Richard Kirkland: The Angel of Marye's Heights

The monument here honors Richard Rowland Kirkland, a nineteen-year-old sergeant in Company G of the Second South Carolina Volunteers, Confederate States Army. After the Battle of Fredericksburg in December of eighteen sixty-two, hundreds of wounded Union soldiers lay in the open ground below the stone wall at Marye's Heights, crying out for water through the winter night and into the next morning.

Kirkland asked his commander for permission to go out to them. He was told he could not carry a flag of truce. He went anyway. For an hour and a half he moved from man to man across the exposed ground, carrying canteens of water and making the wounded as comfortable as he could. Both sides stopped firing while he worked. Union soldiers who witnessed it reportedly cheered him. Kirkland was killed nine months later at Chickamauga. He was twenty years old. The act he performed at Fredericksburg was not strategic, did not change the war's outcome, and cost him nothing except his own safety. That is what made it remarkable enough to remember.