andrews rode at the head of his battery, he was nearly cut in two by a shell which laid open the anterior covering of his abdomen. It was useless to harass a dying man, it was thought by the surgeons; so he was left on the field with his devoted friend and faithful surgeon, Grafton Tyler of the First Maryland.
Maryland lost one of her most distinguished sons when Charles Winder fell, and nearly lost another as good a man when Snowden Andrews was so badly wounded. He ought to have died by all the rules of anatomy and experience of surgery, but he was of fiber too tough to be killed merely by one Yankee shell. His indomitable will and his unflinching courage pulled him through, and he lives to-day, vigorous in mind and body, just as obstinate as ever, and as faithful to friends as in the days when he was left lying on the field of Culpeper, with his
