500 HISTORY OF COH ASSET. 



The billows of battle began to surge on the morning of 

 July I ; regiment was dashed against regiment all that day. 

 At night there lay about ten thousand men mangled and 

 dead upon the ground ; every one of them taken from 

 some distant home. The fifty thousand survivors rested a 

 little in sleep, and then in the morning with a hundred 

 thousand reinforcements they moved into battle array 

 against each other. In the afternoon of that hot July day 

 at about four o'clock the signal guns of Lee boomed out 

 slowly the command to attack our Union forces. 



Some of our Cohasset men remember the awful cannon- 

 ade upon the hills that followed, and the infantry charges 

 against the Union trocps on Little Round Top and the 

 Devil's Den and Cemetery Ridge. On into the night the 

 fighting continued in different parts of the field, while 

 others who had borne the brunt of battle lay exhausted in 

 sleep. 



Yet again on the third day the carnage was renewed. 

 At about half-past one Lee's signal guns spoke out " one " 

 — " two," and both armies sprang to the contest. This 

 country had never seen more terrible courage than the Con- 

 federates displayed in their determination to plant their 

 banners upon our ramparts, but the vigor of Lee's army 

 was soon exhausted. Pickett's desperate charge under our 

 raking streams of shot was all in vain. His gallant men 

 were literally mowed down by our bullets, and then the 

 Union regiments sprang upon the field, capturing prisoners 

 and trophies of war. That night Lee withdrew with 

 twenty-six thousand less men than he brought. Of our 

 own soldiers nearly as many had been lost, and the rest 

 were too utterly exhausted to pursue the retreating Army 

 of Virginia. 



It was a sad Fourth of July, but also a sort of thanks- 

 giving day for the North, when President Lincoln an- 

 nounced the victory of Gettysburg. But on the same day 

 came the news that Grant had choked Vicksburg into sur- 



