During some of the most brutal and bloodiest fighting of the American Civil War, the day is saved by an overweight, epileptic washout.
Now That Should Be A Movie.
Short Pitch
It is called Carrying The Flag
It is a War Drama.
In the vein of Fury.
It is like Glory meets All Quiet on The Western Front.
It follows epileptic washout Private Charles Whilden
And young veteran officer James Armstrong
As they fight to survive the hellish combat of the Overland Campaign
Problems arise when their regiment is almost annihilated and they retreat, disgracing themselves in front of General Robert E. Lee
Now together Charles’ dedication to his duty and James’ respect for him will help them achieve victory and save the army.
The idea came to me when reading Carrying the Flag by Gordon C. Rhea, which is a more exciting read with more intimate details than some novels.
My unique approach would be a focus on a few soldiers, their intimate army life, horrific combat experience, and the effects of their actions upon the overall campaign.
A set piece would be when Charles and James are pinned down in bloody mud by heavy firepower from Union troops positioned atop high ground known as The Bloody Angle. Confederate officers who rise to lead charges are immediately cut down. They can’t retreat across the bullet-swept open ground behind them. Charles reaches for the regiment’s battle flag. No words are spoken as James hands it to him. Charles climbs up the barricades, slippery from the pouring rain. Then he begins charging the Angle. Soldiers rise up from the trenches, gather around him, and rush the high ground. Charles becomes a target for Union Minie balls. He’s hit in the shoulder but continues. He shakes from epilepsy but holds the pole steady. Then he sees that the flag is coming loose from the pole. If it falls and floats away, the charge will falter. He grabs the flag from the pole, wraps it around his body, and, as a human flagpole, rushes on toward the Angle. He and his comrades reach the high ground. Hand-to-hand combat breaks out as men wrestle in the mud. Finally, the Yankees retreat, and the high ground is in the Confederate hands thanks to Charles’s bravery.
Target audiences would be men (18-80), military service members and veterans, war movie fans, history buffs, Southerners, Civil War reenactors, and gamers.
Audiences would like to see it due to its unique battlefield scenarios of the Wilderness and The Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania Court House, themes of courage, bravery, devotion to duty, brotherhood, and redemption, and the human interest story of a washout overcoming his past and epileptic handicap to just once do something significant in his life.
Today’s book I would like to pitch as a movie is Carrying the Flag: The Story Of Private Charles Whilden, The Confederacy’s Most Unlikely Hero by Gordon C. Rhea, from Basic Books.
Charles Whilden was born on April 3, 1824. His father was a struggling newspaper editor in Charleston, South Carolina. Despite his middle-class upbrings, he and his siblings were basically reared by a seventy-years old female slave named Maumer or Maum Juno. After Mr. Whilden died when Charles was 14, Maum Juno helped the family make ends meet by remitting her pay from washing and ironing. Her influence on the children was such that Charles’ sister Ellen wrote an autobiography of her, The Life of Maumer Juno.
Charles and his siblings came of age and began pursuing careers. His younger brother William had a head for business and soon started his own retail firm Hayden and Whilden. Charles pursued a career in law, passing the bar. But his career fizzled out as the economy declined in South Carolina’s Low Country. Charles sought his fortune in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where iron deposits had been discovered. He bought property but was soon in debt and had to be bailed out by William. Then he was the personal secretary to the chief of the Commissary Department of New Mexico. He made and lost investments in stocks. And was unable to find a wife.
In modern terms, he was a loser and washout.
He ended all his letters to his family with “give my love to all the folks including Maum Juno.” In one he wrote that his hair was graying and that Maum Juno used to say that each hair of their heads “would be worth at $1,000. I have never been worth $1,000. I could sell out my head of hair at Maum Juno’s calculation for about $100,000.”
Then the War began, and Charles lost his job when his boss resigned his position to throw in his lot with the Confederacy. Charles took a ship to see what mediocre series of failures awaited him in Charleston. According to family lore, the craft sunk in a storm and Charles was forced to spend several days floating in an open boat, exposed to the elements and broiling tropical sun. Thus, he developed epileptic seizures.
Business for the Firm of Hayden and Whilden boomed in the early war days providing swords, weapons, uniforms, and, most prominently, flags. One was a silk banner for the 1st South Carolina Regiment. William also became an officer in an artillery company. Charles watched as his brothers, cousins, and friends joined up and marched off to war. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather who had fought in the American Revolution, but when he tried to enlist, he would be turned down whenever he had an epileptic attack.
In November 1861 Union forces captured Port Royal fifty miles south of Charleston. Soon the city was under blockade and siege and the firm of Hayden and William had to close. By August 22, 1863, Union guns could fire into the heart of the city. Most famous was the 8-inch barreled Parrott Rifle called the Swamp Angel, whose shot contained Greek Fire. Although it burst upon its thirty-sixth round, other cannons quickly took its place and began firing on civilian targets, using the prominent steeples of the local churches to sight their guns. When the gunners were satisfied that they had leveled the civilian buildings around that part of the church, they would move on to the next steeple. In January 1864 more than fifteen hundred shells struck the city. Families, women, and children, abandoned their homes in terror. Charles and the Whilden women and children, including Maumer Juno, fled inland to Columbia.
In January 1864, Charles tried once again to enlist. This time he was accepted. The harsh realities of war were causing the Confederacy, according to President Davis, “to grind the seed corn of the nation.” Compulsory military service was broadened to include all white males from seventeen to fifty, and men like Charles who had been previously medically disqualified were accepted into the ranks. Whatever the reasons for the war – states’ rights, slavery, tariffs – by now Charles had seen the Union blockade and bombardment wreck his brother’s business and drive his family and friends from their homes. He had seen women and children flee from exploding shells and flaming houses at night and in the morning, grief-stricken civilians pull wounded and dead loved ones and friends from the rubble. By now Charles was looking to strike back and defend his home and his family.
When Charles arrived in Virginia, he was placed in Company I, 1st South Carolina commanded by Comillus Wickliffe “Wick” McCreary, Samuel McGowan’s Brigade, Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox’s Division, in A. P. Hill’s Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. Hill liked to call on Wilcox’s division for his bloodiest work. It was apparent on the 1st South Carolina’s battle flag which he names of battles the regiment had fought – sixteen in all. The regiment no longer carried the silk banner produced by William Whilden’s firm. It had been sent to Columbia for display after Gettysburg.
The 1st South Carolina, with 425 men, was the smallest of McGowan’s five regiments. When Company I was reorganized, only nine of its twenty-eight privates were veterans. At almost forty years old with a beard and thinning, mostly gray hair, stooped shoulders, protruding belly, epileptic seizures, and a preference for Meerschaum pipes and good books, Charles was both the old man and the odd man of the regiment. He and other recruits were looked upon by the veterans as little more than cannon fodder. Charles soon became friends with Pennsylvanian-born but Charleston-raised Captain James Armstrong of Company K, often dining together. Despite James being half Charles’ age, this friendship would set in motion Charles’ destiny since Company K was the regiment’s color company, responsible for carrying the unit’s flag into battle. And James was responsible for selecting who carried the flag.
Flags were an integral element of 19th-century warfare. They floated above the smoke and confusion of battle, directing soldiers to press on or fall back. If troops became separated, they would look for the flag as a rallying point. Flags were a morale booster, creating an esprit de corps reminding soldiers of their communities and families. No greater disgrace could befall a regiment than its flag being captured. Thus, flag bearers became special targets for the enemy. During one battle the 1st South Carolina had lost five flag bearers, many of them shot multiple times. Armstrong had been wounded carrying the flag at Gettysburg.
Color bearers had to be tall and strong, with upper body strength, able to hold the flagpole high, straight, and steady as they marched quickly for long distances. So it was not surprising, when in preparation for the upcoming campaign Armstrong selected the flagbearer and the privates who would serve in a line of succession when he was killed, Private Charles Whilden was not one of them.
A great honor would be to hold the flag while General Robert E. Lee reviewed the troops. While the Army of the Potomac prepared for the coming campaign by beefing up recruiting drafting and stripping troops from northern garrisons, Lee reviewed his much smaller army. The men could not hold in their excitement at seeing their commander, The Gray Fox, and began cheering and throwing their hats in the air. “Does it not make him proud.” someone asked. “No,” comes the reply. “It awes him.”
The 1864 Overland Campaign in Virginia between the armies of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant would be like nothing the war had seen before. To keep a growing peace movement in the war-weary North from winning at the polls during the presidential election, Grant planned to achieve battlefield victories by destroying Confederate armies at lightning speed. He planned on destroying Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia by outflanking and getting in between him and his supply base in an area known as The Wilderness.
Here were thick tangles of brush and chinquapin so heavy they blocked out the sun. Dense foliage along twisting creeks blocked the view of anyone who wandered off the area’s few roads. The skein of branches and saplings swallowed up troops and field commanders lost sight of their flanks. Cannons were useless against an unseen enemy and the use of cavalry was limited. Grant and subordinates gave Lee the perfect location for his 35,000 men to attack the 120,000-man-strong Army of the Potomac.
Lee ordered Hill’s Corps to meet Grant in the Wilderness along the Orange Plank Road. The 1st South Carolina veterans discarded anything that was not necessary – chessboards, fiddles, extra blankets. Others filled canteens, cooked extra rations, and stuffed their haversacks with as much food as possible. Private Charles Whilden’s war was about to begin.
The Battle of The Wilderness is Nightmare Fuel
Only a few hundred yards of sapling undergrowth separated opposing lines. Soldiers forced their way through tangles of briers, brush, and thorns across the ground cut by gullies. Others slugged through muddy swamps. Gaps in lines opened as men detoured around stumps and bogs, crowding and jumbling the formations. Companies and regiments lost contact with each other until disintegrating into stand-up fights between individuals and isolated bands of armed figures swaying back and forth in the foliage. Groups of disorganized, disoriented soldiers wandered through a twisting maze of ravines until colliding into tangled heaps with other outfits. Disoriented soldiers wandered into enemy lines where they were killed or captured. Bark and other shrapnel exploded and flew out of the wooden undergrowth. Tangled branches and vines kept the bodies of the dead in upright standing positions. The canopy of leaves trapped heat and the smell of gunpowder, stinging eyes and hanging in nostrils. Shrieks, cries, and groans filled the air.
Then came the fires.
Men blackened from the smoke leaped over barricades like fiends from hell. Wounded men hobbled to safety. Others gouged their elbows into the ground to pull their bodies along. Soldiers burned to death. Cartridge boxes ignited, filling the air with random explosions. Some men chose to kill themselves rather than burn. Comrades unable to rescue friends stranded in no-man’s land fired mercy killing shots. Blackened skeletons covered the battlefield.
Charles and the 1st South Carolina marched into this at quick time, then at the double-quick. Bullets and cannonballs plowed the road around them. Mangled and wounded men emerged from the darkened woods that Charles and his comrades were about to enter. They left the Orange Plank Road and disappeared into the jungle-like undergrowth.
The South Carolinians burst forth with a yell, which alerted the Federals who had a barricade a hundred yards away. They fired on the 1st ‘s front and right and Charles heard balls slammed into his comrades. Charles and his comrades dropped to their knees and began firing at invisible targets. Friendly fire hits them in the back. Having punched ahead of the rest of the line, Charles and his companions were practically alone. Lieutenant Colonel Washington Pickney Shooter’s brother, Benjamin Franklin Shooter, was killed. Even when it was discovered that the regiment was being fired upon on both sides of its exposed flanks, the lieutenant colonel refused to yield the field.
Finally, the other South Carolina regiments came forward, relieving pressure on the 1st South Carolina. But they too outpaced their support, creating a pocket, and the Yankee soldiers moved in for the turkey shoot. The regiments began cutting their way out of the pocket. In most battles, one side usually gave way after a few shots. Not in the Wilderness.
McGowan ordered Charles and the 1st South Carolina to unite with the rest of his command north of the Orange Plank Road. To do so, they would have to cross the road that the Union artillery was firing straight down, making the cross deadly impossible. The soldiers came up with a solution. They would watch the gunners and, whenever the crews stopped to reload, a few dozen men would run across the road a hundred yards from the guns. The Union artillery would aim and fire at them but miss. Then while reloading, large numbers of South Carolinians would dash across the road and unite with McGown’s command. The plan worked.
Still, the Yankees advanced, moving like a pincer, pressing the rebel formation into a huddled, infective line of battle. Fired upon from two sides, the South Carolinians’ battle became a brawl between individuals. Hand-to-hand combat broke out. Muskets blaze away, orange in the gathering dark. The flag bearer, Corporal Andrew Chapman, is shot in the head. Several members of the color company were killed or wounded until only Private William Bunch of the Carolina Light Infantry Company was left. Then he too was wounded.
Finally, Wilcox sent reinforcements in, which drove the northerners back. Another hour and the Confederate line might have collapsed, but the fog of war kept the Yankees from seeing just how desperate the Confederate position was.
Charles had faced death and had not faltered. He had won the respect of his company. Armstrong wrote home that “he behaved in a manner worthy of a veteran.” With Private Bunch wounded, Armstrong had to select someone to carry the battle flag at the head of the regiment. He chose Private Charles
Around five o’clock the next morning, the first shots were fired. The sounds of thousands of Union troops tramping through the overgrowth could be heard. Nearly half of the Army of the Potomac was closing in on Hill’s men. Charles watched as just a few hundred feet in front and to the right of him a mass of Union troops attacked. A volley was fired but Confederates south of the 1st South Carolina’s position retreated. The Union troops overran the lower end of the rebel line, taking prisoners and seizing flags. At the sound of shots and explosions and the sight of others falling back, Charles grasped the flagpole. As the line rolled like paper, he and his comrades stampeded back down the Orange Plank Road. They retreated until they ran right past General Robert E. Lee sitting on Traveller.
“My God,” Lee shouted. “General McGowan, is this splendid brigade of yours running like a flock of geese!”
“General,” McGowan replied defensibly. “The men are not whipped. They only want a place to form, and they will fight as well as they did.”
The Carolinians managed to disentangle themselves from the mass of retreating soldiers and gathered behind a defense line of artillery. Charles, the flagpole still in his hands with the flag hanging limply in the air, and his comrades were little more than observers while Yankee bullets kicked up dust around Traveller’s feet as the Yankees approached.
However, the South Carolinians did not have a chance to redeem themselves. In a scene tailor-made for cinema, The Texas Brigade arrived in the nick of time. “The eyes of General Lee are upon you,” the Texans’ commander told them. General Lee was so excited that he almost led the brigade in a charge himself but was convinced to turn back. “Can’t I, too, die for my country,” he was heard muttering to himself as he rode to the rear.
The disgrace of Charles and the 1st South Carolina was completed. Not only had they dishonored themselves in front of Lee but now had to stand aside as spectators and watch another brigade retake the ground they had given up so easily. While the Texans drove the Yankees back, McGowan’s brigade stayed in a reserve line, building trenches. Despite some skirmishing, they did not get a chance to redeem themselves. Out of McGowan’s Brigade lost 55 were killed, 383 wounded, and 43 missing. The 1st South Carolina had sustained 137 casualties.
An estimated 29,800 men became casualties in the Wilderness. Grant lost 17,000 against Lee’s 13,000 and had gained no ground. His predecessors would have retreated. Instead, he decided to leave the Wilderness and seize the crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House ten miles below. Lee would have no choice but to follow him and fight him on the ground of his choosing to protect Richmond.
Grant moved toward Spotsylvania Court House, but Lee beat him to the critical crossroads. Grant spent three days trying to outflank Lee, but the Gray Fox seemed to predict his every move. The Confederate engineers used the terrain around Spotsylvania to their defensive advantage. The ground contoured to create angles and pockets that subjected the attackers to overlapping fire from several directions as they crossed open ground, often uphill. The Confederates were entrenched behind breast-high battlements several feet thick. Traverses, stubby mounds, were constructed every fifteen feet to provide rallying places in case the defenses were breached. The gaps between the traverses created pens. These trenches ran for six miles, blocking every approach to the crossroads. But despite the obstacles in front of him, Grant vowed to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
The men of the 1st South Carolina, unaware of the grand strategizing, spent sweltering days observing smoke, swatting flies, and, in Charles’s case, smoking his meerschaum pipe. On May 9th McGowan’s troops were deployed atop a ridge half a mile east of Spotsylvania Court House along a trickle called the Ni River. They looked to find redemption here, but the Yankees refused to attack Lee’s seemingly impenetrable lines.
But Lee’s lines COULD be broken. On May 10th Col. Emory Upton led a concentrated attack of 12 massed regiments against one position, punching a hole open in the Confederate fortifications. The attack only failed when expected reinforcements did not arrive, and Confederates, again almost led by General Lee himself, did. But it gave Grant an idea. Why not attack one spot in the Confederate line with three corps?
Because Confederate engineers had followed the contour of the land, they had built a line to the north, that jogged eastward and then bent southward. The result was a half-mile wide, half-mile deep salient pointed toward the Federals known as the Mule Shoe. It was notoriously hard for defenders to support one another in a salient, but the high ground on which the Mule Shoe was built was too important to give up to the enemy. One advantage the defenders at the head of the Shoe had was the open fields the attackers would have to cross.
Against the head of Mule Shoe Grant would send the entirety of Winnfield Hancock’s corps, some twenty thousand men. At the same time two different corps, a total of forty thousand men, would attack the eastern and western legs of the Shoe. The pincer movement would force the defenders out of the Shoe and Lee would have no choice but either to split his army or be destroyed.
On May 12th the Union troops charged through the mist, taking the rebel pickets by surprise by jumping into their pits. Those not captured or bayoneted or clubbed to death, alerted the defenders of the Mule Shoe when they came running in, firing into the drizzle behind them. Percussion caps exploded in a flurry of pops amid sporadic bursts of fires. Wet powder spared Hancock’s men the devastating volley they had expected as they poured into the Mule Shoe. Muskets exploded in flame as they were fired right into the faces of the Confederates. Pressed by reinforcements from behind, Union troops were pushed into the pens made by the traverses. Jammed tightly in, they fought with bayonets and musket butts. The fighting spilled over from one pen to another. The fighting was over in minutes, with 3000 Southerners captured.
Now that the twenty thousand Union troops were in the Mule Shoe, companies, regiments, and brigades were all mixed up, form and order disappearing. Hancock rode forward and tried to encourage his officers to organize their lines. On the Confederate end, a reserve force under John B. Gordon arrived on the scene in the nick of time. His counterattack drove the surprised Yankees from the eastern leg, back in and, after a firefight involving pistols, swords, and muskets, to the far side of the earthworks of the Mule Shoe. Once again Lee had to be convinced not to take part in the charge.
With more Union columns converging on the area, Lee realized that he would need to abandon the Mule Shoe and create a new line on the high ground a mile to the rear. Digging fortifications would require time which would have to be bought by a portion of his army holding off the entire Union offensive. Gordon said he could hold off the Union troops plastered against the side of earthworks opposite of his troops by a few feet on the eastern leg, but Lee knew more troops were needed to drive the bluebellies from the Mule Shoe’s western leg and apex and then hold them in check while the new line was constructed. This meant having to send troops to attack across open ground. Some of those troops would be Wilcox’s Division and Private Charles Whilden.
If the Battle of the Wilderness was nightmare fuel, then The Battle of the Mule Shoe was nightmare fuel’s nightmare.
In the pouring rain, men raised their rifles over the top of earthworks and fired blindly. Confederates bayoneted Union soldiers and pitched their bodies into the earthworks behind them. Barricades were slippery with blood and rain. The combatants are so close together that flag staffs crisscross each other. Men could reach across the works and snatch flags from their poles. Gunpowder settled on men’s faces and gore from guns firing at nearly point-blank range covered men from head to toe. Men battled in individual combat from one traverse to the next traverse.
Muskets were jammed through chinks in the earthworks and fired blindly into the huddled mass on the other side. Men jumped onto the parapets and fired at the packed enemy below while their comrades handed them loaded muskets. When a man fell, another jumped up to take his place, only to be cut down and the cycle to continue. The Union troops were so close together that they could not fire without hitting the backs of those close to them. The kickback of a musket would jam man up against those behind him. Reinforcements could not enter the works due to stacks of dead bodies blocking their way. The earthworks held corpses up like statues. Occasionally a man would crawl out of the tangle of arms and legs covering the ground and continue fighting. Trenches were full of crimson-stained water in which dead bodies floated and wounded men drowned. Dead bodies were trampled underfoot of both sides fighting back and forth until they turned to jelly, their fluids meshing and running together with the mud.
A bend in the works gave the Union troops a clear field of fire for about 200 yards into which they could fire directly into huddled, trapped masses of Confederate troops who could find little cover. This bend became known as “The Bloody Angle.”
Lee was watching all this with his field glasses. Two cannon shells exploded near him, a projectile passing under Traveller’s stirrup. Again, the Gray Fox almost led a group of Mississippian troops into the works himself. Only with the Magnolia State troops cheered a promise that they would take the works did Lee hold back. Someone murmured to the side, “Could somebody get that fool out of here.”
The Mississippians kept their promise to take the works. As soon as Alexander Mixon of the 16th Mississippi jammed his flagstaff into the ramparts, he was shot dead. Two other color guards were also killed. But the banner kept flying, showing the Mississippians where to rally.
But Grant continued to send whole brigades into the north side of the works. Here they would hold the high ground at the Angle. For the second time in a week, the Army of Northern Virginia faced annihilation. To save his army, Lee called upon General McGowan and Charles’s Company I to take the Bloody Angle.
The South Carolinians approached the battlefield in pouring rain, minie balls whistling around them. They would have to charge a hundred yards at a right angle. Stumbling stooped and panting heavily, Private Charles Whilden, hoisted the regiment’s battle flag. He shakes uncontrollably, seized by an epileptic seizure. Armstrong observed his friend’s condition and asked him to give him the flag. At first, Charles refuses. He has borne it since the fight at the Wilderness and he was carrying it when the brigade disgraced itself in front of General Lee.
Armstrong struck a deal with Charles. If he would let Armstrong carry it to the battlefront, when the regiment halted, he would return the flag to Charles if he was in any condition to take the colors. Charles agrees. Armstrong carried the flag as the regiment dashed a quarter mile through a patch of woods to the point of combat.
McGowan led the troops into the heaviest fighting of the Mule Shoe. The formation unravels as the men splash across a small creek and charge through some woods. “Forward, my brave boys,” McGowan exhorted. The brigade emerges from the woods and dashes for the reserve works. The brigade formation becomes continues to fall apart. At one point the 1st stops to let the other regiments catch up, but then is forced to continue due to the heavy fire. Armstrong manages to make it without getting hit. Charles is close behind to make sure that Armstrong keeps his word and returns the flag. The Angle is now 150 yards away.
A ball ripped into McGowan’s right arm, inflicting his fourth wound of the war. Now Brockman of the 13th South Carolina is in charge. He has scarcely given the order to charge when he is hit in the head and killed. Colonel Brown of the 14th South Carolina is now in charge, but it is impossible to pass orders through the din and confusion.
Colonel McCreary arises admits the rain and points toward the Angle. “Charge!” He immediately becomes a magnet for bullets and falls back into the mud, wounded. Lt. Col. Shooter leaps onto a traverse, waving his sword and cheering. “Forward, men,” he calls as a bullet hits him in the chest and throws him back into a water-filled pen. His brother Evander C. Shooter also starts to charge but is mortally wounded. More officers and sergeants were killed as they tried to lead the charge.
The South Carolinians have failed to take the Angle. Some Confederates fired blindly into each other. Many soldiers are now fighting in small, isolated groups. Charles and his comrades huddled in the pens formed by the main works and traverses, trying to escape the relentless fire a hundred yards from their right on the high ground at the Angle. Federals rise from the haze and fire into them from the other side of the barricade. Survival means capturing the high ground, even if it means fighting from traverse to traverse.
Charles squats in the bloody muck, bullets hitting the side of the muddy traverse a foot from where he presses his head, spray hitting him. What is going through his mind? Is he thinking about the grand military strategy of the war? How the very survival of both the Army of Northern Virginia and his nascent country of the Confederate States of America hangs in the balance? Is he thinking about the loved ones at home, the sisters, nieces, nephews, and Maum Juno he has seen displaced by the Federal shelling of civilian targets? Is he thinking about how the eyes of Robert E. Lee are upon him and his regiment? Whatever he is thinking, it causes him to motion for Armstrong to hand him the flag.
Neither man speaks as he takes the flag from his friend. Grasping the flagpole, he stands firmly, placing a foot on a traverse, and begins waving the banner side to side. Floating above the hell of mud and blood, it is an inspiration for the South Carolinas. The soldiers rise up and rush forward.
Charles heads toward the Bloody Angle, first warily then steadily, exposed against the blizzard of musketry. South Carolinians and Mississippians rise out of the trenches to join him. Mud flies up around him and bullets thud into the growing mass of humanity crowding behind him. He staggers, and fights off a seizure as his eyes fix on the high ground. Soldiers climb over the traverses and leap from pen to pen. Others dart along the top of the main earthworks, slashing with their bayonets and firing into the Yankees struggling to hold the works.
Charles is now a target, leading a motley band of rebels. He is hit in the left shoulder, a chunk of skin taken out by the ball. He keeps going. He looks up at the flag. It is becoming loose, about to tear free. If the banner falls men might think he had been shot and the charge will die out. He seizes the flag, rips it from the staff, and wraps it around his body,
Then, he advances onward toward the enemy works, a human flagpole.
Soldiers surge around him in the attack. Leaping over the final set of traverses, the Carolinians and Mississippians fight the Yankees hand to hand, stabbing bayonets into flesh and cracking skulls with musket butts. Soon mud, blood, and brains are up to the men’s waists. Soldiers wrestled until their bodies locked in death embraces.
But thanks to Charles the Bloody Angle is now in Confederate hands.
Now comes the battle to hold it.
Four southern brigades have to hold back Grant’s thousands as Lee’s army constructed new fortifications behind the Mule Shoe. It was ten o’clock in the morning.
Grant sent wave after wave of Union troops against the Mule Shoe. After each attack the Confederates pitched the dead men, often four or five deep, out of the trench, pry the weapons from the hands of the dead, and loaded all the muskets, propping the weapons up to keep them out of the mud. When the Union troops attack next, they are met by one continuous wall of fire. Many times, the Confederates could not put the muskets to their shoulders due to the closeness of the Yankees, instead firing from the hip.
The Union brought up cannons. They fired shells point blank, which punched ragged, smoking holes through the earthen mounds, pulverizing everyone on the other side. Double canister blew back anyone who counterattacked. Mired in the mud, the gunners could not retreat when they came under Confederate fire. Many guns were abandoned as all the gunners and their teams of horses were killed.
Neither side had a monopoly on bravery. Forty-three Union soldiers would receive the Medal of Honor for actions at Spotsylvania Court House, mostly for capturing flags. In front of Charles’ position, Captain Lewis Wisner led a handful of axe-wielding men across a fire-swept field to lower the rebel earthworks for a clear field of fire for the Union cannons. When Wisner retreated to his lines, he saw that the lowered log allowed Confederate artillery to fire into the Union soldiers. The captain then dashed across the open ground, replaced the log, and rushed back to his lines. His uniform was riddled with bullets.
Charles and his comrades were held in place by the pieces of lead howling around them. Historians estimate that The Bloody Angle, where Charles stood as a human flagpole, absorbed more firepower than any other portion of a Civil War battlefield. An example of this is an oak tree twenty-one inches in diameter that stood behind the position of the 1st South Carolina. All day and all night Minie balls tore the leaves and branches from the tree. By evening the side facing the enemy was incased in lead. At midnight the tree fell over, as though cut down by a woodsman’s ax.
Still, Grant pounds. Armstrong is wounded. The killing does not end with the night, musket flashes lightening up the faces of the dead.
Near dawn commands are whispered down the Confederate line. The second line of entrenchments has been completed. The Southerners withdraw as silently as possible. Last to leave is McGowan’s Brigade and Private Charles Whilden.
They had been fighting for fifteen hours straight.
McGowan’s Brigade had lost 450 men. The 1st South Carolina had lost 79 men killed. Nine thousand Union soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured during the day’s battle, and Lee had lost eight thousand. And all Grant had to show for it was a few acres of bloody soil. Lee now faced him with a new and stronger line than the one that he faced the day before.
Behind the new barricades, as Charles and his comrades wash off the gore, we see his character arc. He writes his brother, William, mentioning that Lieutenant Armstrong had been very kind but not dwelling on his duties or heroics as flag bearer. Instead, his brush with mortality causes him to write a will, something he had been putting off. He bequeaths his brother his meerschaum pipe and divides the rest of his property between his sisters.
Charles never received official recognition or a medal for his actions at the Bloody Angle, which would be his last combat of the war. He was officially discharged and given a Certificate of Disability for Discharge epilepsy in October 1864. When he returned to Charleston, the 1st South Carolina gave him the flag that he had wrapped around his body on that day of horrors at the Mule Shoe.
Charles died shortly after the war ended when an ecliptic seizure caused him to fall face forward into a street puddle and was drowned. He was buried in Magnolia Cemetery. His friend Armstrong survived the war living well into the 1920s, writing articles about the exploits of his comrades in the 1st South Carolina, including those of Charles. The location of the flag Charles wrapped his body on that bloody day at the Mule Shoe is unknown.
Audiences would like to see a movie about Charles because of the different battlefield scenarios. Instead of a grand army in neat lines firing orderly volleys on an epic battlefield, the battles of The Wilderness and The Mule Shoe were fights of individual units in claustrophobic locations that offer a unique visual experience that is both exciting and horrific at the same time. They have not yet been portrayed before in a major work of cinema. I could see Sam Hargrave (Extraction) David Ayer (Fury) James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) Peter Farrelly (The Greatest Beer Run Ever) or directors like Chad Stahelski (John Wick) or Mic Rodgers (stunts for Hacksaw Ridge) who started their careers in stunts behind the director’s wheel. Due to the monstrous nature of the combat around the Mule Shoe, a director with experience with horror movies, like Sam Rami (Spiderman) or Robert Eggers (The Northman), would also be a good choice. I could see either Christ Pratt, Martin Freeman, Paul Walter Hauser, Vince Vaughn, or Kevin James playing Charles Whilden.
Audiences would also like to see the movie because of the themes of courage, bravery, honor, devotion to duty, brotherhood, friendship, and redemption. Mostly, audiences would like to see Charles’ story because his experience is one that many can relate to. The struggle to find one’s niche in society and settle down is one that transcends time, race, and society. The human desire to rise above a life of mediocrity and failure and just once in one’s lifetime do one great, meaningful thing that makes a difference makes audiences identify with Private Charles Whilden regardless of one’s opinion regarding his cause. The harrowing experience that he is shown rising above is one to remind audiences that it is possible to honor and respect fighting men on both sides of a war.
Because it is an exciting and thrilling story of a nobody making a difference in a unique battlefield experience is why the story of Private Charles Whilden as told in Carrying the Flag by Gordon C. Rhea Should Be A Movie.
