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© Aug '12 smck |
Fades the light;
And afar
Goeth day,
And the stars
Shineth bright,
Fare thee well;
Day has gone,
Night is on.
4th verse of 'Taps'
In July 1862, after the Seven Days battles at Harrison's Landing (near
Richmond), Virginia, the wounded Commander of the 3rd Brigade, 1st
Division, V Army Corps, Army of the Potomac, General Daniel Butterfield
reworked, with his bugler Oliver Wilcox Norton, another bugle call,
"Scott Tattoo," to create Taps. He thought that the regular call for
Lights Out was too formal. Taps was adopted throughout the Army of the
Potomac and finally confirmed by orders. Soon other Union units began
using Taps, and even a few Confederate units began using it as well.
After the war, Taps became an official bugle call. Col. James A. Moss,
in his Officer's Manual first published in 1911, gives an account of the
initial use of Taps at a military funeral:
"During the
Peninsular Campaign in 1862, a soldier of Tidball's Battery A of the
2nd Artillery was buried at a time when the battery occupied an
advanced position concealed in the woods. It was unsafe to fire the customary three volleys over the grave,
on account of the proximity of the enemy, and it occurred to Capt.
Tidball that the sounding of Taps would be the most appropriate ceremony
that could be substituted."
re: usmemorialday.org/taps.html