The men of Sheridan’s division were the first to reach the crest, and the honor of planting the first colors fell to eighteen-year-old Arthur MacArthur, Jr., captain of the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin, who shouted, “On Wisconsin!” MacArthur was his regiment’s fourth color-bearer—the first was shot, the second run through with a bayonet, the third “decapitated.” Young MacArthur would go on to become the senior general of the army from 1902 to 1909 but is remembered best as the father of Douglas MacArthur, commander of Allied forces in the Pacific in World War II. —
