MARCH 30, 1921 - Moses Ezekiel's Funeral at Arlington
- Defend Arlington
- Mar 28
- 8 min read
Coming Home: Part 3 The Battle of New Market
MARCH 30, 1921 - Moses Ezekiel's Funeral at Arlington COMING HOME Part Three The Battle of New Market Part 3 of a 6 Part Series |
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"Put the boys in."
And then, almost to himself: "God forgive me for the order."
The four companies of VMI cadets heard the order pass down the line. They had been waiting in reserve, watching the battle unfold on the slopes above them, watching the Confederate center buckle under the Union artillery on Bushong's Hill. They had marched eighty five miles in four days through rain and mountain cold to get to this field. They had listened to the veterans around them make the kinds of comments veterans always make about men who have never been under fire. They had said nothing back.
Now it was their turn.
Breckinridge had not ordered a charge. He had ordered them to fill a gap in the Confederate center, to plug the hole that the Union artillery had torn in his line, to hold the position and steady it. That was all. Fill the gap. Stand firm.
Lieutenant Colonel Scott Shipp gave the command to advance. Two hundred forty seven boys in clean uniforms with pristine muskets stepped off from the fence line at the edge of the Bushong orchard and began moving toward the Union line.
Two hundred yards of open ground lay in front of them.
Two hundred yards of freshly plowed Virginia wheat field soaked by days of rain until it had become something that was no longer mud and not yet quicksand but something in between, something alive and hungry that reached up for a man's feet with every step. The Union artillery on the heights above them was already finding the range. The sound of it was continuous. The smoke drifted across the field in gray curtains through which the shapes of running boys appeared and disappeared.
Not all of them were supposed to be there.
John S. Wise and Jacqueline Stanard, called Jack by his friends, had been ordered to stay behind and guard the baggage wagons. Safe. Out of the fight. It was a reasonable order and a merciful one and they both ignored it completely. They looked at each other and then they looked at their brothers moving toward that field and they made the only decision either of them could live with. They ran to catch up. John was 17. Jack was 19. They ran toward the sound of the guns because they could not stand to be left behind.
Moses Ezekiel ran with them all.
He was nineteen years old. A boy from Richmond with ink-stained fingers and a sculptor's eye who had never been in a battle. He ran because the boy next to him ran. He ran because stopping was not a choice anyone had given him. He ran because this was what he had come eighty five miles through the Virginia mountains to do and the only way out was through.
The field grabbed at his brogans.
One step and the mud took hold. Another step and it pulled harder. The freshly plowed soil had been churned by days of rain into something with intention, something alive and hungry that wanted to keep every boot it touched. As if the ground itself was protesting. As if Virginia was reaching up to pull her own sons back from what lay ahead. Boys all around him looked down mid-stride to find their feet bare. The brogans were simply gone, swallowed whole by the earth that had grown their fathers' wheat and fed their families and now refused to let them go. There was nothing to do but keep running. Barefoot now through mud and blood and the continuous concussion of the guns, Moses ran with his brothers toward the hill.
Lewis Davis was fifteen years old. He had been at VMI less than a year. There were mornings in Lexington when he still woke up reaching for the warmth of his mother's kitchen, still half dreaming of the smell of her biscuits coming out of the oven, of his little brother's laugh carrying through the house on a Saturday morning with nowhere to be and nothing pressing and the whole long day ahead. He had thought about those mornings on the march up from Lexington, when the rain wouldn't stop and his feet were blistered and the mountains rose dark on either side of the road. He had not let himself think about them since they reached New Market.
He was thinking about them now.
The smoke was so thick he could not see more than ten yards in any direction. The percussion of the guns was so close and so constant that it had stopped being sound and become something else, something that lived in his chest and his teeth and the back of his skull. He kept his eyes on the boy directly in front of him and he ran.
Then the first shell found them.
It exploded in the midst of the advancing line before they had covered fifty yards. Three cadets fell where they stood. First Sergeant William Henry Cabell, struck in the chest. Private Charles Gay Crockett. Private Henry Jenner Jones. Dead before the charge had fairly begun. Lewis Davis saw it happen. He saw the smoke and the terrible simultaneity of it, three boys there and then not there, and he kept running because the boy in front of him kept running and that was the only instruction he had.
Private William Hugh McDowell went down next. Seventeen years old, a North Carolinian, not large and by no means robust. He had been running beside Lewis, close enough to touch. Survivors would remember him lying on the field as if asleep, more fit for a cradle than a grave, his jacket torn open, his hand clutching it back from a fair white breast with its red wound. Lewis did not stop. He could not stop. He closed the gap where William had been and kept moving because that was what you did and there was nothing else. Colonel Shipp took a shell fragment in the face and went down. Command passed to Captain Henry Wise. The line kept moving.
Cadet Francis Smith was shot through the chin. The ball entered his mouth, shattered his jawbone, and came out through his neck just missing the carotid artery. He kept going. He was still running when the cadets reached the Bushong fence line.
The gap was filled.
The order was complete.
And then they kept going.
No one ordered what happened next. The boys who were still upright, boys who had never been in battle, looked up the slope of Bushong's Hill at the Union line and made a decision that no general had made for them. The whole Confederate line was moving now and the cadets moved with it, past the point where the order ended, past the point where anyone had told them to go, up the hill and into the fire because stopping had somehow become unthinkable.
Lewis Davis. John Wise. Every boy who had not fallen. They all kept going.
That is what made them heroes. Not that they were ordered to charge. But that they were not.
Jack Stanard made it into the Bushong orchard. Grapeshot found him there and shredded one of his legs, breaking bone, tearing blood vessels. The boy who had disobeyed orders to guard a wagon so he could be with his brothers went down on the porch of the Bushong farmhouse. He sent a message to his mother. I fell where I wished to fall, he told her, fighting for my country, and I did not fight in vain. Tell my mother that I die with full confidence in my God.
He was seventeen years old.
And still the line moved.
The cadets hit the Federal position with everything they had. The 34th Massachusetts and the 1st West Virginia tried to hold but the Confederate charge was too much. Sigel's army began to fall back. In the chaos a cadet climbed astride a captured Union cannon and raised the VMI flag above his head. The Valley was secure. The Confederacy had held. The boys from VMI had done what Breckinridge had prayed they would not have to do.
And they had done it without being asked.
The ground behind them told the price. Fifty seven wounded. Ten who would not come home. The ones who lay still on that field while the living walked among them looking for faces they knew.
Moses was looking for Thomas.
Thomas Garland Jefferson was nineteen years old, a private in Company B, great great nephew of the third President of the United States. He and Moses had been friends since their earliest days at VMI. Thomas had gone down somewhere on that field, wounded in the chest, and Moses went back for him.
A woman named Eliza Crim lived in New Market. She was known there for her compassion, for the way she moved toward trouble rather than away from it. When the battle ended she was the first woman to walk onto the field. She told them to bring a badly wounded cadet to her home. And she described what happened when Moses brought him in an ambulance, this pretty black curly-headed Jewish boy, carrying his friend inside. When they laid Thomas down he looked up and said Sister, what a good soft bed. Moses sat with Thomas for two days. He read to him from the New Testament, though Moses was a Jew and the words were not his own prayers. Thomas had asked him to. It did not matter what the words were from or who had written them. They were what Thomas needed and Moses gave them.
On the second day Thomas Garland Jefferson died in Moses Ezekiel's arms.
Moses held him close through his last moments and then he set him down and stood up. He was still nineteen years old. He was wounded himself. The field behind him held the bodies of boys he had drilled with and studied with and sketched in the margins of his notebooks. Boys who had talked about going home. Boys who had mothers waiting and little brothers who would grow up without them now.
He had seen what he had seen. He would carry it the rest of his life.
He would also spend the rest of his life making sure those boys were not forgotten.
But that is a story for another installment.
To be continued.
Today marks 825 days since the Confederate Memorial was removed from Arlington National Cemetery.
-By Mindy Esposito / March 27, 2026 / Nashville, Tennessee
Mindy Esposito is an independent historian, writer, and Confederate heritage advocate based in Nashville, Tennessee. She has spent more than two decades in primary source research on nineteenth and twentieth century American history.
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COMING HOME: A Six-Part Series Bibliography Part Three
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Coming Home is a Six-Part Series on the Life, Death, and Funeral of Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel. |
COMING HOME: MOSES EZEKIEL'S FUNERAL AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY The Battle of New Market
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