EZRA CHURCH (Atlanta), Battle of. On 20 July 1864 the Confederate army under General Hood was defeated at Peach Tree Creek, and driven into the inner defenses of Atlanta. On the 22d Hood attacked the Army of the Tennessee, and was again defeated, and General Sherman began the investment of Atlanta. He began to force Hood from Atlanta by moving upon his communications leading south from the city. The Army of the Tennessee was ,transferred from the extreme left of the investing line to the right, near Ezra Church, and Hood took measures to check its further extension and drive it back. On the night of the 27th he marched out of Atlanta with the greater part of his force, and on the 28th Gen. J. C. Brown's division was ordered to attack Logan's corps, then advancing on the right, and drive it back to and beyond Ezra Church. Brown drove in Logan's skirmishers, followed them 500 to 600 yards, and struck Logan's right, carried it at some points, but was quickly repulsed with great slaughter. He made a second attempt with no success and fell back. He had lost 694 killed and wounded and 113 missing. During Brown's attack four regi ments from Dodge's and Blair's corps extended Logan's right, and took part in the action. Clayton's division attacked on Brown's right, but not until after Brown's first repulse, and by a misunderstanding his three brigades made isolated attacks upon Harrow's division, all of which were repulsed with great loss, some of the regiments losing 50 per cent. Walthall had led out his division while Brown and Clayton were engaged, and at 2 P.m., after they had been withdrawn, he was ordered to attack over the ground of Brown's fight. Walthall made several persistent efforts, but failed, although some parts of his force got within 50 yards of Logan's line. After more than an hour's severe fighting, in which he reports the loss of 152 officers and nearly 1,000 men, he fell back. At night Hood withdrew his troops to the works around Atlanta. The Federals in this battle numbered about 13,000 men; the Confederates about 18,000. The Union loss was 559 killed and wounded, 73 missing. The aggregate Con federate losses were apparently about 2,636 killed and wounded, and 200 missing. The esti mates of Generals Sherman, Howard and Logan that the Confederate loss was from to 7,000 are excessive. Consult 'Official Records,' (Vol. XXXVIII) ; Cox, 'Atlanta); Sherman, 'Personal Memoirs' (Vol. II) • The Century Company's 'Battles of the Civil War,' (Vol. IV).
F the sixth letter of the English and Latin alphabets and all alphabets derived from the Latin. Its sound, technically called a ulabiodental voicele” spirant,p is produced by bring ing the lower lip into loose contact with the upper teeth, the vocal cords being in active. The character F, though it does not
appear in the Greek alphabet of the classic period, had a place in the earlier Greek alpha bet, and is believed to have there represented the sound of v or of w. It is called by Greek grammarians, digamma or double-gamma, being formed of two gammas (g hard, r) written one above the other (F). From the Greek it came into Latin and, finally, was used to ex press the sound which it has for us. That the sound of F in Latin was the same as in Eng lish, we know from what Quintilian says of the mode of uttering it. The Greek letter . (phi) represented in Latin and English by ph, appears to have been very different in sound from the F of the Latins; and that in the pro nunciation of F Greeks found great difficulty is known on the authority of Cicero; their diffi culty was like that which people of other speech than ours find in pronouncing th in then, this, and in thin, think. A like difficulty in pronun ciation of the F of Latin must have presented itself to the inhabitants of the Spanish Penin sula, if not in the time of the Roman domi nation, then after; else the initial F of words from the Latin would not have been so gener ally changed by them into a mere breathing, represented by the letter h. Examples Lat. faba (bean), Span. haba; fabulari (to talk), hablar; facere (to make), hacer. In other languages, whether derived from one another or springing independently from a common original stem, as German, Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Latin, Celtic, etc., we see a different interchange as between F and P; thus to the English word fish answers the Latin pisc (piscis); to Eng. fire the Gr. pyr; to Eng. plow the Ger. pfiug. In the local dialect of the English county of Somerset, F usually becomes V: fair becomes vair, friar vrier, five vive. As the Latin alphabet had but one character, V, to represent both the vowel I.J and the consonant V (or W) the Emperor Claudius ordered that in public inscriptions and state documents this consonant V should be represented by the F inverted, a, and hence in monuments of that reign we find AMPLIA an., TERMINAaIT, OCTAaIA, etc., for Amplia vit, Terminavit, Octavia, etc. The letter F in physics is a contraction for Fahrenheit.
F. F. V's (First Families of Virginia), a jocular term applied in the North, before and during the war, to the Southern aristocracy in general.
FA, fa, the name given by Guido to the fourth note of the natural diatonic scale of C, that is, the. subdominant. In the major scale of C this tone is F.