Bay Billy

DESCRIPTION: As the 22nd Maine struggles against Early at Fredericksburg, orders come that a battery must be taken. The regiment repeatedly tries and fails. The colonel is shot down. In the next attack, his riderless horse leads the charge and the battery is captured
AUTHOR: Words: Frank H. Gassaway
EARLIEST DATE: 1886 (Potter, _My Recitations_, according to Gray-SongsAndBalladsOfTheMaineLumberjacks)
KEYWORDS: horse Civilwar death battle
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Gray-SongsAndBalladsOfTheMaineLumberjacks, pp. 166-170, "Bay Billy" (1 text)
NOTES [237 words]: Frank Gassaway seems to have specialized in Civil War bathos; his other relatively well-known poem was "The Pride of Battery B." His collected Poems seem to have been published in 1920.
Gray-SongsAndBalladsOfTheMaineLumberjacks maintains that this was a popular poem. Possibly true in the nineteenth century. Thankfully, that has ceased to be the case; Granger's Index to Poetry lists not one Gassaway poem.
This piece is particularly irritating because it's completely false. Checking the Fredericksburg Order of Battle in Palfrey, pp. 198-210, the 22nd Maine wasn't at Fredericksburg. Nor, as it turned out, was it at Chancellorsville (during which battle there was again fighting around Fredericksburg, involving the Confederate general Jubal A. Early). In fact, the 22nd Maine never served in the east at all! Internet searches reveal it to have been a nine month regiment which performed its active service in Louisiana -- and, in its entire existence, suffered only nine men killed in active service (one officer, eight enlisted men; by comparison, the swamps of Louisiana took their toll in a high rate of disease deaths -- 160, according to Fox, p. 468).
I do not know if Gassaway knew this, and decided to use an obscure regiment for his nonsense, or if he didn't know this and was smoking something particularly strong the day he excreted this, but I can only hope that it will be mercifully forgotten. - RBW
Bibliography

Fox: William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War 1861-1865, 1881; fourth edition 1888 (I use a photoreproduction of the 1898 Albany Press edition which does not list a publisher!)
Palfrey: Francis Winthrop Palfrey, The Antietam and Fredericksburg, Campaigns of the Civil War series, 1882 (I use the 2002 Castle Books reprint)

Last updated in version 6.3
File: Gray166

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