“My God, has the army dissolved?”—Robert E. Lee, following the Battle of Saylers Creek, April 6, 1865.

[Command Posts is honored to feature the following story from Lieutenant General Samuel Vaughan Wilson, about his family's connection to the Civil War Battle of Saylers Creek, as excerpted from his book in progress.]

I remember the holes in the wood siding of Lockett House, where my grandmother, Lucy Lockett was born and raised. The holes were made by minie balls fired by both sides.  There were thirty-two of them in the front side of the house alone, along with four larger scars made by cannon balls.

Lockett House, where Gen. Samuel Vaughan Wilson sat as a young boy, listening to family stories of the Battle of Sayler's Creek. The holes made by minie balls are still there today. Image and caption: Callie Oettinger.

In the course of the battle, the farmhouse had been turned into a hospital for both the Northern and Southern forces, and Lucy Lockett’s young niece, Mamie Lockett, had spent most of the fight crouched on a pile of last fall’s potatoes there on the floor of the basement, her tiny frame shielded by that of her nanny’s.

When I would visit her in the early 1930’s, “Cousin Mamie—we sometimes called her “Aunt Mamie”—would sit there in the front parlor rocking and holding on to her cane, and, if I was patient and kept quiet long enough, she would talk about the battle of Saylers Creek, which shattered Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia on the way to Appomattox Courthouse.

“After a while,” she would say:

“all that terrible noise and all that shooting began to die down a bit, and old Aunt Charity got up and went to see what was going on.  The minute she was gone I sneaked up the stairs myself just as quick as I could and hunched down there on the floor by the wall close to the front parlor door, so they wouldn’t notice me in all the commotion.  A lot of folks were coming and going.  Some of them were hurt and bleeding but still able to walk; others real bad hurt were being carried in to where the doctors were working.  I can still hear the screaming and hollering in my head.  I tell you, it was awful.  Awful.

“There was a big man, pale as a han’t, with a goatee and in a blue coat lying there on the floor right over there where you can still see the big smudge stain in the floor.  He was a Yankee cavalry captain, at least when I told them later that he had those two little silver bars like railroad tracks on his shoulders, they said that meant he was a captain.  And those shiny spurs on his boots meant he was in the cavalry.  Anyway, his left leg had been shot almost plumb off, and the only thing holding it was what was left of his boot.  What was bad was that blood was just spurting from his leg in gushes, and they couldn’t stop the bleeding.   Sounds kinda funny now, but as I watched his chin kept coming up and up until his beard was pointing right at the ceiling.  Then it came down sorta slow on his chest, and I just knew he was dead.

“There was another one right over here where you can see that other stain still there in the floor.  He was a little Johnny Reb,  couldn’t have been more’n 12 or 13,  tow-headed and not even old enough to shave. He was in real bad shape, had been hit in the stummick, bleeding real bad and his guts were spilling out all over the place.  They kept trying to stuff his guts back in his belly, but it looked like it wasn’t working.  I can hear him now calling for his mama—’Mama, Mama, help me, Mama . . .’ Then he called real low one last time and was quiet, and I knew he was dead too.”

Then she straightened up in her rocker and looked me squarely in the face:

“You see how that stain from where that first fellow was lying spreads on around and goes on under my rocking chair?”

“Yes’m, I see it.”

“You know what that is, boy?”

Of course I knew what that was.

“What’s that, Aunt Mamie?”

“That’s blood, boy.”

“Yes’m.”

“You see how that other stain where that little Johnny Reb was lying over there and bleeding to death?”

“Yes’m.”

“You know what that is, boy?”

Of course I knew what that was also.

“What’s that, Aunt Mamie?”

“That’s blood, too, Boy.”

“Yes’m.”

“You see how those two bloodstains spread around here and come together and overlap?”

The hair on the back of my neck began to prickle, and my mouth was dry.  I could only nod my head.

Pointing with her cane to the merging stains, she rasped in her old lady’s cracked voice:

“That’s how our country came back together . . . ”

Tough stuff for a nine-year old boy.