The wounded officer was Lt. Colonel Liberty Billings, a New Hampshire abolitionist that neither Higginson nor Montgomery admired. Higginson wrote after the wounding: “I suppose Lt. Col. Billings will be a hero at the North. A wound is a wound no matter if one stumbles into it, as was undeniably the case with him. For myself I could spare him forever; he is absolutely worthless to me.” See Looby, 139.