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was in charge, told him that Grant had gone to Port Gibson, eight miles away, and that “I was to remain where I was until he came back.” That was an order. Fred could get no more information from him.
    The Union army was now on Mississippi soil, twenty miles south of Vicksburg. The first thing Grant wanted to do was to secure the river coast for the Federals by seizing control of Grand Gulf and Port Gibson, both Confederate strongholds. Two days earlier, on April 29, Admiral Porter’s ironclads had tried to take Grand Gulf but had failed. As Fred now knew, today his father was attacking Port Gibson.
    Fred stood at the ship’s railing, watching all the activity around him. Onshore he saw troops preparing to march in the direction of the cannon fire he could hear in the distance.
    He knew what he had to do. He respected his father, and he strived to be a good soldier and obey orders. But he could not wait out the battle here onboard ship. He
had
to go.

    Porter’s ships, now successfully downstream from Vicksburg, transported Grants army across the Mississippi River at Bruinsburg on April 30. The following day Grant attacked the Confederates at Port Gibson.
    He saw his chance when a rabbit onshore caught his eye. All innocence, “I asked General Thomas to let me go ashore and catch the rabbit.”
    The unsuspecting Thomas gave permission, and moments later Fred was onshore and running. He caught up to a wagon train and was able to ride one of the mules for a while before marching with an artillery group and then a regiment. The whole time the sounds of battle were coming closer.
    Fred didn’t describe what happened next, but soldiers often felt overwhelmed and confused by their first taste of battle. Fred may have been momentarily deafened by the roar of cannon, or even knocked to his knees when the ground shook from the thunderous blasts. It is hard to imagine what he must have felt as the air became hazy with smoke and he heard the sounds of gunfire and the shouts and cries of his comrades, some falling under fire.
    He did report that he eventually spotted his father on his horse watching the unfolding scene. He wanted to go to him, he recalled, but “my guilty conscience so troubled me that I hid from his sight behind a tree.”
    When he thought it was not possible for the battle to last another minute, the Union troops, who greatly outnumbered the Rebels, finally got the upper hand. As they rushed forward, the sun already beginning to set, Fred joined the shouts of “Hurrah!” for “the enemy had given way.”
    He ran onto the battlefield among the exhausted, jubilant men, cheering, but as the celebration began to die down and he looked around, he was suddenly sobered. Fallen soldiers were everywhere, some dead, some dying, many begging for help. This would not have been his first time seeing casualties: two days earlier, after the battle for Grand Gulf, he had seensailors on the ironclads who had been killed or injured and it had sickened him. Now, at Port Gibson, “the horrors of a battlefield were brought vividly before me,” he said. “Night came on and I walked among our men in the moonlight.” Though dazed, he realized that all about him, soldiers who were uninjured were helping with the dead and wounded. “I followed four soldiers who were carrying a dead man in a blanket. They put the body down a slope of a little hill among a dozen other bodies. The sight made me faint… and I hurried on.”

    Doctors and nurses traveled with the armies to care for the wounded at field hospitals like this one behind Union lines.
    Wanting to help, he joined a detachment that was transporting the wounded to a schoolhouse that served as a field hospital. He was unprepared for what he saw next. “Surgeons were tossing amputated arms and legs out of the windows. The yard of the schoolhouse was filled with wounded and groaning men who were waiting for the surgeons.”
    Twelve-year-old Fred could take no more. “I