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Final Meals, Feasts, and Words from History’s Notorious and Victorious

Khalid Elhassan August 12, 2021 36 min

The death of John Sedgwick, shortly after he uttered his unfortunate final words. Wikimedia

14. General Sedgwick’s Unfortunate Final Words

At the Battle of Antietam, John Sedgwick was sent on a poorly planned charge, and his division was shot to pieces. He lost 2200 men, and was struck by three bullets. When he recovered from his injuries and returned to duty, he was promoted to command his own corps. He won early success with his Sixth Corps during the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, but the battle ended in a Union defeat. During the Overland Campaign in 1864, he led his corps in the Battle of the Wilderness. On May 9^th, 1864, at the start of the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, as Sedgwick positioned his artillery, his troops came under sniper fire and grew jittery.

He chided his men for their timidity under single bullets, and wondered how they would react when they confronted the massed enemy on the firing line, and faced full volleys. The men were ashamed, but continued to flinch. So Uncle John Sedgwick continued with what became his final words: “Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dista…“. That was when his pep speech was interrupted by a sniper bullet that hit him in the face beneath his left eye, and killed him instantly. He was the highest-ranking Union general killed on a battlefield in the Civil War.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.