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He told me he did not-he had fought in a battery lower down, and then remarked ‘that it was very hard to fight as he had fought, and turn and find his own brother fighting against him,’ at the same time pointing to the wounded soldier from whose side he had just arisen.
I asked if it was possible that was his brother.
‘Yes, sir, he is my brother Henry.
The same mother bore us-the same mother nursed us. We meet the first time for seven years. I belong to the Washington Artillery, from New Orleans-he to the 1st Minnesota Infantry.
By the merest chance I learned he was here wounded, and sought him out to nurse and attend him.’
Thus they met-one from the far North, the other from the extreme South--on a bloody field in Virginia — in a miserable stable, far away from their mother, home, and friends-both wounded — the infantryman by a musket ball in the right shoulder, the artilleryman by the wheel of a caisson over his left hand.
Thus they met after an absence of seven years. Their names are Frederick Hubbard, Washington Artillery, and Henry Hubbard, 1st Minnesota Infantry.
We met a surgeon of one of the Alabama regiments and related the case to him, and requested, for the sake of the artilleryman, that his brother might be cared for. He immediately examined and dressed his wounds, and sent off in haste for an ambulance to take the wounded ‘ Yankee’ to his own regimental hospital.
Alas! that our country should ever have been visited by a war in which brother was often thus arrayed against brother.
Another sad incident of the same kind was related by
the Hon. Lewis D. Campbell, of
Ohio:
I had two brothers in the war; one in the Confederate army in Texas, and the other in the Union army.
They were sons of one who, at the age of seventeen, fought at the battle of Eutaw Springs. One of my brothers, at the head of a regiment of Texans, fell in Louisiana, and the other, at the head of a Union regiment, fell at the battle of Chancellorsville.
And the news of
