en from its place on Hooker's right
before Stonewall Jackson made his charge. Had Barlow been there
he might have done something to stay the disaster. At Gettysburg,
however, he was in the front in command of a division. An old soldier,
a lieutenant that day under Barlow, told me that he had charge of the
ambulances of the division and on the march near Emmitsburg Barlow put
into the lieutenant's especial charge the ambulance of his wife who,
with a premonition of calamity, insisted on being near at hand to
help. When the battle joined and Gordon swept overwhelmingly upon
Barlow's division, the lieutenant had difficulty in restraining Mrs.
Barlow from rushing at once upon the field among the fighting men. He
held her back almost by force but she remained close at hand.
Barlow was again desperately wounded, so hurt that his death seemed
inevitable, and when the faithful wife, at last making her way,
presented herself even in the rebel lines with a petition for her
husband, supposed to be dying, Gordon chivalrously gave him up. It
was magnanimous, but for him ill-timed. Again Barlow laughed at his
wounds. In May, 1864, he was in the field at the head of the first
division of Hancock's corps and on the 12th of May performed the
memorable exploit, breaking fairly the centre of Lee's army and
bringing it nearer to defeat than it ever came until the catastrophe
at Appomattox. He captured the Spottsylvania salient together with the
best division of the army of northern Virginia, Stonewall Jackson's
old command, two generals, thirty colours, cannon, and small arms to
correspond. John Noyes, a soldier of a class after us, told me that in
the salient he and Barlow worked like privates in the confusion of the
capture, turning with their own hands against the enemy a cannon that
had just been taken. Barlow was as cool as when he fired off the old
cannon in Cambridge ten years before. This stroke proved futile, but
from no shortcoming of Barlow's. A few weeks later at Cold Harbor
he effected a lodgment within the Confederate works when all others
failed. That too proved futile, but his reputation was confirmed
as one of the most brilliant of division commanders. There is a
photograph in existence portraying Hancock and his division generals
as they appeared during that terrible campaign. It was taken in the
woods in the utmost stress of service. Barlow stands in the group just
as he looked in college, the face thin and beardless, alm