Buckshot struck Pvt. Bill Aspinwall in the right shoulder, and then a minnie ball plowed across the top of his head, cutting the scalp and chipping his skull and cutting his hair as neatly as if it had been done with a pair of shears.

Aspinwall, a young Indiana soldier, fell to the ground and wrote in later years that he “bounced around like a chicken with its head cut off.” By the time he came to his senses, his comrades had retreated and Aspinwall found himself inside Confederate lines. Soon, a Southern officer sat down on the ground beside him, examined the wound, gave him water from his canteen, then informed the Yankee, “My boy, I am afraid you are done for.”

Only a few hours earlier, Aspinwall, a member of Company H of the 47th Indiana, had been on the march from Bolton to Edwards on May 16, 1863, along with thousands of other blue-clad boys under the command of Gen. U.S. Grant. Resistance to the invaders had been poorly organized and sporadic following the Battle of Raymond May 12. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston had abandoned Jackson before he even spotted one of the enemy invaders, leaving the city in the early hours of May 13. There had been some delaying tactics, but that night Grant slept in Johnston’s bed after instructing Gen. William T. Sherman to burn everything of importance in the capital city. The Union army was then turned toward Clinton and Bolton and Edwards with Vicksburg being the ultimate objective.

From Clinton to Bolton, Aspinwall was reminded of the horrors around him when he saw dead Confederate soldiers along the road, marking the line of retreat the Rebels had taken. It was a quiet march, but it was just the lull before the storm, for ahead of them the two armies would meet on the slopes of the Champion farm near Edwards for one of the most decisive battles of the War Between the States.

In the confusion of battle, the wounded Aspinwall defied the predictions of the Southern officer and managed to get back into Union lines, where he was sent by ambulance to a makeshift hospital in a corn field. The structure was really a brush arbor, the branches shading the wounded from the heat of the Mississippi sun. The men were lying in rows, the surgeons working from man to man down the aisles. Aspinwall couldn’t endure the pain and misery he saw, so he walked on through the hospital to the outside, away from the pitiful cries and groans.

As night came, some of Aspinwall’s buddies brought him blankets, and he made a bed in a fence corner of the field. Soon, a Confederate soldier came along, shot in the abdomen and in great pain.

“Here, partner. I’ll share my bed with you,” Aspinwall told him.

The two men, one in gray and the other in blue, began to talk. The Confederate told the man, who only a few hours earlier had been his enemy, that he was from Savannah, Ga., and that he had a wife and children. He gave Aspinwall a card with their names and addresses, for he was convinced he was going to die and he wanted the Yankee to tell them what had happened to him.

Weak and exhausted, Aspinwall drifted off to sleep as the Confederate soldier talked. When he waked several hours later, Aspinwall didn’t get an answer from the Southerner when he spoke to him. Putting his hand on the wounded Rebel’s face, he realized that, “My foe and friend had crossed the river.”

As he lay there beside his dead companion, Aspinwall could hear singing and shouting coming from the Methodist Regiment — the 24th Iowa, composed mostly of Methodists — who were holding a religious service on the battlefield. The wounded man thought it very strange to hear them “above the groans of the wounded and dying and the distant musketry and artillery firing.”

When daylight came, Aspinwall found someone to dress his wounds and write two letters, one to the private’s mother in Indiana and the other to the family of the dead Confederate soldier. Not far away in an adjoining field was a Confederate hospital, and Aspinwall made his way to it. There was no arbor to shield the wounded from the sun, and they lay between the corn rows.

Finding a Confederate officer, Aspinwall explained what had happened and gave him the letter. He assured Aspinwall it would be delivered and complimented him on his kindness and assured him that if he was ever in trouble, to call upon him for help.

Not everyone was so grateful, however, for Aspinwall wrote, “A number of ladies had assembled from surrounding towns and country, waiting on the Confederate wounded and they looked daggers at me; not a one of them spoke to me. They did not like the color of my blood-spattered uniform.”

For Grant, Champion Hill was the decisive victory of the Vicksburg Campaign, for when the Confederates fell back from the fields of Hinds County in 1863 they retreated into Fortress Vicksburg where they faced privation and hunger and eventual surrender.

For Bill Aspinwall, who spent the rest of his life as a tramp known as “Roving Bill,” Champion Hill had been a personal encounter with the realities of misery and death, an experience he still vividly remembered when he wrote about it 35 years later.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.