8/30/1862: Texans capture guns at Second Manassas

[Craig Tx]

On this day in 1862, Hood's Texas Brigade played a distinguished part in the battle of Second Manassas.

After a Union assault was broken up by artillery fire, Confederate General Longstreet launched his First Corps, with the Texas Brigade in the lead, in one of the most successful counterattacks of the Civil War. The Fourth Texas Infantry, under the command of Lt. Col. B. F. Carter, captured a federal battery of artillery, losing eleven killed and twenty wounded in the process. After the battle the commander of the brigade, Gen. John Hood, encountered the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, who playfully asked him what had become of the enemy. Hood answered that the Texans had chased them across Bull Run "almost at a double quick." A regiment of New York Zouaves was shattered by the assault, and, seeing their brightly uniformed bodies scattered about the next morning, a Texan officer wrote that they gave the battlefield "the appearance of a Texas hillside when carpeted in the spring by wildflowers of many hues and tints."