The rattle of musketry is heard in front. Skirmishers must have made contact with enemy pickets. All are alert. A signal gun is fired and the artillery joins in with accumulating fury. At last the command – “Forward!” – and an overpowering urge to make contact with the enemy. Soon lines of blue are discernible Comrades begin to fall in increasing numbers. Now the shout, lost perhaps in the din of battle – “Charge!” – accompanied by a forward wave of an officer’s saber and the line leaps forward with the famous “Rebel yell.”
This yell itself is an interesting thing. It was heard at First Manassas and repeated in hundreds of charges throughout the Civil War It came to be as much a part of a Rebel’s fighting equipment as his musket. Once, indeed, more so. Toward the end of an engagement near Richmond in May, 1864, General Early rode up to a group of soldiers and said, “Well, men, we must charge them once more and then we’ll be through.” The response came back, “General, we are all out of ammunition.” Early’s ready retort was “Damn it, holler them across.” And, according to the narrator, the order was literally executed.
The Confederate yell is hard to describe. Attempts to reproduce it at Civil War re-enactments. By the very nature of things, is an inadequate representation. The voices are not battle weary, and half starved. As it flourished on the field of combat, the Rebel yell was an unpremeditated, unrestrained and utterly informal “hollering”. It had in it a mixture of fright, pent-up nervousness, exultation, hatred and a pine of pure deviltry. Yelling in attack was not peculiar to Confederates, for the Yankees went at Rebels more than once with a furious shouts on their lips. But the battle cry of Southerners was admittedly different. General “Jube” Early, who well understood the spirit of his soldiers, made a comparison of Federal and Confederate shouting as a sort of aside to his official report of the battle of Fredericksburg. “Lawton’s Brigade, without hesitating, at once dashed upon the enemy,” he said, “with the cheering peculiar to the Confederate soldier, and which is never mistaken for the studied hurrahs of the Yankees, and drove the column opposed to it down the hill.” Though obviously invidious, the general’s observation is not wholly inaccurate.
The primary function of the rousing yell was the relief of the shouter. As one Reb observed after a fight in 1864, “I always said if I ever went into a charge, I wouldn’t holler! But the very first time I fired off my gun I hollered as loud as I could, and I hollered every breath till we stopped.” At first there was no intention of inspiring terror in the enemy, but the practice soon attained such a reputation as a demoralizing agent that men were encouraged by their officers to shout as they assaulted Yankee positions.