[64]
They have ceased.
But their glory shall never cease,
Nor their light be quenched in the light of peace.
The rush of their charge is resounding still
That saved the army at Chancellorsville.
Little Giffen
The poem is true in every detail.
The facts, often misstated, are set forth in a letter which the poet's granddaughter,
Miss Michelle Cutliffe Ticknor, courteously furnished for these pages.
During the war, the wife of the poet daily visited the improvised hospitals of
Columbus, Georgia. ‘in one of these, the old bank's building,
Mrs. Ticknor first saw the boy,
Isaac Newton Giffen, and was so haunted by his pitiful condition that when the doctors declared his case hopeless, she carried him in her own carriage to “torch
Hill,” the country home of the Ticknors.
There under the personal care of
Dr.Ticknor And
Mrs. Ticknor he won his fight against death.
Brought to “torch
Hill” in October, 1864, he left only in March, 1865, on receiving news of
Johnston's position.
During his convalescence
Mrs. Ticknor taught
Giffen to read and write, and his deep gratitude toward the Ticknors leaves only one solution to his fate.
How he met it, however, remains as obscure as his family history.
That his father was a blacksmith in the mountains of
East Tennessee is the only positive fact of his ancestry.
He was sixteen years of age when taken by
Mrs. Ticknor and had been engaged in eighteen battles and skirmishes.’
it will thus be seen that the boy was wounded in one of the battles about
Atlanta when
Johnston and
Hood were opposing
Sherman.
We may suppose that the
Captain's reply, given in the poem, was written after the
battle of Nashville, December 15-16, 1864.
in March, 1865,
Johnston was again opposing
Sherman, this time in the Carolinas, and it must have been in one of the closing battles of the war that ‘little
Giffen’ lost his life.
Out of the focal and foremost fire,
Out of the hospital walls as dire,
Smitten of grape-shot and gangrene,
（Eighteenth battle, and he sixteen!)
Spectre!
such as you seldom see,
Little Giffen, of Tennessee.
