Civil War
With Alabama's secession from the Union, Fry enlisted in the Confederate army and was appointed Colonel of the 13th Alabama Infantry. The regiment was transported to Virginia and fought in the Peninsula Campaign. Colonel Fry was wounded in action at the Battle of Seven Pines. He recovered in time to command his regiment in the savage fighting at Antietam, where he was again wounded, suffering a shattered arm.
Fry rejoined his regiment and led it during the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville, where he suffered a third wound. During the subsequent Gettysburg Campaign, Fry's regiment was among the first Confederate units to deploy into battleline and engage the Union cavalry of John Buford at the opening of the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. His men suffered considerable casualties as the day progressed after being driven off McPherson's Ridge by the arrival of the Federal Iron Brigade. With the capture of Brig. Gen. James J. Archer, Fry assumed command of Archer's Brigade of Tennesseans and Alabamans. Held in reserve on July 2, Fry's brigade was a key part of the July 3 attack that became famous as Pickett's Charge. He suffered yet another wound, and fell near the Union lines. Held as a prisoner of war at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Fry was treated in a local field hospital.
There, rumors circulated that Fry had been involved in the August 1862 murder of Union general Robert L. McCook in Alabama. Fry's West Point classmate, John Gibbon, who ironically commanded the troops that had shot Fry at Gettysburg, vouched for his character and the matter was forgotten.
Exchanged in 1864, Fry rejoined the Army of Northern Virginia in time for the beginning of the Siege of Petersburg. During Philip H. Sheridan's raid on Richmond in early May, Fry was assigned command of Seth Barton's Virginia brigade, leading it during the Battle of Meadow Bridge. He was promoted to brigadier general on May 24, 1864.
During the final months of the war, Fry was placed in command of a military district in South Carolina and Georgia.
Read more about this topic: Birkett D. Fry
Famous quotes related to civil war:
“To the cry of ‘follow Mormons and prairie dogs and find good land,’ Civil War veterans flocked into Nebraska, joining a vast stampede of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and European immigrants.”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)