The talk is available here at C-Span. It’s long, almost 54 minutes altogether, but when you have time, Krick’s criticism of Longstreet is worth the hearing. The remarks on Knoxville begin at 35 minutes in.

Via Crossroads.

“He always said that it was his ‘gallant boys of the batteries that placed the wreath around his stars.’ At Sharpsburg he was moved to tears as he rode up in the heat of the fight to his ‘boy battery’ from Richmond, Va., under Capt. W. W. Parker, and found thirty of them dead or wounded around their guns and the remnant obeying the commands of their officers as gallantly as if on dress parade.”

The novel’s Sgt. Pease remembered Freemantle speaking to Private Tommy Bainbridge of Pease’s gun section, in a recreated conversation whose words are found in Robert K. Krick’s history, Parker’s Virginia Battery, C.S.A.

Meaning his friendship with Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, Longstreet’s chief of artillery. For as Alexander put it in his memoir:

“If I want a Christian to pray for the dying soldier, I call on Parker. If I wish a skillful surgeon to amputate the limb of a wounded soldier, I call on Parker. If I want a soldier, who with unflinching courage, will go wherever duty calls, I call on Parker.”

Which is why, at Knoxville, the “Boy Battery” had to haul their 3-inch rifled field pieces on a leaky old flatboat back and forth across the freezing Holston River in a snow storm.

“We’d came and went no less than three times in four days,” as sergeant-gunner Pichigru Pease put it, “to satisfy some damn fool generals who couldn’t make up their feeble minds.”