GRANT'S SOLDIERS DIGGING POTATOES - ON THE MARCH TO COLD HARBOR, MAY 28, 1864

Robert Gray

Sergeant Major
Joined
Jul 24, 2012
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These boys of the Sixth Corps have cast aside their heavy accouterments, blankets and pieces of shelter-tent, and set cheerfully to digging potatoes from a roadside "garden patch." One week later their corps will form part of the blue line that will rush toward the Confederate works—then stagger to cover, with ten thousand men killed, wounded, or missing in a period computed less than fifteen minutes. When Grant found that he had been out-generaled by Lee on the North Anna River, he immediately executed a flank movement past Lee's right, his weakest point. The Sixth Corps and the Second Corps, together with Sheridan's cavalry, were used in the flank movement and secured a more favorable position thirty-five miles nearer Richmond. It was while Sedgwick's Sixth Corps was passing over the canvas pontoon-bridges across the Pamunkey at Hanovertown, May 28, 1864, that this photograph was taken. When the foragers in the foreground have exhausted this particular potato-field, one of the wagons of the quartermaster's train now crossing on the pontoon will halt and take aboard the prize, carrying it forward to the next regular halt, when the potatoes will be duly distributed. Not alone potatoes, but wheat and melons and turnips, or any other class of eatables apparent to the soldiers' eye above ground, were thus ruthlessly appropriated. This incongruous episode formed one of the many anomalies of the life of the soldier on the march.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR IN TEN VOLUMES
Frances T. Miller - Editor in Chief - The Review of Reviews Co.
1911
 
Could it be they were really digging in an attempt to find rebel household jewelry which was very often buried in the garden to keep from approaching Union armies?
 
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