For Lt. Henry Scott, aide to his cousin, Col. Gordon, a brief stay at Harper's Ferry with the 2nd Massachusetts in February of 1862, was anything but uneventful. The regiment had just left its winter quarters at Frederick, MD, to "invade" Virginia for the second time. Scott was on duty guarding a battery about a half mile from camp, when he detected signs of the enemy in the vicinity of some haystacks. This is the story he told his sister, Lizzie:

"While I was peering around, three of my men came up on the other side and said they saw them go into a hole in the stack. I drew my sword and felt that my revolver was all right, and looked carefully in but couldn't see them. But soon one of my men found another holw where he could see them, and just as I got there he grabbed one by the leg and hauled him out. In the excitement of the moment I rushed on him with drwan sword and ran him fairly through. He turned over on his side, the blood gushed out in crimson torrents and streamed from my sword, and he was dead. A feeling of remorse began to come over me but I hadn't time to think of that for another came running out of that same hole, and I barely time to thrust at him inflicting a bad wound on his shoulder and another on his side. But in the excitement of the moment he escaped, for another of them tried the first hole and was knocked down by one of the men by a heavy blow from a club and lay there stunned. I saw that the blow was so severe that he would never recover from it and so in pity of him, and to put him out of his misery, I applied the never failing pain exterminator, my trusty steel, and he died without having recovered from the effects of the first blow."

This story, if it is true (Scott may have been simply trying to impress his sister), displays a bloodthirstiness that was rare among the officers of the 2nd MA. He seemed to take great delight in informing Lizzie that his sword had been "dipped in rebel gore at last." And since he had only killed a couple of "secessionist pigs," he concluded that his sword remained "unstained by human blood."

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