YANKEE PRISONERS to the number of thirteen were received at the Libby [Prison in Richmond] from Petersburg Monday [July 25, 1864]. Among them was one commissioned officer, Lieutenant-Colonel C[harles]. H. Hooper, Twenty-fourth Massachusetts regiment, captured by our forces at Deep Bottom, on Sunday [July 24, 1864], while placing pickets in our front.
Yesterday [July 26, 1864] Captain William P. Harford, five sergeants and corporals, and forty nine privates of the One Hundred and Sixty-second [New York] regiment, Canby’s Nineteenth army corps, late of Banks’ beaten army, were received at the Libby from Deep Bottom, where they were surprised and captured EN MASSE on Monday night [July 25, 1864], with almost the entire regiment. The prisoners say Canby’s corps had just joined Grant and been just landed at Deep Bottom, when the regiment named was “gobbled” by our forces in that vicinity.1 Twenty eight out of the forty-nine prisoners were foreigners.2
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Source/Notes:
- SOPO Editor’s Note: This small fight was between two regiments of Henagan’s South Carolina Brigade (Kershaw’s Old Brigade) and two regiments of Currie’s Brigade (3/1/XIX), recently arrived from Louisiana. In reading the Official Records correspondence of the Union generals, it appears Currie’s two regiments, the 162nd New York and the 165th New York, had not been trained in fighting as a skirmish line, and they paid dearly for this lack of experience. By the time the Union Second Corps crossed over the James River to start the First Deep Bottom Campaign, the 11th Maine of Foster’s command had regained the lost ground, something it had done multiple times in the previous week! ↩
- “Yankee Prisoners.” Richmond Examiner. July 27, 1864, p. 1 col. 3 ↩