May 12
On this day in 1864, Private Thomas Price Duckworth (1822-1864) of the 30th North Carolina Infantry was mortally wounded during brutal fighting at the “Bloody Angle” in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. A 41-year-old small farmer from Charlotte, Duckworth lived with his wife and six young children when he was conscripted into the Confederate army on October 1, 1863. Assigned to Company K, in the 30th North Carolina, Duckworth had just a few months to train before being thrown into the fury of the Overland Campaign in May 1864. After limited fighting in the battle of the Wilderness on May 6, Duckworth’s regiment, as part of Stephen Dodson Ramseur’s brigade, faced one of the war’s fiercest battles at Spotsylvania. After a heavy Union assault broke through the Confederate “Mule Shoe” salient in the early morning of May 12, Ramseur’s brigade was one of a number of units rushed in to plug the gap at a spot that became known as “the Bloody Angle,” where, one Confederate soldier commented, “The enemy seem[ed] to have concentrated their whole urging of war at this point.” There, in a torrential downpour, Duckworth and his comrades fought in a nightmarish melee lasting nearly 20 hours. Muddy trenches filled with blood and bodies, as men battled in hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, knives, and axes. One Confederate soldier observed a “tall, brawny fellow” drop his musket and grab a hatchet from the ground: “As a Federal [came] at him with a bayonet, he pushed it aside with his left hand, while with the hatchet in his right he brain[ed] his opponent.” Amid this chaos, Duckworth received a gunshot or bayonet wound “through the bowels.” Somehow, he managed to extricate himself from the battle lines and received a medical furlough to return home. Though surrounded by loved ones, his condition was beyond treatment. He died in his bed on July 10, 1864, just nine months after being conscripted–another life claimed by the unrelenting war.
Photo: The Union breakthrough at Spotsylvania
Sources:
Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 8:415; T.P Duckworth, Compiled Military Service Record; 1860 U.S. Census: Mecklenburg County; Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver, An Environmental History of the Civil War, 133-134.
