December 13
By: Thea Taylor
On this day in 1862, Sergeant Isaac Lefevers (1832-1864) of the 46th North Carolina Infantry Regiment participated in the slaughter of Union soldiers at the Battle of Fredericksburg. A 31-year old potter from Catawba County, Lefevers left his wife and three infant children on March 13, 1862 to enlist in the “Catawba Braves” in Newton. While avoiding the worst of the fighting at the Seven Days and missing the 2nd Battle of Bull Run, Lefevers’s regiment participated in bitter fighting in the West Woods at Antietam. But Fredericksburg would strike Lefevers as particularly memorable. During the battle, the regiment formed part of General John R. Cooke’s brigade, which was positioned behind a stone wall at the base of Marye’s Heights, where they faced wave after wave of Union assaults. Writing to his brother-in-law on December 18, Lefevers claimed that the “46th Regiment did the hardest fighting.” He reported that his colonel “was confident that the 46th Kiled three yankes to every one man that was in his Regt.” Another member of the regiment recorded, “protected by the wall about breast high, all day long [the regiment] shot down the brave men who charged again and again across the level plain in front.” Lefevers was amazed by the number of casualties his comrades inflicted on the Union army: “the yanks piled up own piles that you could a walked all over the ground own dead yankes without tuchen the grounds.” Lefevers continued to serve in the army, enduring the hellish battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, until he died of wounds sustained in fighting near Richmond, Virginia, in July 1864.
Sources:
Weymouth T. Jordan, comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 1987), 11: 129-130, 228, 234; 1860 U.S. Census: Catawba County; Isaac Lefevers to Henry Rhodes, December 18, 1862, in Private Voices.
Sources:
Louis H. Manarin, comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 3:380, 390; 1860 U.S. Census: Edgecombe County, North Carolina; Fayetteville Observer, November 6, 1862; Tarborough Southerner, October 18, 1862
