When reflecting after the Civil War on the men in the “Liberty Hall Volunteers,” the nickname of Company I, 4th Virginia Infantry, William A. Anderson remembered Captain Givens Brown Strickler as being “remarkable, even among the brave men who were his comrades, for the coolness and dauntless intrepidity with which he bore himself on the field.” Strickler, like the majority of the original members of his company, had been a student at Washington College in Lexington, Va., at the outbreak of the Civil War. Enlisting as a corporal at age 21, Strickler received several promotions, and became captain of his company after the Second Battle of Manassas. He survived two wounds, one at First Manassas, where his older brother Cyrus was mortally wounded, and the second a little more than a year later at Second Manassas.
The 4th Virginia was part of the famed “Stonewall Brigade,” which, along with the 2nd, 5th, 27th, and 33rd infantry from the Old Dominion, had been raised in 1861 by General Thomas J. Jackson. The regiments had participated in all the battlefield victories achieved by “Stonewall” and Robert E. Lee in 1862 and 1863. At Gettysburg, the Stonewall Brigade was part of Maj. Gen. Edward Johnson’s Division of the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Johnson’s Division was ordered to attack Culp’s Hill, a critical anchor of the Army of the Potomac’s right flank, in the early evening of July 2. The Stonewall Brigade was held out of that assault because it was left on Brinkerhoff’s Ridge to the east to contend with Federal cavalry.
After desperate fighting, Johnson’s attacks were stalled, but fighting for the stone-studded hill would resume on the morning of July 3, when the Confederates renewed their attacks. The 4th and the rest of the Stonewall Brigade would see heavy fighting that morning when it and three
