June 26
By: Will Asby
On this day, Private Noah Asby (1831-1890) of the 1st North Carolina Infantry got his first taste of combat at the Battle of Mechanicsville, as a part of General Roswell Ripley's doomed assault. A 30-year-old farmer in Martin County when the war began, he enlisted in Company H of the 1st North Carolina on June 24, 1861. Though ordered to Virginia in July 1861, his regiment saw no combat until the summer of 1862, when the Army of the Potomac menaced the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. In the early hours of June 26, the 1st North Carolina–part of Ripley’s brigade of D.H. Hill’s division–embarked on a long, circuitous march to arrive south of the Chickahominy River, below the Union forces at Mechanicsville. In the late afternoon, under General Robert E. Lee's orders, the First North Carolina crossed the river and advanced over half a mile, through such a withering hail of enemy artillery and gunfire that the air seemed to be full of lead. After clearing a garden fence as “bullets rattled against the palings,” the men fixed their bayonets and advanced into “a regular storm of flying missiles of death” as they attacked a well-fortified Union position across Beaver Dam Creek near Ellerson's Mill. As one lucky survivor put it, “[t]he carnage was terrible,” as the men were exposed to heavy fire while on an open hillside. One officer recalled the “terrific” slaughter “in the face of this murderous fire.” By the time that the regiment finally retired under cover of darkness, its colonel, six other officers and more than half of its men had been killed or wounded. Private Asby himself escaped from the battle unharmed, but his luck would not hold forever. He was shot through both thighs at Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crippled, he returned to his Martin County farm and claimed a veteran’s pension in 1885.
Ripley's men attacking the Union position across Beaver Dam Creek at Ellerson's Mill.
Sources:
Louis H. Manarin, comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 3:223; North Carolina, Office of the State Auditor, Declaration of Soldier for Pension. 5.21.2.22. Martin County: Pension Bureau, 1885; James. C. Birdsong, Brief Sketches of North Carolina Troops in the War Between the States (1894), 3-4; Robert A. Williams, “Lavish of Blood: The 1st North Carolina State Troops at the Battle of Mechanicsville,” Company Front vol. 30, no. 1 (2016): 11-15; H.A. Brown, “First Regiment,” in Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861-65, ed. Walter Clark (H.M. Uzzell, 1901), 1: 138-139; Marcus Herring, “Hard Service in Camp and Battle,” Confederate Veteran 22 (1914): 19-20.
