University of Virginia Library

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE WAR.

1. CHAPTER I.
HUNTER'S RAID UP THE VALLEY.—STONEWALL
JACKSON'S GRAVE.

Our advance upon Lexington was in four columns—General
Averell's cavalry on the extreme
right; Crook's West Virginia infantry right centre;
Sullivan's infantry left centre; and Duffié's
cavalry on the extreme left, having in fact wandered
over to the east side of the Blue Ridge and
there lost its way—as was the custom of its General
Commanding.

The enemy, under General McCausland—who
succeeded General Wm. E. Jones, killed at Piedmont
a few days before—fell back before our
advance, but not without offering a vigorous
opposition. The brigades of Imboden, Vaughan,
Echolls, “Mudwall” Jackson, Jones, McCausland,
and a cloud of guerillas under Mosby, Gilmer, and
McNeil, broke down all bridges in their rear, obstructed
the roads wherever feasible, and from
every eminence played on the heads of our advancing
columns with their artillery, while also doing
a large bushwhacking business from the dense
woods through which we had to pass.

But the weather was beautiful in that beautiful

valley, and our troops in the highest spirits. At
Stanton we had sent back our prisoners, numbering
about thirteen hundred Confederate soldiers,
and had dismissed some five or six hundred other
prisoners—old men and mere boys belonging to
the Reserve Militia—as not worth any further
thought. We had also sent back all our spare
transportation and stores not absolutely needed—
the guard for this train consisting of one Ohio
regiment of volunteers whose term of service had
expired, two regiments of Ohio militia only called
out for one hundred days, and a battalion of
cavalry—the whole under command of Major-General
Julius Stahl, who had been slightly
wounded in the shoulder some few days before
at Piedmont, while leading the last charge in
which the rebels had been broken. Stahl's orders
were, on his return, to collect all the troops he
could at Martinsburgh—probably about five thousand—and
then to follow after us with a train of
extra ammunition and supplies.

Never did an army advance through a lovelier
country than was the Shenandoah Valley between
Stanton and Lexington in that soft month of June.
Vast fields of purple and white clover gave ample
and delicious pasturage to our cattle; and from a
pocket-book then carried, we extract the first
stanza of a song commenced, but never finished—
nor now ever likely to be:

Occasionally light showers just freshened the
atmosphere; and the lofty peaks of the Blue
Ridge on our left, clothed with foliage and verdure
to their highest summits, looked lovely
enough to deserve the pencil of Church or Bierstadt.
The country around showed no signs of
war, save here and there, at advantageous points,
some rail-fence rifle-pits thrown up by the enemy
the night before, and from which they were continually
driven or outflanked by our advancing
columns.

MARKS OF PREVIOUS CONFLICT, AND TEMPER OF
THE PEOPLE.

Up the Shenandoah to Harrisonburgh, the country
had been traversed and desolated in repeated
campaigns—fields without fences, showing where
armies had encamped; desolate and fire-blackened
stone chimneys, standing up like pillars to mark
where happy homes had ceased to be; long grave-trenches
of red earth, recalling the legend that here
Stonewall Jackson had whipped Banks, or Milroy,
or given rude check to Fremont, or held his own
and accomplished his purpose of retreat, despite
the headlong fury of General Shields's attack.

Martinsburgh was a desolate and forsaken town,
which had changed masters half a dozen times
under the fluctuating fortunes of battle—soon to
have two changes more. Winchester was much
the same—aristocratic and bitterly rebellious—
with vast earthworks and forts on the hills surrounding
it, but utterly indefensible from the
nature of the country in which it lay. At Strasburg
and Woodstock the people were sullenly
silent as we passed through the streets—only
some shrill-tongued females having the boldness
to cry:

“We've seen men with your colored clothes go
up this valley afore; and we've seen 'em come
back this way a mighty sight faster than they
went up.”

All the bridges from Cedar Creek to Newmarket
had been broken down by General Sigel,
about ten or twelve days before our advance, in
his headlong retreat from the latter place, fancying
himself pursued all the way by the victorious
forces of General Breckinridge, who had really
only followed him in force as far as Edinburgh—
also a bitterly rebellious and much-scourged town,
famous in the South for its manufacture of patent
medicines. At Newmarket, or rather at Rood's
Hill, on this side of it, we came on the shocking
débris of the recent battle, many scores of our men
being so imperfectly buried that their blackened

and wormy limbs protruded through the earth,
while the air was horribly impregnated with the
Bouquet de Rottenhoss—as “Porte Crayon” used
to call the dead remains of our cavalry and artillery
animals.

ANECDOTE OF “PORTE CRAYON” AND GENERAL
SIGEL.

And here let me give a little story of “Porte
Crayon,” and then this digression shall terminate:

It was after the battle of Newmarket, while
Sigel was in headlong retreat down the Shenandoah
turnpike, that news reached his small and
discomfited army of General Averell's success in
destroying certain important railroads in South
Western Virginia.

“Oh ho!” said Colonel Strother (“Porte Crayon”),
who was then Sigel's chief of staff. “By
Jove, boys! the Department of West Virginia is
doing a big business, General Averell's tearing
up the railroad, and General Sigel's tearing down
the 'pike!”

To make the matter better, an innocent young
staff officer tried to cheer his chopfallen General
by repeating this story to him as “Porte Crayon's”
last bon mot; but the General couldn't see
it in any such light.

“By gar,” he exclaimed, “I vill not haaf beoples
zayin' dem kind o' tings! By gar, I pelief
dere are beoples on mein staff who are not griefed
to zee me dearin' down de 'pike! By gar, Colonel
Strodare must not zay dem kind o' tings, or he
veel be court-martial!”

Let me add, in justice to our Teutonic General,
against whom this story rather tells, that Colonel
Strother was at all times emphatic in speaking of
the perfectly reckless manner in which General
Sigel exposed himself and staff in the last hours
of the battle of Newmarket—the gallant Colonel,
now Adjutant-General of Virginia on Governor
Pierpont's staff, equally asserting that there was
no trace of cowardice in General Sigel, as there
certainly was none of generalship.

And now to return from our digression, and
hasten on to Lexington as fast as possible.

BATTLE OF PIEDMONT.—A BAD CASE OF WHIP.

Quitting Harrisonburgh, which we had entered
with only some inconsiderable skirmishing, we
amused the enemy for a few days by some feints
on their strong—indeed, nearly impregnable—
lines at Mount Crawford, just in front of us; and
then suddenly wheeling to the left—our movements
covered by a cloud of cavalry, under the
guidance of poor young Meigs of the Engineers,

since killed, son of the Quartermaster-General—
we crossed the Shenandoah at Port Republic on
pontoons and by wading; and then found ourselves
in a virgin part of the valley, which had
never previously seen our uniforms except on
prisoners being sent to Lynchburgh by Lee or
Jackson. This was on the 4th of June, 1864,—
a miserable day, the rain pouring in torrents; and
well for us that it did so, as it helped to mislead
the enemy.

Next morning, at daylight, commenced the battle
of Piedmont, or Stanton, as the enemy more
properly called it—Stanton being the prize at
which we aimed. The forces actually engaged
were about equal, General Hunter having some
nine thousand men actually in action, while the
enemy had about the same—strongly posted, however,
on a range of hills, horse-shoe shaped, and
heavily timbered, and further protected by rifle-pits
and rail-fence barricades, hastily thrown up
the night before. The rebel morning report of
the day previous, found on the dead body of
General Jones that afternoon, showed that he had
then under him 6,800 regular Confederate soldiers,
while we knew that he was joined on the
morning of the engagement by Vaughan's brigade
from East Tennessee, and also by about fifteen
hundred militia—old men and young boys, not
worth the powder required to kill them—hurried

forward from Stanton and Lynchburgh on news
of our advance.

The fight, though not large in numbers, was
singularly obstinate and fluctuating, the enemy
beating back repeated charges of our infantry and
cavalry, under Generals Sullivan and Stahl—for
neither the divisions of Crook and Averell had
then joined us; and it was quite late in the afternoon,
after a long and sweltering day of battle,
when the movement of the gallant Colonel Thoburne's
division across the narrow valley and its
charge up hill upon the enemy's right flank,
decided the contest in our favor. General Wm.
E. Jones, their commander, was killed, as also
five colonels, thirty or forty officers, and some
seven or eight hundred men killed or wounded;
and we had about eighteen hundred prisoners,
including the worthless reserve militia, seventy
regular officers, and twenty-eight hundred stand
of arms, as the spoils attesting our success.
But for the coming on of night, and the broken,
heavily-timbered nature of the country, the famous
feat of “bagging” that army—so popular with
Congressional orators and enthusiastic editors—
might have been easily accomplished; for a worse
whipped or more utterly demoralized crowd of
beaten men never fled from any field.

ALEXANDER H. H. STUART.—ONE LOYAL POLITICIAN
IN VIRGINIA.

Next day we entered Stanton without any regular
opposition, destroying the railroad thoroughly
on each side of it, and also enormous quantities
of quartermaster, commissary, and ordnance stores
there accumulated; and, riding into town, the
first person the writer had any conversation with
was the Hon. Alexander H. H. Stuart, once a Whig
member of the Washington Cabinet, and now
again becoming prominent in Virginia politics.
He was a handsome, portly, tall, middle-aged and
gray-headed gentleman, a good deal resembling
Mayor Berret, of Washington; and one observation
that he made to us—indeed, almost the first
—was memorable in that land of secession proclivities:

We were sitting, with Mr. Stuart, the Mayor,
County Clerk, and other dignitaries of the town,
on the stoop of the Stanton Bank, when the head
of our infantry column appeared, preceded by a
band of music, playing “Hail Columbia,” and an
enormous banner of the Stars and Stripes, almost
breaking the long pole—for there was a thunder-storm
just then—on which the soldiers carried it.

“That's a grand old tune,” said Mr. Stuart,
somewhat huskily, and with a slight quaver in his
voice. “A grand old tune, and a grand old flag.

It's long since I have seen the one, or heard the
other”—and he looked as if he were not sorry.
It is but justice to Mr. Stuart to add, that he was
one of those who had vehemently opposed the
ordinance of secession, and was always regarded
as being so much a Union man as it was safe for
any one to be in those parts, during the entire
rebellion.

A SONG BY OUR IRREPRESSIBLE ORDERLY.

While referring again to our field note-book for
these particulars—hastily jotted down at the time,
and jumbled up with all manner of army and
private memoranda—we find in pencil, on the
back of a rough morning report sent in by General
Sullivan, the following lines, hastily scribbled,
and which we now publish for the first time, as
some indication of the kind of thoughts with
which the mind amuses itself and seeks relaxation
in the midst of scenes like these. It is a soldier-song
in verity—a song of the rank and file, rough
and wholly unpolished; but not, we think, without
some true spirit of the camp in its hasty
stanzas:

MARCH FROM STANTON, AND CAPTURE OF LEXINGTON.

At Stanton we were soon joined by the infantry
division under General Crook, and the cavalry
under General Averell; our force being
thus raised—allowing for what we had to send
back from here with the prisoners and trains—to
an effective body of some twenty thousand men;
and it was with this force we were advancing
against Lexington when this paper of “recollections”
opened.

Our first day's march of twenty miles from
Stanton brought us to a little hamlet variously
styled Midway or Steele's Tavern; and the next
day's march, notwithstanding all the vehement
though irregular opposition offered by McCausland,
brought us by noon on a hill overlooking
the pretty city of Lexington.

Here we found that McCausland was making
what promised to be a resolute stand—the Lynchburgh
canal defending his right flank, while a
branch of the Shenandoah river, sweeping round

a high perpendicular bluff of rock on which was
situated the Lexington Military Institute, offered
a serious barrier to our progress. The bridge by
which he had crossed into the town was now a
pile of smoking ruins, and all our efforts to find a
ford or lay our pontoons were met with determined
opposition. From every house and eminence
commanding the river and its approaches,
and from the windows and grounds of the Military
Institute, a close and deadly fire both of musketry
and artillery was kept up against us; and
it was not until late in the afternoon that McCausland
abandoned this defence, finding his left flank
in danger of being turned, and his retreat cut off
by General Averell, who had found a ford some
miles higher up and crossed with his cavalry.

It thus came to pass that it was late that evening
before we entered Lexington; and now, before
speaking of Stonewall Jackson's grave, let the
writer be permitted a few words of explanation
as to two acts committed at this place, for which
General Hunter has been most acrimoniously,
and, as we shall prove, most senselessly and unjustly
abused. We refer to the burning of Gov.
Letcher's house and the Virginia Military Institute.

BURNING OF EX-GOVERNOR LETCHER'S HOUSE.

The West Virginia troops, forming, with some
regiments from Maryland, the élite of our little
army, were furious beyond measure against John
Letcher. He had been a Union man, they said,
who had sold his principles for promotion in the
rebel service; and, as was the case with all apostates
of this kind, had then signalized his devotion
to his new faith by unheard-of oppressions
and cruelties against all of his former associates
who persisted in remaining faithful to their creed
of loyalty. They charged against him gross and
wanton outrages upon the liberties, lives, and property
of all the loyal men within his reach; and so
strongly was their desire for retaliation manifested,
that General Hunter, in order to protect the family
of the fugitive ex-Governor, who had only fled
the night before, directed that a guard of two
companies from some Ohio regiment—the 116th,
if we remember rightly—should be detailed for
the security of Mr. Letcher's residence. Several
officers of General Hunter's staff, also—of whom
Captain Towne, chief signal officer, was one, and
Captain Prendergast, since killed, another—took
up their quarters with the Letchers—partly as it
was a pleasant, though small and rather modest
mansion; and partly to give additional protection
to the frightened family of females—ex-Governor

Letcher having fled the night previous to our
entrance.

Thus matters stood until next day, when some
soldiers of the 9th West Virginia, under Colonel—
now General—Duvall, happened to find in an
abandoned printing-office, already half set up in
type—the manuscript in John Letcher's hand,
and over his signature, of a proclamation to the
citizens of “Rockbridge and other Counties,” calling
upon them to “arise and slay the foul Yankee
invader;” and if unable to offer any organized resistance,
then from behind every tree and stone in
the valley, to kill us as they could. It was, in other
words, a direct incitation to bushwhacking and
murder; and if Mr. John Letcher had been caught,
not only would his house have been burned—as
the houses of four other bushwhackers, and only
four, had previously been—but he would have
been hung on the first tree with a little paper
pinned on his breast bearing this brief but pregnant
legend:

What folly and something worse it is, while
General Sherman goes blameless for having burned
down whole towns and cities that offered any
resistance, to censure Hunter for his course in this
valley campaign, wherein—at least, so far as we

have knowledge—he only caused five private
dwellings to be destroyed, and these on conviction
that the proprietors were assassins and bushwhackers!

BURNING OF THE VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE.

As to the cry raised against “Uncle David” for
the destruction of the Virginia Military Institute,
that is still, if possible, more senseless and unjust.
General Smith, commanding the Institute, as we
have good evidence, protested to General McCausland
against defending Lexington, and more especially
against using the Institute as one of the
points of defence—stating the town to be wholly
indefensible, in his judgment, and that it would
be made liable to bombardment and destruction
by such a course; and especially pleading that to
fire from the windows of the Institute on our
troops, or to use it in any manner as a military
point, would likewise, and still more strongly,
necessitate its destruction.

To this McCausland replied by showing his
orders from General Lee, which were to contest
every mile of our advance with the utmost obstinacy,
every hour gained against us being important,
as the division of Breckinridge and the
corps of Ewell under General Jubal Early, were
then hastening forward by rail from Richmond to

his relief. General Smith, as we have heard, still
maintained that using the Military Institute (of
which, by the way, Vaughan, Imboden, McCausland,
and nearly all the other Virginia leaders of
prominence had been graduates,) could do no
good, but would certainly result in its destruction;
and finally, when McCausland persisted in his
course, General Smith asked to be relieved from
service under him, and marched away with his
cadets down the canal tow-path to Lynchburgh.

As to the order of General Lee, we are certain
—the original telegram having been captured
next day in the house of General Smith, at which
McCausland and the other generals had stopped
over-night; and as to General Smith's protest and
subsequent action in the matter, they were related
to us next morning by a very intelligent and
respectable old black man—General Smith's butler
or steward—to whom we were indebted for many
comfortable meals during the next two days.

This Institute, at the burning of which the
writer looked with feelings of inexpressible regret
though fully satisfied of the justice of the act,
was an exact copy of the West Point Academy in
architecture, and perhaps more handsome—certainly
more modern, elegant and commodious in
the houses of its professors, of whom the great
Stonewall Jackson had been one. The more
valuable books of its library, however, and instruments

of its scientific, astronomical, and chemical
departments, had been removed before our advent.
It contained large quantities of arms and ordnance
stores, and it must be remembered that its students
had been organized into a battalion of infantry
and had fought against us, not many days
before, at Newmarket. On its roll of graduates,
too, could be found the names of hundreds of
prominent rebel officers; and this, en parenthèse,
opened our eyes to comprehend how it came to
pass that the South had such good officers uniformly
on the breaking out of the war, while ours,
except the regulars from West Point, were then
so ignorant—nearly all the young aristocracy of
the South having been trained to arms in just
such institutions as this of Lexington, Baton
Rouge, and so forth. This burning took place on
the 12th of June, 1864.

STONEWALL JACKSON'S GRAVE AND ITS PECULIAR
MONUMENT.

And now for a visit to Stonewall Jackson's
grave—Jackson who has always impressed us as
one of the most veritable heroes of these degenerate
days. We know not who wrote that magnificent
soldier-lyric in his honor, entitled “Stonewall
Jackson's Way;” but do know, despite its
roughness, that it is one of the grandest tributes

ever paid by the Muse to the character of a Hero.
It is fiery, and loving, and droll, and full of pathos
—a song for the full appreciation of which, perhaps,
one should have made a campaign or two in
the Shenandoah, and beheld all the monuments
of his genius. “Ah,” said an old rebel prisoner
to us once, when we asked him which of their
generals he had most faith in: “Ah, Colonel!
Johnsing we guess to be the retreatin'est general
we ever had; but the grittiest and the flankin'est
was Stonewall Jackson.”

The churchyard in which poor Stonewall lies is
just on the borders of the town, and must have
been a pretty and neat little place of burial before
the war. It has heavy borders of moss roses and
the dark roses of the South along its walks, and
these were in richest bloom when we paid our
visit. Beautiful white marble monuments are
scattered around in profusion; but looking at
their dates it will be seen that few of these have
been erected since the breaking out of the rebellion.
Death has been since then too busy in the
South to receive such honors; and the long, close
rows of freshly-made graves—more especially
those of a dozen young cadets killed at Newmarket—had
no other trophy or memorial than a
small shingle at the head of each, bearing a brief
and rudely painted inscription.

Exactly in the centre of the churchyard is the

grave of the great rebel leader—a little bank of
earth sodded over with green clover, and with two
little dark boards (now probably chipped away by
relic-hunters) at its head and foot. Near to its
head, also, a tall pine flag-staff sprang nakedly up
into the air; and on this, until carried away by
McCausland in his retreat, had waved a Confederate
battle-flag, worked in threads of silk, and
gold, and silver, by certain secession-sympathizing
peeresses of England—the Countess of Arundel
and Surrey, if we remember rightly, having been
prominent in the work. This battle-flag, with a
sentry in gray walking up and down beneath it,
had formed Stonewall Jackson's only monument;
and now both had disappeared!

Suppose McCausland had left both sentry and
flag on guard by that solitary grave, who believes
that either would have been disturbed? Would
not both have been held sacred as portions of the
tomb of a good and gallant soldier? At any rate
this thing is very sure: that, if either or both had
to be taken away, the writer would have striven
hard to shirk in his own person that particular
tour of duty; and this feeling, so far as he could
ascertain, was unanimous amongst all his younger
associates.

Just in rear of the flag-staff were two handsome
white marble tombs enclosed within an iron railing—one
sacred to the memory of the wife, and

the other to that of a beloved child of “Professor
T. J. Jackson of the Virginia Military Institute.”
Doubtless had the rebellion prospered, a splendid
tomb would in time have arisen to Jackson's memory;
and, even as things are—so catholic is the
admiration which valor rouses—we would gladly
contribute our mite towards the erection of some
substantial memento to the great Genius—as General
Lee was the great Respectability—of the
Southern war.

Let it not harm us in the esteem of our friends
of the Loyal League if we confess the weakness
of having pulled some dark roses of the South and
strewed them on Jackson's grave, taking away in
return—reverently and with uncovered heads—
some few blades of clover which we have still
preserved in a locket as one of the war's most
precious relics,—our flagrant “treason” in this
act having been shared at the time by an officer
of far higher position, whose name as a cavalry
leader on the Union side was then a terror throughout
the Shenandoah and Kanawha valleys.

ODD TOMB OF AN ECCENTRIC OLD LADY.

It is when we feel most grave and sentimental
that a sudden presentation of any ludicrous thought
or object becomes most irresistible to the nerves
of laughter; and of this we had an illustration on

letting our eyes rest for a moment upon the tomb
of an old lady whose remains are deposited precisely
opposite Stonewall Jackson's feet. This
tomb is a square house of granite, probably ten or
twelve feet square; and into its door-way this
eccentric old dame—a Mrs. Hammond or Hammel,
we think—had caused the hall-door of her
house, painted green, with her name regularly
engraved on a brass plate, and with a brass handle,
a brass keyhole, and a brass bell-handle in
the adjacent wall, to be inserted; so that it just
looked as if we had nothing to do but pull the
bell and ask was the defunct occupant within.
No tomb more quietly ludicrous have we ever
seen; and though it shocked us to laugh in the
vicinity of Jackson's grave, we could not but
laugh heartily in spite of all our efforts to be
serious.

GEN. GRANT'S ORDERS.—IMPORTANCE OF THIS
RAID.

As to what were General Grant's orders in this
campaign, contrasted with what were General
Hunter's acts, we find our space already so largely
occupied by this hurried memoir, that we must
hold over their consideration for another article;
in which will also be given the two days of battle
before Lynchburgh, with the engagements of

Liberty, Salem, and the retreat across the Alleghanies
and up the Kanawha valley, terminating
at Gauley Bridge. Of this raid—so much misunderstood
by the public, for the reason that we
had cut loose from communications, and the only
reports that were heard of our “miscreancies”
reached the North through the Lynchburgh and
Richmond rebel papers—it must suffice for this
chapter to say: that General Grant has borne his
official testimony to its being, in his judgment,
the greatest, most daring, and most ably conducted
raid of the war up to that time, and the most
important in its results. Hunter's only fault was
that his tender and noble heart did not allow him
to execute one-tenth part of the severity of his
orders; but of this in full hereafter. Let us also
add that it has now been ascertained that General
Lee, at the time of this raid, had set apart 35,000
picked men under General Early to hurry forward
to reinforce Johnson, who was then facing
Sherman opposite Atlanta, with nearly balanced
forces; and that, had those reinforcements reached
Johnson at that time, Sherman might have fared
ill in the retreat he would have been compelled to
undertake towards Nashville. It was Hunter's
success in the Valley, which was Lee's arsenal and
granary, that compelled Early with his men to be
sent to save Lynchburgh; and thus it was, and
thus only, that Sherman was enabled to carry out
his superb strategetical conception of the march
from Atlanta through the bowels of the Confederacy.

2. CHAPTER II.
CAUSE OF THE HALT AT LEXINGTON.—SHERIDAN
EXPECTED.

Hunter's raiding party of about eighteen thousand
effective men entered Lexington on the evening
of the 11th of June last year, and remained
there until the morning of the 14th—a delay for
which the General has been blamed in certain
quarters. This blame, of course, makes no difference,
as had he not been censured for this—it
being then the fashion to abuse him—his candid
accusers would readily have found some other
source of accusation.

For the delay, however, there were many valid
and peremptory reasons—General Duffié's cavalry
column of about three thousand men, detached at
Stanton and sent across the Blue Ridge to cut
the railroad between Amherst Court-House and
Lynchburgh, having lost its way in the mountains,
as was usual with its leader, and not rejoining
the main command at Lexington until late in
the evening of the 13th. This expedition had not
been successful, only slightly damaging the railroad,
capturing three hundred wagons and teams,

and taking some seventy or eighty prisoners. It
brought news, however, that Sheridan had had a
heavy fight with Fitz-Hugh Lee's cavalry at Charlottesville
some two or three days before; and
herein—that we were waiting for Duffié—lies a
partial explanation of our delay at a juncture so
critical. Cut off from our communications, and
hearing only through Richmond papers and contrabands
of Sheridan's march toward Charlottesville,
Hunter naturally, and we believe rightly,
supposed that Sheridan was attempting to join
his expedition against Lynchburgh; and it was
partly to await his arrival, and partly to give
time for Duffié's cavalry to rejoin us, that the halt
in question had been made.

REASONS FOR A NON-DIRECT ADVANCE.

But there were yet other and manifold reasons
for the delay. From our central position while at
Lexington, the enemy were puzzled to guess in
what direction would be our next advance—whether
still directly up the valley against Lynchburgh,
or across the Blue Ridge to Charlottesville,
and from thence across country to join General
Grant, destroying all the railroads connecting
Lynchburgh with Richmond on our line of march.
It was also requisite at this point to still further
strip the army of all superfluous stores and equipments,

placing it in the lightest marching order,
as we were substantially with a railroad terminus
in front of us at Lynchburgh, and another in our
rear at Rock Fish Gap; so that if General Grant
had been repulsed, of which we heard many and
curiously circumstantial accounts, General Lee
could in twenty-four hours have enveloped us with
veteran forces more numerous than our own, in
addition to the troops we were already contending
with—and the forces thus united would be in communication
with their base, while we were wholly
cut off from ours, and already beginning to run
short of everything which our foraging parties
could not hunt up and bring in from the surrounding
country.

For these considerations, and in order to destroy
the enormous branch of the Tredegar Iron Works,
then in full activity at Buchanan, General Hunter
decided not to move directly up the valley against
Lynchburgh, but to cross the James at Buchanan,
thence strike for the town of Liberty on the Virginia
and East Tennessee railroad, and so approach
Lynchburgh on the south-west side, which was
reported to be the side least heavily fortified.
This would still keep open to us, if unsuccessful
before our objective point, or forced to withdraw
under pressure of superior numbers, two lines of
retreat: one northward across the Alleghanies, and
viâ the Kanawha to Parkesburgh on the Ohio;

the other towards East Tennessee, destroying the
great salt works near Salem, of such vital importance
to the rebels, as we passed. To retreat down
the Shenandoah from Lynchburgh, as we had
come up, would have been simply absurd and impossible—the
country being thoroughly eaten out,
for one reason, and the railroad on the east side of
the Blue Ridge, running from Lynchburgh to
Waynesboro', offering to whatever force might be
able to repulse us the means of intercepting our
retreat in the strong positions afforded by Stanton
and its surrounding hills and earthworks.

BUCHANAN AND ITS FOUNDRIES.

Starting from Lexington on the morning of the
14th, and driving the routed valley-forces easily
before us, we entered Buchanan that evening, and
had much trouble in saving the town from a conflagration
which McCausland's retreating and
demoralized forces had left behind them as a souvenir.
Here a vast branch of the Tredegar Iron
Works, owned by Gen. Anderson, together with
many other furnaces and foundries casting shot,
shell, and ordnance for General Lee, was destroyed;
and next day, though with severe difficulties,
and at a great expense of pioneering labor
and bush-fighting, our column crossed the Blue
Ridge between the shadows of the Peaks of Otter

—the narrow road over which we trailed in serpent-fashion
looking down continually over precipices
of from five to fifteen hundred feet in
depth, while immediately above us towered the
highest and sharpest of the Otter peaks—forming
the loftiest point of the Blue Ridge Range—clothed
with dense timber and undergrowth to within some
two hundred feet of its topmost pinnacle.

At Buchanan we captured, amongst other prisoners,
Colonel Angus McDonald, formerly of the
Union army—a cruel and hoary-headed rebel commissary,
who had caused the death of Colonel
Strother's father by arresting that gallant old
patriot for his avowed Unionism, and casting him
—an old man over seventy years of age, with
whom his tormentor had previously held most
friendly social relations—into a dark cellar-cell in
the common jail of Martinsburg, there to languish
on damp straw for a few days, until death put an
end to his life and miseries together. “I can only
regret my civilization,” said the Colonel, when
the capture of this miscreant was announced.
“Just for this one morning, Miles, I should like
to be a Camanche or Sioux Indian, and have their
privilege of vengeance.” Not being a Camanche
but a gentleman, however, he took no other notice
of the prisoner than to see that he was no better
and no worse treated than his fellow-captives of
higher and lower rank.

THE BLUE RIDGE AND ITS BEAUTIES.

From the peaks of Otter the view over “the
Piedmont of Virginia,” as it is called, can nowhere
be surpassed on this continent—perhaps not in the
world. The lessening hills of the Blue Ridge,
with many a lovely valley and brawling stream
between, roll downward from our feet in woody
and billowy undulations, ever diminishing until
they merge and fade away in the noble champagne
country beyond, dotted with still handsome villas
and farm-houses that were both happy and prosperous
before the war.

In our upward march that day the obstructions
left behind by the enemy had been of the most
annoying nature. At every five hundred yards a
few strokes of the axe would drop enormous trees
across the narrow road, scarcely wide enough to
prop both wheels of a wagon; while at turning-points,
or other places offering natural facilities
for such work, this narrow and precipice-sided
causeway would be either cut away altogether or
blown up with gunpowder, leaving us no alternative
but to rebuild the same before proceeding.
It was not without severe bushwhacking and the
loss of many wagons and ambulances that this
march was accomplished—the mules and horses
frequently becoming restive, either from harnesschafing
or some other irritant; and in such cases,

where the drivers were not particularly nimble
and steady, wagon and mules, or ambulances and
horses, would go crashing down over the yawning
chasms on our left, until either shattered and
stopped against some trees, or rent into insignificant
fragments by the downward process of attrition.

Despite all these annoyances, however, the view
from the signal-station overlooking the Piedmont
of Virginia was one that can never fade from
recollection. Beautiful little farms in the vales
between the spurs of the hills, nestling beneath
us in frightened silence—so many doves with the
hawks swooping in circles over their helpless
heads. Beautiful sunlight patches floating over
the massive and varying verdures of the mountains;
clear springs bubbling out from beneath
every moss-grown rock; rich flowers shedding
brilliancy and perfume even from the topmost
cliffs; and dense woods of unmatchable shadow
and stateliest growth giving the coolness and
repose of perpetual twilight, even in the noon
and glare of that toilsome summer day.

PREFACE TO A SKETCH.

And now, before describing our descent on the
Virginia and Tennessee railroad at Liberty; the
two days of engagement in front of Lynchburg;

the subsequent actions at Liberty and Salem, and
the arduous withdrawal of our nearly starving
and ammunitionless forces across the sterile tract of
the Catawba and other mountain ranges of the
Alleghanies, our route leading us through the
famous Sweet, and White, and Red Sulphur
Springs of the Kanawha, and past the Hawk's
Nest, that loveliest and most unique of all the
views in this region of rugged beauty—perhaps
the writer may be pardoned a digression in order
to answer the many inquiries that have from time
to time been addressed to him in regard to the
character and calibre of the remarkable officer
who was the leader and supporting strength of
this daring and most exhaustive expedition—
his inflexible will seeming to supply continued
energy and endurance to his whole command, and
his soldiers being cheered by witnessing a veteran
of sixty sharing all their privations, undergoing
more than their share of labors, and apparently
becoming fresher, hardier, and more lightspirited
the more our prospects darkened, and the
more lofty and unending appeared the hills we
had to cross before either food or respite could be
gained.

It is of Gen. David Hunter the writer desires to
say some few words—words, indeed, essential to
a full comprehension of this hurried narrative,
and also designed to quiet the many of his Democratic

friends who continually do cry, but not like
the Seraphim and Cherubim: “What could you
have seen in such a leader to excite your admiration?
And why do you embarrass yourself by
supporting one against whom so large a part of
the public stand arrayed, either from judgment
or prejudice?”

GENERAL DAVID HUNTER.—WHO HE IS AND
WHAT?

To the questions thus roughly embodied, we
now answer collectively and in writing, as we
have grown weary of answering verbally and
separately, that in our whole experience of human
nature—and it has been considerably varied—the
purest, gentlest, bravest, and most honest gentleman
we have ever had the means of knowing
thoroughly, is the officer in question. Too fearless
and sincere to be politic—too warm to be
always wise—too innately noble and truthful to
be what is called “successful” in these miserable
latter-days of intrigue and fraud—David Hunter
yet lives in our memory, and must while memory
lasts, as a character so free from any vice, so
incapable of any baseness, that we have often
thought four years of life not wasted, if only for
enabling us by their experience to realize that
such a manhood as his was yet possible in this
soiled and dusty world.

“Hunter is the noblest of all noble fellows,”
remarked Fleet-Captain Ramon Rogers one day
(during an interview, by the way, in which he
and the writer were endeavoring to prevent a
personal collision between Admiral Du Pont and
“Uncle David”—both of sensitive and choleric
tempers). “He is both gentle and fierce,” continued
Rogers, “if you can reconcile that contradiction
of terms; and there can be no finer mettle
for any soldier.” Of course, with this spirit on
the part of the officer representing Du Pont, and
an equally sincere admiration of the Admiral on
the part of the officer representing Hunter, negotiations
on the point of difficulty were quickly
adjusted; and thus the only breeze that ever
ruffled, or even threatened to ruffle, the otherwise
invariably pleasant relations of Army headquarters
and the Navy flag-ship in the Department
of the South, faded away, leaving the surface of
conjoint operations as bright and cloudless as
before.

General Hunter is a soldier—not a politician,
not a writer, not a controversialist, not a lawyer;
and as a soldier should be judged. He served
over thirty years, in the saddle and on the frontier,
as captain of dragoons; nor is there an Indian
tribe from the Canadian line to Mexico that
has not its own stories of his rule, and with whose
habits and temperament he is not familiar. He

was in command of Fort Leavenworth and the
Indian Territories nearly forty years ago; served
on the staff of General Taylor as chief paymaster,
and was his confidential officer during the whole
Mexican war; fought several duels during his
first year in the army, and was once dismissed for
having challenged his superior officer, Colonel
Snelling—being subsequently restored to the service
by President Adams, in an order of high
compliment, very damaging to Colonel Snelling,
and one of the most remarkable General Orders
ever seen. Jefferson Davis served many years
under him as Adjutant of the First Dragoons,
while Hunter was Captain commanding; and
“Black David Hunter,” as his West Point companions
called him from boyhood, and General
Nathaniel Lyon, were about the only two avowed
anti-slavery officers in the army previous to the
breaking out of the late rebellion. Both had
gone to Kansas as tolerators, if not supporters of
slavery; and both had been there converted to
the anti-slavery faith by witnessing the atrocities
of the Border Ruffians from Platte and Doniphan
counties in Missouri, the frauds of Sheriff “Candlebox”
Calhoun, and the open prostitution of
all President Pierce's and Buchanan's power to
coerce the reluctant residents of that Territory to
accept a slaveholding constitution.

In appearance and physique, General Hunter

is a most remarkable illustration of how far and
how long the good habits of a lifetime can preserve
high spirits, virility, and vigor. Standing
about five feet eight inches high, his shoulders are
broad and powerful, his chest deep, and his limbs
still sinewy and active. Swarthy and Indian-like
both in complexion and of feature, his grey eyes
dilate into blackness and brilliancy under excitement;
his nostrils expand, while his lips are compressed
tightly together under their curling moustache;
and, taking him for all in all—not forgetting
his perfect horsemanship—if there be any
finer ideal of a veteran soldier the writer has
never seen it, not even excepting Generals
Hooker, Sheridan, or Hancock.

Not a Puritan, though of deeply religious
convictions; not a strait-laced nor jaundiced
moralist in judging those faults in others from
which he has been free himself; one to whose
lips a single phrase of profanity is as impossible
as one of falsehood; one whose still white and
perfect teeth give evidence of a stomach never
disarranged by strong potations, a mouth never
misused as a receptacle for tobacco or its fumes;
able to share and even enjoy the roughest food
and severest privations of the humblest private
soldier under his command, although noted in
civilized life for good-living and a generous hospitality;
a pliant wrist for the sabre exercise, a

steady finger on the trigger; eyes of the farthest
and keenest vision after sixty years of use
that we have ever known; a heart overflowing
with kindliness, though liable to sudden fits of
rage; always with a tendency to side with the
“under-dog” in every fight,—misfortune and
helplessness appearing to have the same attractions
for his chivalrous nature that success and
strength have for men of more worldly and prudent
characters; endowed with an utter scorn of
expediency, when opposed to his convictions of
principle; and with a pride of character which
can neither be purchased, bullied, nor cajoled into
anything which his judgment or prejudice may
regard as of questionable integrity,—such is
Major-General David Hunter, as he was revealed
to us in personal relationship and by correspondence,
during a vicarious but most intimate association
of over three years—the writer during
about one-half of that time serving on his staff,
and when not so serving, but on the staffs of
other generals, being in the receipt of frequent
and confidential letters from his old commander.

This eulogy is warm—the warmest and most
unreserved we have ever written—the roseate ink
of hero-worship not often suiting the hard and
angular steel pens with which faithful verbographs
have to be drawn in this practical and
unromantic age. That “Uncle David” has many

opinions wholly opposed to our own is quite sufficiently
known; that he, for example, particularly
disliked and distrusted McClellan, for whom the
writer is proud to say he voted; as also that he is
to-day in favor of extending the right of suffrage
to every negro of the South, and disfranchising
every white man in the least degree prominent on
the rebel side—two points with neither of which
the writer can agree.

There are, however, so many to find fault with
this well-abused gentleman, and they appear to do
their work so heartily, that we feel the darker
side of his picture stands in no need of further
shadowing from our hands; while, should any
excuse be needed for the unrestrained and fervent
admiration seeking brief embodiment in this hurried
sketch, let it be found in the fact that the character
of a loved and honored friend—the most
absolutely pure gentleman of our entire acquaintance—has
been made systematically the prey
either of Southern traitors, or the meaner class of
their Northern allies, seeking expression for their
hatred of the Union by abusing one of the Union's
most fervent, if not always wisest, champions;
as also by the time-serving, vacillating, cowardly,
corrupt, and shuffling elements of the Republican
party, ever as ready to surrender any honest leader
whose strides may have outstripped immediate
party-expediency, as they subsequently were to

adopt the inspirations of his honest genius, and to
claim credit for having originated those very ideas
for the first announcement of which the true
author had been both rebuked and punished.

We claim for Hunter that the most vital and
conquering ideas of our late struggle had their
origin in his tent, and that every forward step of
our Government was but an acceptance—often
slow and semi-reluctant—of some point of policy
for which, on its first promulgation, said government
had officially reprimanded its author. Hunter
first armed and organized negro troops. His
conduct was disapproved and his experimental
regiment disbanded without the pay of soldiers.
But we have had in the service since then not less
than two hundred thousand black men. Hunter
declared that slavery—only existing by civil and
municipal law—was “incompatible with martial
law,” and that slavery, therefore, must cease in all
parts of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida
within the lines of his command. This order was
immediately and publicly revoked by President
Lincoln; and yet within a month after its recall,
out came the first Decree of Emancipation, covering
not only the three States named, but the entire
South, with an announcement of the self-same
principle!

General Hunter, too, was the first to declare
that rebels could have no rights of property which

loyal men were bound to respect, and that our
armies should subsist, free of charge, upon any
country through which they passed. For this,
though never officially rebuked, he was for a long
time held up to public odium—all the rebel and
rebel-sympathizing press denouncing him as a
“barbarian;” while but few of the Republican
journals had the courage or good heart to say ten
manly words in defence of our ablest champion.
The same journals, however, “saw a great light”
some short time after, when the Confiscation Bill
passed both Houses of Congress and received the
Presidential signature.

Lastly, let us say, it was Hunter who introduced
and pressed upon the authorities the importance
of vast raids through the interior of the Confederacy,
in lieu of that other policy of attacking the
rebels in their strongholds and precisely where
they invited and dared us to assault their works;
and here, without wishing to take a leaf from
Sherman's nobly-earned chaplet, let us only remark,
in conclusion, that a programme similar to
William Tecumseh's mighty raid from the south-west
to the Atlantic was in the hands of the Hon.
Secretary of War at least one year before Sherman
undertook or even proposed it—its first proposer
having been General David Hunter, and his only
request in connexion therewith, that he might be
allowed to make the experiment, of which he even

then foretold—as if endowed with prophecy—
the magnificent and all but bloodless success that
must immediately follow.

And now, are our many anxious Democratic
friends, who have occasionally hinted that Hunter
must have given us “love-powders,” any better
satisfied? Or can they now any more clearly
understand why and how it is, that—without any
effort “to fight an unpopular man into popularity”—we
refuse either to give up or conceal our
deep and heartfelt admiration of the very noblest
and purest gentleman upon whose aspect we have
looked since the coffin-lid was shut down over
the cold face and straightened limbs of a father
who sleeps his last sleep under the green turf and
pleasant dews of an Irish hillside?

3. CHAPTER III.
THE SOUTHERN GUERILLAS.—REALITY vs.
ROMANCE.

From the Peaks of Otter, through Fancy Farm
to Liberty, our march was substantially unopposed,
only McCausland's rear-guard of guerillas
under Mosby, Gilmer, and McNeil, and some
scattering squadrons of Imboden's cavalry offering
any resistance; and these were quickly overcome—in
fact, never amounted to enough to retard
our movements. And here, perhaps, some few

words relative to those famed guerillas of the Virginia
valleys may not be out of place.

It was the fashion in secession circles, down to
the very closing of the rebellion, to magnify these
free-lances of the Southern cause into little less
than chivalric paladins, or knights-errant; all
mounted upon high-mettled chargers gorgeously
caparisoned, their persons sumptuously clothed
from the spoils of a hundred forays, their swords
glittering and their revolvers infallible; all heroes
sans peur et sans reproche, and each not only able
and eager to whip, but constantly in the habit of
whipping, from ten to a dozen of our Northern
mud-sills in open fight.

We have so few pleasant illusions left in connexion
with the late war, that nothing but a
strong sense of the reverence due to the truth of
history could induce us to give another side to this
picture, and paint these guerillas, both as they fell
under our own observation and as they were uniformly
described to us by scores of officers who
had served for years against them in the Shenandoah
and Kanawha valleys. Those Maryland
ladies of secession sympathies, therefore, who
crowned the “Noble Mosby” and “Brave Harry
Gilmer” with flowers, while the followers of those
illustrious chiefs were rifling trunks and picking
pockets on the train between Baltimore and Washington,
had better, perhaps, for their own peace

of mind, skip the following paragraph; as we
mean it to be the simple truth told in language as
plain as common decency and the respect due to
vanquished foes will permit.

These guerillas, then, we say, as they appeared
in fact, and not in the rhapsodical letters of such
correspondents as “Druid,” of the World, were
about the filthiest, drunkenest, meanest, most ill-looking,
ragged, mutinous, diseased, undisciplined,
lousy, and utterly cowardly gang of horse and
chicken-thieves, highway robbers, grand and petty
larcenists, that the Lord, for some inscrutable purpose—probably
to punish rebellion by a stick of
its own growth and cutting—ever permitted to
disgrace the noble calling of the soldier, or the
fair surface of American soil, to which neither
thieves nor cowards appear indigenous in any
extended degree. They were terrible, indeed, to
the stampeded muleteers, sutlers, and camp-followers
of some unprotected train; but still more
terrible to the wretched residents of their own
section in the regions through which they operated.

As to standing up in fair fight, however, before
any body of our troops, well-officered and even
half so numerous as themselves, the thing was out
of the question, and they never tried it. If a
report came in that Mosby, or Gilmer, or McNeil
were hidden at any gap in the mountains, waiting

for our troops to pass that they might swoop down
without fear of molestation on our exposed train
and sutler-wagons, the orders given to the famous
Captain Blazer of West Virginia; or Captain
Prendergast (since killed), of the 1st New York
cavalry; or Major Timothy Quinn, of the same
regiment; or that most dashing of all our young
cavalry officers, Captain Berry; or Captain Ellicott,
of the Scouts, would be: “Take a company,
or squadron, or platoon of your men, about so
many”—never assigning for this duty more than
one-third or one-fourth of what the guerilla
strength was reported to be—“and go chase those
scallywags over the mountains until our train has
got well up.” And chased in this manner they
were, and always allowed themselves to be, without
offering any soldierly resistance whenever and
wherever our troops in pursuit, if even decently
officered, were one-third as numerous as themselves.
This, however, is a digression; and now
to return to our lost sheep, from these rank-smelling,
cowardly, and thievish mountain-goats.

DESTROYING RAILROAD TRACKS AS ONE OF THE
“EXACT SCIENCES.”

At Liberty we struck the Virginia and East Tennessee
railroad, running south-east from Lynchburgh
to Salem, and thence viâ Wytheville and
Abingdon into the north-eastern section of that
State which contains the grave of Andrew Jackson
and the birth-place of Jackson's illustrious successor
and fellow-confessor, President Andrew Johnson.
It was a sight, indeed, worth going far to
see—though one, we trust, never to be repeated in
the history of this country—Crook's veteran infantry,
consisting of twelve West Virginia regiments,
all hurrying to the work of destruction on that
road, with the same delighted hum and buzz that
we hear from a young swarm of wandering bees
when they settle down on the white and well-sugared
table-cloth which the careful farmer has
spread for their detention. Up went the rails for
miles and miles along the road; soon the ties were
gathered in separate piles and set on fire; next
the rails were laid across these blazing bonfires,
taking care to have the centre of each rail above
the burning pile; and then, when the iron at a
white heat was soft and ductile, one or more soldiers
at each end would seize the cold extremity
of each rail-bar, rush with it to the nearest tree,
bringing the heated part against the trunk, and

twist the writhing metal into rings or semicircles,
or true-lovers'-knots, as best pleased their fancy.
The torch would then be applied to all trestle-work
bridges along the line, while bridges of stone
or iron would be “sent kiting” by gunpowder.

It was the illustrious Stonewall Jackson who
first invented and taught our boys how to destroy
a railroad scientifically and thoroughly; but the
scholars soon improved on their teacher; and in
the veterans of Crook's division—all infantry, for
cavalry are but hasty hands at such a workmanlike
business—he had pupils of whom any master could
have found no reason to be ashamed. It was,
indeed, surprising—the pleasure taken by our foot
soldiers in this species of labor. Whether, if
Lavater or Mr. Fowler had examined the rank
and file of our armies, either would have pronounced
the bump of destructiveness unusually
developed in our men, or not, we have no means
of judging; but of this fact we are sure: that no
matter how long the march, how hot the day, how
short the rations or water, how imminent and
menacing soever might be the enemy's movements
—the very moment our infantry struck a railroad
their fatigue, thirst, hunger, and sense of danger
all seemed to fall from them with their dropping
knapsacks; and they buckled down to the business
of rendering that line of transportation of no
further avail to the enemy for at least some

months, with all the eager, joyous, and untiring
energy of a flock of school-boys pelting snowballs
at some detested usher.

ON TO LYNCHBURG! THE MINERAL WEALTH OF
THIS SECTION.

Marching from Liberty towards Lynchburgh
along this line of railroad, and destroying it as we
advanced, the indications became every hour more
clear that General Lee had begun to pour down
heavy reinforcements against us by the Lynchburgh
and Richmond railroad, which General
Duffié's cavalry column had been dispatched to
destroy—a mission it had not been able to fulfil.
At New London our friends in grey first showed
in line of battle since Piedmont, but made no
determined stand there—Averell's cavalry developing
to feel and drive them, while Sullivan's
infantry demonstrated as if for a direct attack, and
Crook sought to wheel round on their right flank
and rear—a movement only thwarted by their
withdrawal after some few hours of rather heavy
but desultory fighting. We halted that night on
the Big Otter, and had headquarters at a house
alleged to be haunted—a large, and once handsome,
but now deserted red brick dwelling, of
which the negroes in the vicinity told some tales
that Mrs. Crowe might have been glad to gather

for any new edition of that banquet of ghostly
horrors—her “Night-side of Nature.” It is at
New London that the famous Alum-spring throws
up its mineral and healing treasures; and indeed,
many, if not most of the springs in this part of the
country, are more or less strongly tinctured with
the same astringent chemical. Perhaps, in the
new development of wealth which awaits this
entire section, the alum bed, which evidently
underlies the fertile surface for a distance of many
square miles, may play no inconspicuous part.
It was not far from here that the house of a Mr.
Mosby was burned—he being some kind of a
cousin to Mosby the guerilla, and the bodies of
two of our men, treacherously shot in cold blood
in his yard as they were drawing water from his
well, attesting that he was not unworthy to claim
kinship with his bushwhacking relative.

FIRST DAY'S FIGHTING BEFORE LYNCHBURGH.

Next day, the 17th of June, we started at earliest
daylight in the direction of Lynchburgh, our
way lying through a country more densely covered
and obstructed by wood and underbrush than any
we had yet seen. The roads were our only
resource, even the skirmishers failing to make
more than slow headway through the timber on
either hand of them, and our advance being consequently

much delayed. Meantime, the enemy
were not inattentive to our operations, their light
batteries and sharpshooters incessantly annoying
the heads of our various columns; and their skirmishers
keeping up a continual crackle of musketry
from behind the trees in the vicinity of our
advance-guard and pioneers.

It was therefore not until about two in the
afternoon that we came upon their first line of
irregular rifle-pits and rail-fence barricades, at a
place variously styled by the negroes Diamond
Hill, or the Old Stone Church; and here they
succeeded in holding us until about eight P.M. that
evening, when they were finally broken by a dash
in of Averell's cavalry upon their right, and a
splendid charge of Crook's infantry, under a heavy
fire of grape, across some open fields and over
their defences—the West Virginia boys clearing
the rebel barricades with a vault, and using their
clubbed muskets and bayonets in close quarters.

Here, and at this moment, the rout of our
grey-back friends became suddenly complete—
two guns, four or five caissons, and many hundred
prisoners falling into our hands; and had it
not been for the rapid coming on of night, and
the necessity of removing our own and the enemy's
wounded out of the woods, which had
caught fire during the action, and were now burning
fiercely with a mighty crackling and roar,

only pierced by the terror-stricken screams of the
mangled men who lay beneath the flaming canopy
of leaves and branches—we might have pushed
on into Lynchburgh that night, for as yet not more
than a third of Early's corps (formerly Ewell's)
had joined the forces under McCausland, and
these were again as utterly beaten and demoralized
as they had been on the fifth of the month, previous
to our having been joined by Crook and
Averell from the Kanawha.

BELLIGERENT RELATIVES.—A TRUE SOUTHERN
BELLE.

That night we lay in line of battle before the
enemy's second and main line of works for the
defence of Lynchburgh, on the south-eastern side
—two powerful and regular earthwork forts,
carefully built in 1861 and mounted with siege
artillery crowning the slopes in front of us; and
a regular chain of heavy rifle-pits connecting
these two together, and running off beyond them
to join yet other regular forts on right and left.
Our headquarters that night were at the beautiful
residence of an aged gentleman named Hutter,
formerly a major and paymaster in the United
States army, and some kind of distant relative to
General Hunter—as, by the way, in some degree
of cousinship, more or less remote, were pretty
nearly all the good families whose barns we had

been emptying, and whose cattle we had been
eating and driving off during the entire march.
Indeed it was often ludicrously, though painfully
amusing, to hear Colonel David Hunter Strother
(“Porte Crayon”), or the old General himself,
inquiring anxiously after the health of “Cousin
Kitty,” “Aunt Sallie,” “Cousin Joe,” or “Uncle
Bob,” from some nice old Virginia lady with
smoothed apron, silver spectacles, and in tears, or
some pretty young rebel beauty in homespun,
without hoops and in a towering passion,—our
soldiers meanwhile cleaning out smoke-houses and
granaries by wholesale; and the end of the conversation,
as the affectionate though politically
sundered relatives parted, usually finding those
of the rebel side without a week's food in the
house, without a single slave to do their bidding,
and with horses, cattle, sheep, bacon, pigs, poultry,
and so forth, things only to be recalled in
ecstatic dreams.

This Major Hutter “had one only daughter,
the divine”—but her name escaped us. For the
inexpressible sweetness of her pure silvery voice
and exquisite repose of manner, however, the
lady's image is yet a thing of vivid force in our
faithful memory—her eyes shedding no tear as
she saw in that hour of the gloaming, all the
refined surroundings of a costly and luxurious
home swept into ruin; and her cheek blanching

no shade of its clear olive-pink, though aware
that with the earliest dawn the heretofore splendid
and happy home of her childhood—the shrine to
which, we have no doubt, proud wooers must
have come from far and near to court the sunshine
of her smile—would in all human probability
become the central position for which two
infuriate armies must contend. “Oh, how I pray
for peace,” she exclaimed, as we opened a blind
in the drawing-room (metamorphosed the preceding
night into an Adjutant-General's office), to
see if the east yet gave any signs of dawn. “Do
not misunderstand me, however,” she continued,
in that silvery voice of inextinguishable sweetness.
“Do not think I crave, or would accept,
that peace you talk about—the peace of subjugation;
for I am Southern in every fibre;” and her
bright eyes kindled brighter, her cheek took a
deeper flush, and her musical voice swept upward
into a yet higher treble as if to give assurance
of her faith. “This dress I wear”—a plain
grey homespun, but made beautiful by the womanhood
it covered—“I have carded, and spun,
and cut out, and put together with my own
hands. Oh, we have given up everything for the
cause, save the barest necessaries of life; and I
cannot believe that God would allow a people to
suffer so much as we have done, if not intending
to reward us with final victory.”

SECOND DAY'S ENGAGEMENT BEFORE LYNCHBURGH.

Next morning, at daylight, the skirmishers
began amusing each other, and by seven o'clock
the work was lively. All night long we had
heard the incessant screaming of trains on the
Lynchburgh and Richmond railroad, as the reinforcements
sent by General Lee continued to
arrive in steady stream—General Duffié's attempt,
made the preceding night, to destroy the long
bridge across the James River, having been defeated
by superior forces. Various charges that
we made up the hills on which the earthworks
stood were heavily repulsed—only part of one
Ohio regiment getting over their works, and that
part remaining therein—either from pride in their
achievement, or because unable to fight their way
out again. Our men, too, now began to suffer severely
for want of proper food—General Sullivan
having reported the night before that his men were
then eating their last rations, a piece of information
which General Hunter answered by the laconic
remark: “Tell them there is plenty of food
in Lynchburgh.” It is true we had yet with us
plenty of beef cattle collected as we marched
along, for we had been mainly subsisting on the
country; but from the rapid movements of the
past few days, and the activity all round us of

the enemy's cavalry, we had not been able to
gather in any corn or materials for making bread.
Our coffee and sugar, too, were giving out—and
what are soldiers good for without their coffee?

By noon it became evident that the enemy's
forces were gaining a large numerical ascendancy,
a continual stream of Early's corps flowing from
the railroad terminus to the scene of action, and
their right flank beginning to overlap our left
with some danger of turning it. It was then,
after a brief consultation with Generals Crook,
Averell, and Sullivan, that Hunter gave orders
for our trains to commence falling back rapidly
towards Salem, on the Tennessee and Lynchburgh
railroad line; but of this—for the orders were
secret, and the trains far in our rear—neither our
own soldiers nor the enemy knew anything until
nightfall, the battle being thereafter continued on
our side with even greater activity, in order to
cover this movement, and our men believing
firmly that they were to enter Lynchburgh as
conquerors if it cost them a week's steady fighting.

Our situation, however, was indeed critical, and
fully justified the belief entertained both by
Generals Lee and Grant, that none of Hunter's
expedition could return save as prisoners. We
were but fifteen or sixteen thousand effective men
at the outside, cut off from our communications,

rapidly running short of ammunition, wholly
destitute of forage and rations, operating in a
country intensely hostile to us, with no hope of
any reinforcements, no hope of supplies nearer
than the far side of the Alleghanies, in presence
of an enemy already amounting to thirty-two
thousand well-supplied men, and at the terminus
of a good railroad in working order, by which
General Lee could have poured down upon us
thirty thousand more of his veterans, had such
been his judgment or pleasure. Back the road
we had come we could not go, as the country was
eaten out, in the first place; as an inferior force
cannot collect supplies in presence of a superior,
even if supplies lay around them as thick as
in that mythical town whose roofs were of pancake,
and through whose streets little roast pigs
ran crying out, “Come eat me;” and lastly, because
the enemy had another good railroad from
Lynchburg to Stanton, or rather to Waynesboro',
just twelve miles therefrom, by means of which
they could throw any force they pleased across
our front, while still pressing us in rear with
equal or even stronger forces.

These were the considerations which caused the
order, issued secretly at noon, for our trains to
commence retreating toward Salem; and it was
doubtless the hope of “bagging us,” body and boots,
when his full reinforcements should have come

up, and when (as he expected) we should commence
to fall back down the Shenandoah, that induced
Early not to press us any harder than he
did during the balance of this 18th day of June,
1864—anniversary of that most memorable world-battle
which sent the first Napoleon to St. Helena.
Press us, however, and rather heavily, Gen. Early
did on several occasions that day—more especially
about 3 P.M., when, with a charge over his works
and down the hill, he broke Sullivan's infantry on
our left, and drove the gallant Thoburne's brigade
(Thoburne since killed), and the brigade of Col.
Wells, of Massachusetts (also “dead on the field of
honour”), pell-mell through the woods. This disaster,
however, was but of short duration, though
extremely threatening at one time, two brigades
from Crook in the right-centre reinforcing our
left; and the engagement after that sullenly settling
down into an artillery and skirmishing duel,
with no charges though many demonstrations, and
consequently no repulses or heavy losses upon
either side. Averell's cavalry took no part in it,
that officer wishing to keep his men fresh for a raid
toward Danville which he projected under Hunter's
directions, but failed to put in practice; and
Duffié's cavalry doing but little on the extreme
left, from the woody and broken nature of the
ground, as also from the fact that there were
earthworks to contend against, and that Early's
veteran infantry were not the kind of troops with
whom it would be safe work for a forageless cavalry
to play tricks.

Before concluding this chapter, we cannot forbear
inserting here, though a little out of its place,
the brief and simple, yet how significant dispatch,
in which the great Lieut.-General of our Armies
frowned down and quietly trod into the mire
under his feet an attempt made in certain interested
quarters to make Hunter a scape-goat for all
the flurry and fuss of Gen. Early's subsequent raid
into “Maryland, My Maryland,” and the demonstrations
of that bibulous, one-legged warrior in
front of the walls of Washington. It was thus
wrote our good and gallant Lieut.-General at a
time when attempts were being made to blame
Hunter, who was then crossing the Alleghanies
with a starving command and with horses dying by
the thousand for want of forage, for not checking
in the Shenandoah with his fourteen or fifteen
thousand worn, wasted, shoeless, and nearly ammunitionless
troops, the thirty-five thousand well-supplied
veterans under General Jubal Early, for
whose proper reception in Maryland and around
the District of Columbia, no proper provision had
been either made or makable by the authorities:

4. CHAPTER IV.
END OF THE RAID.—NOW FOR FOOD AND SAFETY.

Hunter had done a noble work up the valley—
how noble did not become known until the capture
of the rebel archives showed that Early's
corps of thirty thousand picked men, thrown upon
us finally by Lee, had been collected and were
designed as a reinforcement for General Johnson,
who was then facing our Sherman before Atlanta
—a reinforcement which, about equally balanced as
the opposing forces in the south-west then were,
might very materially, and to our detriment, have
altered the results in that region, had Lee's primary
intention been carried out.

But Hunter's successful raid beyond the barrier-lines
of Mount Crawford, never passed before
by any Union army, nor ever afterwards passed
until the close of the war, summoned Lee to defend
instantly and at any cost, the valley whose
maiden soil—untrodden heretofore, at least south
of Harrisonburgh—contained, in a very great
measure, the granary and armory of the main
rebel army holding Grant in check before Richmond.
The cloth-mills to clothe his men, the

flour mills to feed them, the gun-stock factories,
shoe-shops, saddle and harness factories, the countless
furnaces and foundries from which came the
main munitions for his army—ill-able to afford
such a loss—all these had been “going up in a
balloon” incessantly, with every mile of our march
from Port Republic to Lynchburgh; and it was,
indeed, as a picture of the scenes of this raid,
considered in a generic light, and as symbolizing
all other raids, that the following lines were subsequently
written by our distinguished Ex-Orderly,
in regard to General Sherman's yet more famous
march from Atlanta to the Atlantic:

THE RETURN COMMENCES.—WAS IT A DEFEAT
OR VICTORY?

That we could not capture Lynchburgh became
very painfully evident during the operations of
June 18th, some details of which were given in
the preceding chapter. Indeed the question now
to be considered—and with all the odds heavily
against any answer in our favor—was: whether
Lynchburgh would not capture us? Short of ammunition,
cut off by hundreds of miles and two

ranges of mountains from our base, and wholly
out of supplies save a little coffee and sugar left
in the train of that excellent officer, Major-Gen-George
Crook, we were in presence of an enemy
already heavily superior to us in numbers, close to
his main army, operating in his own country, and
every moment being further reinforced from Richmond,
as we could both see and hear by the trains
incessantly arriving, and the steady stream of
troops hurrying from the railroad terminus to the
scene of action during the torrid day—day hot in
a double sense: and neither pleasant.

It was in view of these facts, that our trains had
been sent back on the road towards Salem at
about noon on the 18th, although the fighting—
sometimes furious, sometimes desultory — continued
with but slight intermission until after sundown;
every possible demonstration being made,
and indeed our own soldiers firmly believing, that
we meant to renew the attack next morning. But
that night about ten o'clock, with our picket-line
doubled and in the strictest silence, that nothing
might be known of our movements, the march of
our little army away from Lynchburgh and towards
Salem began—our poor boys trudging along
wearily enough, after a long day of incessant conflict,
or preparation for conflict; and with the depressing
conviction of defeat upon their spirits
which soldiers can never shake off when failing to

attain any point against which their efforts—even
in a feint—have been directed. It may only have
been a feint or a diversion to the general, but all
such matters are solemn verities to the rank and
file. They knew they had not been either broken
or beaten; but still they had not entered Lynchburgh;
and this, therefore, was to them a defeat—
an opinion in which the wise Northern newspapers
seemed fully to agree.

But was it a defeat?—a question only, but
easily to be answered by referring to the instructions
under which the expedition had been organized,
and the objective point at which it struck.
The orders of Lieut-General Grant to Hunter, on
that officer's relieving Sigel, were to the effect that
he should “reörganize Sigel's beaten army, and
with it reädvance up the valley, demonstrating
for the capture of Stanton, but not attacking it in
case either the enemy or the fortifications, or both
together, should appear too strong; in which case
he was to avoid any general engagement, but keep
his column moving, and find employment for as
many of the enemy as possible, in various directions.”

“ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANT AND IMPORTANT
SUCCESSES OF THE ENTIRE WAR.”

This formed the substance, and the whole substance,
of Grant's original instructions; and with
these data kept in view, the public will at once
perceive how much better than he had been ordered
to do, General Hunter did. He not only
captured Stanton, as the result of the battle of
Piedmont, but Lexington, Buchanan, Liberty, and
all the intermediate towns from Port Republic to
Lynchburgh—towns heretofore inviolable, and all
busily engaged in pouring eastward to Lee supplies
of everything that commander required for
his army. He had not only employed all the Valley
Forces, but beaten them into a disorganized
rabble; and finally drew off to check him thirty
thousand picked men of the veteran army of
Northern Virginia under General Early, who had
been collected and were designed by the rebel
general-in-chief for the reinforcement of General
Joe Johnson before Atlanta. He had given to
the flames the better half of Lee's commissary,
quartermaster, and ordnance departments—certainly
all of these that lay between Harrisonburgh
and Lynchburgh; and no wonder, knowing and
appreciating the inestimable value of these services
(as, it would seem, the Hon. Charles A.
Dana did not), that General Grant wrote the very

noble eulogy of Hunter's success which was, for
the first time, published in our last chapter.

As to the alleged barbarity of General Hunter
in “burning private houses” during this expedition,
we have already shown that he burned but
five—each on a specific charge and proof that its
owner was a bushwhacker; but what would the
pensive public have thought had he received in
time General Grant's subsequent instructions, or
had he been able to retreat down the Shenandoah
on his return, in which case they would have been
most faithfully complied with? These second
instructions were—in order to prevent another
incursion by the enemy down the valley into
Maryland, such as Early subsequently made—to
“make the Shenandoah a wilderness over which
the crow purposing to fly would have to carry his
own provender in his claws”—orders afterward
partly carried out by Sheridan, who never, however,
got up the valley any further than Harrisonburgh,
though a raiding party of his cavalry are
said to have been for some few hours in Stanton.
So, also, Hunter was blamed for an order that
wherever any of his men or officers were assassinated
by bushwhackers, the country for five miles
around the spot should be laid utterly waste; and
yet when young Lieut. Meigs, of the Engineers,
was murdered by some roving miscreants, the gallant
Sheridan caused that precise order to be precisely

executed, and there was general approval
through the Northern press; so true is it that
“one cat will be praised for doing what another
cat will be killed for looking at.”

But now to cast aside these digressions, and resume
the story of our return from Lynchburgh:

THE ENEMY AWAKE AT LAST.—ACTIONS AT LIBERTY
AND ELSEWHERE.

So perfectly had our retrograde movement been
concealed, and so fully convinced were the enemy
of our determination to fall back, if at all, down
the Shenandoah, that it was not until the morning
of the 20th—as our rear-guard were repassing
through Liberty—that their cavalry and mounted
infantry came up in sufficient force to make us
halt. General Averell held them, with his and
Duffié's cavalry divisions, as long as possible;
but finally Crook's infantry had to be sent back to
his support—the carbines of the cavalry being of
but little use against the long-range muskets of
Early's mounted infantry, of course dismounted for
action. At this time, taking our whole little army
through, we had left but twelve rounds of cartridges
per man, while at least one of the cavalry
brigades was entirely out of ammunition; and as
we had no means of judging how long, or in what
force, the enemy would hang around our skirts to

harass us, the prospects were not encouraging.
All efforts were now directed to making our lads
reserve their fire as long as possible, so that not
a cartridge might be wasted; and whenever a
man fell, either killed or wounded, there would
be a dozen squabbling over him in a moment for
the precious contents of the cartridge-box which
he could use no more.

That night we crossed the Alleghanies through
Buford's Gap, and halted within some seven or
eight miles of Salem, after a march of twenty-seven
miles—some few dozen men and many hundreds
of the horses giving out; but the spirits of
the army, as a whole, being much better than
might have been expected, when our destitute
condition was considered, the mountainous and
utterly sterile character of the country which yet
lay before us, and the incessant heavy skirmishing,
both by night and day, which the enemy—as if to
harass us and drive away all sleep—kept up
around our rear and flanks. At Salem we saw
the débris and railroad ruins of Averell's famous
raid made during the preceding January, in which
he “rode, slid, climbed, and swam” seven hundred
miles in an incredibly brief number of days—how
many, or rather how few, we forget; but such is
fame. That expedition, we may here remark,
used up a great many hundred men, chiefly frost-bitten,
and many thousand horses—indeed pretty

nearly every horse that was engaged in it; while
its results—only such injury as cavalry could inflict
on a railroad track in a few hours—were not,
perhaps, in any substantial degree commensurate
with its enormous cost; nor had it any military
value otherwise than as a proof of what our
Northern men could endure and yet survive.

The day following came rumors of the enemy
at Fincastle in great force, threatening our right
flank, and, indeed, to cut off our retreat altogether—a
rumor rather supported by the increasing
severity of the skirmishing—which soon amounted
to quite a skirmish as we neared Newcastle,
where some supplies were found; but only a
mouthful, so to speak, for an army already beginning
to starve. It was just beyond Newcastle,
and while crossing Craig's mountain—a portion
of the Catawba range—that we lost, though the
enemy did not gain, six pieces of artillery belonging
to Sullivan's division; and as this matter has
been much discussed, and almost invariably misrepresented,
we may as well here set the story at
rest as allow it to travel further.

HUNTER'S ONLY DISASTER.—SIX OF HIS GUNS
DESTROYED.

Our march was over wild, waterless, and abrupt
mountains—forest-clad precipices yawning beneath
us on either side of the road, while forest-covered
mountains towered thousands of feet above us on
the other. All the soft and beautiful characteristics
of the Blue Ridge were missing here. The
valleys were rocky, sterile, scrubby, and repulsive,
and water could only be found in some of the
largest creeks in the deepest ravines; whereas on
the Blue Ridge clear springs gushed forth in cool
and crystal abundance from beneath every jutting
stone almost to the highest peaks of the mountains.
But few tracts of reclaimed land could
anywhere be seen except in the Catawba valley.
The few houses along our line were for the most
part deserted and in ruins—three years of incessant
military operations, and guerilla and bushwhacking
fighting, having apparently convinced
the inhabitants that “green fields and pastures
new” in some other region had become a necessity.

With the heavy skirmish or engagement near
Newcastle, we appeared to have shaken off the
greater part of the enemy's pursuing force, but
flying squadrons or columns of their cavalry still
appeared at intervals; and General Duffié, who
led the advance, was ordered to strongly picket

all side-roads and bridle-paths leading in upon our
main line of march. This duty in one instance he
neglected; and the result was that the enemy,
who could see all our movements from the surrounding
hills, suddenly sent in a picked force of
about two hundred mounted men, upon an unguarded
side-road, to attack the artillery of
Sullivan's division—said artillery having, by a
blunder, got mixed up with the wagon-train. Of
these mounted men, about fifty carried hatchets,
with which they hacked the wheels of about ten
pieces of the artillery train of our first division.
While they were at work, however, a section of
Captain Du Pont's regular battery wheeled into
position and sent grape and spherical case through
the bodies of over thirty of them. Col. Schoon-maker's
brigade of General Averell's division also
arrived quickly on the scene from the rear, which
Averell was guarding; and of the two hundred
picked men who formed the attacking force, it is
questionable if over seventy got back to their
camp. Four of the ten injured guns were immediately
remounted on the spare wheels of the balance
of the artillery; and the six guns that could
not be toted away were so effectually destroyed
as to remain mere lumber on the road, of no
possible future use in warfare.

This disaster, so much paraded and prated
about, formed the sole injury of materiel inflicted

by the enemy upon Hunter's command during the
expedition. They never captured one of our
wagons or ambulances, though we had to burn or
destroy greater part of both on our return, in consequence
of the horses that should draw them
dying off for want of forage. They never broke
our lines in any engagement, save the brief disorder
on our left in the second day's struggle before
Lynchburgh; and they never took a prisoner
from us, except those of the Ohio men who got
over their works and could not get back; and
some wounded, sick, and starving stragglers who
fell to the rear—in considerable numbers, it must
be confessed—during the terrible marches of the
next half-dozen days. What we lost of materiel,
however, they did not gain. Even the saddles
were taken off the dying cavalry horses—dying
now by many hundreds daily—and either thrown
into the empty commissary and quartermasters'
wagons and brought along, or burned in convenient
piles. None of the men threw away
their arms. Nothing could be more admirable
than their conduct; and nothing but the pinched
faces of those who were continually falling out of
line and to the rear, told the story of their hunger
and weakness, for there was no grumbling save in
the headquarters of one conspicuously grumbling
brigadier; and even he too good, brave, and careful
a soldier in other respects to be censured by
name even for this. But he was “an almighty
grumbler.”

CROSSING THE ALLEGHANIES.—TERRIBLE SUFFERINGS
FROM HUNGER.

Beautiful, indeed, in its wild and forest-covered
sublimity and ruggedness was the country through
which we were now passing, had any of us been
in the mood to enjoy such scenery. None of us
were, however—at least not much; for some
pounded corn, with a rasher of bacon or an onion,
formed a feast only too rarely attainable even by
the highest officers; while day by day the few cattle
we had driven along ahead of each division
began to fail, and there was literally no food—no
cattle, sheep, hogs, or corn—in the ever-rising,
ever-falling wilderness of mountains through
which our diminishing column trailed its weary
length like a wounded, all but dying, serpent.
Each mountain-ridge that had risen before us
seemed of interminable height; but to be—thank
Heaven!—the last we should have to climb.
“Meadow Bluffs” was the cry and thought in
every heart. “Meadow Bluffs” where, as was
reported, there were a million rations left by Crook
and Averell only some fifteen or twenty days before
under charge of a battalion of the Ohio One
Hundred Days' Militia. “Never mind, boys!
bear up as well as you can. Only three more—

only two more—only one more day's march to
Meadow Bluffs, and then—a million rations!”

Ah, how the hunger-pinched faces brightened
up at those glad but deceptive words! How the
struggling men bent their breasts against the next
hill, scorning to throw away the burden of arms
or knapsacks—yea, even the burdens of useless
relics or plunder which some of them had picked
up along their line of march. We found one
company, sharp-set by the pangs of hunger and
half dead from fatigue, but carrying along with it
a wooden-bedded billiard table which the boys
thought would be “a nice thing to have in the
house” if they ever got back to any Christian
camp. “Hang me,” said Captain Towne, our
chief signal officer, “hang me, if I don't expect
to see my rascals carrying a privy along with them,
plank by plank, in hopes of setting it up for general
delectation when they reach Meadow Bluffs!”
It was the grotesqueness of the thought, perhaps,
which impressed this sentence, as one irresistibly
ludicrous, on a memory from which many brighter
and better things have faded.

But mountain still towered above mountain,
each apparently taller than the last; and from the
top of each as we gained it, our saddened and
sickening eyes dropped down into the deep gulfs
of valleys, beyond which towered mountain-walls
apparently blacker, steeper, loftier, more sterile

and waterless than any we had yet traversed.
The limited diet of mere fresh beef, too, without
salt, corn, biscuit, or vegetables of any kind, began
to revolt the stomachs of the weary men, and
cases of aggravated diarrhœa soon became an epidemic.
Still, as a whole, the men bore up wonderfully,
such of the infantry as were not actually
sickened growing more rugged, sinewy, bronzed,
and soldierlike—confident that their sufferings
were not in vain; that they had inflicted far
greater loss on the enemy than paid for all they
were enduring; that Grant would not overlook
the help their division had given to his main operations—as
he did not; and that in a few days
more—a few miles more—there would be plenty
for all of them, and a fortnight's—perhaps a
month's—rest in well-provisioned camps before
any renewed assumption of the war-path.

SWEET SPRINGS AND THE WHITE SULPHUR.—
SOUTHERN WATERING PLACES DURING THE
WAR.

At length, on the 24th, we reached Sweet
Springs—that loveliest watering-place of the inland,
and with the sweetest water; and on the
day following, after a long and tedious march over
hills apparently interminable and through forests
of the densest shade, we descended into the little
valley of the White Sulphur Springs, where at

least and at last our horses were able to enjoy one
day's good grazing. A glorious place the White
Sulphur must have been—will be again—in days
of peace, despite the sickening stench of its yet
pure and wholesome waters. Surrounded by vast
hills bearing the finest and largest timber conceivable,
the nestling valley lies like an emerald bottom
to a great bowl of green and purple porphyry.
Here were immense hotels of red brick and white
stucco-work, with terraces and rows of tributary
Italian and Swiss villas farmed out to separate families,
but all depending on the now empty hotels
for such proud and joyous life as they contained
in the happy days gone by. As to the waters—
the main well was pellucid and pure, but emitted
such an odor of sulphuretted hydrogen, as if a
thousand baskets of the rottenest eggs or worst-decayed
mackerel ever known lay festering at its
bottom. The hotels had been closed and deserted
from the commencement of the war—the largest
one, able to accommodate with its sub-buildings
over one thousand guests, standing open, but
not inviting, as our soldiers crowded and shouted
through its deserted rooms and corridors. The
mirrors remained on the walls, as useless and not
portable lumber. So the iron bedsteads and beds,
pitchers and basins, remained in the multitudinous
rooms; but the carpets and curtains had been
long since cut up to furnish clothing or bedding
to the rebel troops, and the furniture had either
been carried away or burned. Alas! there was
nothing to eat in the vast dining-room, once so
hospitable; and the scene, perhaps, appeared to
the writer all the sadder for the reason that it was
witnessed in company with “Porte Crayon,” who
never wearied of relating droll and varied anecdotes
of its former greatness and splendor before
the “chivalry” had determined that Southern
rights must be achieved by war.

At Sweet Springs, the White Sulphur, and the
Red Springs—all tenantless, all deserted—a contrast
with our own Newport, Saratoga, and Cape
May, not favorable to the men, nor eke the ladies
of the North, was forced on the attention. These
resorts had been abandoned from the first day
of the war—as much abandoned in 1861 and 1862,
when the South was practically triumphant and
the North covered with disgrace and threatened
with defeat, as in 1863 and 1864, when the tide
began visibly turning. Was this so at Newport,
Cape May, Saratoga, Lake George? Did not the
women of the South give more help, more sympathy,
more passionate devotion, more self-sacrificing
denial and heroism to their side of the struggle
than did our colder Northern dames? How
often have we been told in various parts of the
South, when asking some lady at whose house we
had made headquarters, to sing: “You would not

like my songs. Since the war, we Southern women
have sung only the songs of our country;”
and then, when assured that those, of all others,
were the songs we most wished to hear—with
what dazzling passion—almost frenzy—of voice,
eye, swelling figure, and gesture, as of an inspired
Pythoness, would be sent shrilling forth “Stonewall
Jackson's Way,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag,”
“On to Richmond,” or that noblest lyric of the
war, “Maryland! my Maryland!”

Indeed the women of the South were the backbone—the
life and soul of the rebellion. They
made it disgraceful for any able-bodied man to
remain out of the ranks. All members of the
Home Guard Brigade were presented with bonnets,
fans, petticoats, and rouge-boxes, by committees
of patriotic belles. They wore no foreign
goods, nor coveted any, throwing away their silks
at the beginning of the contest, and writing
“Shoddy” on the brows of all their sex who were
too lazy to make homespun cloth, or too proud to
wear it. Even hoops were discarded from an
early date, and their jewel-ornaments were melted
down in local treasuries for the equipment of
volunteers. That our Northern women might not
have done as well and as bravely, had we been
the invaded side, the writer has no disposition
either to question or assert. He only avers that
they did not; and that few of them—save when

actually compelled by the absence of their male
supporters in the ill-paid ranks of the army—
made any voluntary, or even visible, reduction in
their expenditures or style of living. “Madam,”
we once heard Major Sam Stockton say, with a
graceful and well-turned compliment, to a beautiful
young rebel girl who had just finished an exquisitely
rendered but very furious song against
the “Yankee Invader,” and then asked him, as
she rose with flushed cheeks from the piano, what
he thought of it—“Madam, I think,” said Sam,
“that if we had only had a few such ladies as
yourself in the North, we would have driven
all your armies into the Gulf of Mexico before the
second year of this distressing war.”

And now to return to our muttons—or rather
to our army which had neither mutton nor bread.

NO FOOD AT MEADOW BLUFFS.—GEN. GRANT'S
REBELLIOUS AUNT.

But why enter in detail upon the sufferings of
our further march across the Greenbrier river,
through Lewisburgh, where we found some food
in a few stores, and past Bunger's Mill, where also
was a little corn-meal. We had a sickening disappointment
at Meadow Bluffs, from which the
stores had been removed—partly back to Loup's
Creek on the Kanawha, and partly had been
burned by the militia battalion left to guard them,

under some sudden stampede created by a hundred
or so of mounted bushwhackers appearing
in the vicinity. At the Bluffs, however, we got
some score or two of sheep and a few hogs, the
country now growing more level, and with more
numerous signs (partly in the deserted fortifications
thrown up by General Henry A. Wise) of
having once been inhabited.

It was a tough ride and march across the last
high spurs of the Alleghanies that brought us to
Meadow Bluffs; but on the next day—June 26,
1864—a march of nearly thirty miles brought us
to the house of “the widow Jones,” who is an aunt
to General Grant, and was then—we fervently
hope still is—a remarkably bright, hospitable, and
kindly old body, though excessively rebellious, at
whose well-furnished table for the first time in
many weeks our nearly famishing party sat down
to a meal having no stint of scarcity; and with
such gorgeous accompaniments as iron forks, a
table-cloth, sweet milk in glasses, and tea—actual
tea—in cups, as made our recent existence seem
only a preparative whetting of our appetites to this
banquet of the immortal gods!

Next morning Generals Hunter and Crook,
with an escort of such staff officers and mounted
men as still had horses and could keep up, crossed
the Big and Little Sewell mountains—Hunter
being specially anxious to meet and hurry forward

the supply-trains previously ordered up from
Gauley Bridge, or rather Loup Creek, which was
our then base of supplies in the Kanawha, being
close to the head of navigation on that river.
Half way on the road we met the first of these
trains, lumbering along under a guard of some
Ohio militia—a train with 20,000 rations; and
closely followed by another larger one with 75,000
rations more! Better and better! we learn that
there are a million rations and 12,000 new and
complete sets of uniforms and equipments—for
our entire command was shoeless and in rags—
only ten miles ahead of us, at Loup Creek; and
here—at the Hawk's Nest, looking down into the
loveliest and most perfect triangle of scenery our
eyes ever rested upon, and with the wild shouts
of our poor boys, some miles yet in the rear, as
they meet the first train and empty its contents
into their stomachs, this narrative may most
rightly and welcomely be brought to its conclusion.
Here ended Hunter's campaign of the Shenandoah
proper—the movement of his troops down the
Kanawha to Charleston, and from thence up the
Ohio to Parkersburgh, where we first heard of
Early's invasion of Maryland, and from thence to
Harper's Ferry and Maryland, forming a distinct
episode or branch of history.

ROMANCE OF THE WAR IN THE SHENANDOAH.—
END OF THE RAID AT THE HAWK'S NEST.

In conclusion, let us say that this narrative has
grown upon our hands into far larger proportions
than we either expected or have wished; and yet
we have condensed and suppressed everything
that appeared in anywise compressible or suppressible
with due deference to truth and maintaining
the interest of our readers. In our pocket-book—
a very poorly-kept diary, briefly scribbled in the
scanty moments of leisure that duty did not occupy—there
are many passages of but a few lines
that might well be expanded, with their surrounding
circumstances, into chapters of absorbing and
instructive interest. It is in the beautiful but
bushwhacking, inviting but treacherous, mountain-girdled
but yet most insecure valleys of the
Shenandoah and Kanawha, that the romance
writers of the war will hereafter find their most
fitting ground and appropriate traditions and inspirations.
Great armies like that of the Potomac,
are monstrous hives of men, needing infinite quantities
of pork and beans, wearing out infinite
stacks of quartermasters' clothing, and covering an
immeasurable space of country. They have, however,
but few individual adventures, but few rapid
transitions from scene to scene; and the men who
composed them were brought but little into contact

with any of the Southern people residing on
their own farms, as they lived before the war.
In the Shenandoah and Kanawha valleys, on the
contrary, every movement had the swift vibrations
of a shaken kaleidoscope; forays, surprises, and
feats of individual prowess or adventure were the
order of the day; and love-making in the towns
through which our banners and those of the
rebels fluctuated in alternate waves, was a regular
business with the soldiers on both sides—in which,
truth to say, both seemed to become most perfect
proficients under the tutelage of such able and
charming mistresses as those valleys yield.

In another page of these Recollections, but not
as a continuation of the Valley Raid, we shall
describe the country from Gauley Bridge to Parkersburgh—the
great oil, salt, and coal producing
region of West Virginia and Ohio—in which Gen.
Averell, Colonel Vance, the writer, and many
others who took part in the expedition we have
just described, now hold landed interests very
large, and—as the writer fondly hopes—yet to
become very lucrative. In this connexion, too,
will come in the history of the transfer of Hunter's
command from Parkersburgh back to Harper's
Ferry, to resist, or try to capture General Early's
column of invasion—the last rebel forces ever
seen on Maryland soil; together with secret dispatches
from General Hunter, President Lincoln,

General Grant, Secretary Stanton, and General
Halleck, throwing much light over that still mysterious
episode in our more recent history, and
none of which have ever yet been published.
Meanwhile let us conclude by advising all lovers
of the picturesque, while there is yet time this
Fall, and while the forests wear their richest and
most varied verdure, to hasten up the Kanawha
to the Hawk's Nest, where the last pages of this
hurried and imperfect, but honest history may be
supposed to be written. Here, outlying on a vast
ledge of rock, they will look down over a sheer
descent of fifteen hundred feet—the rock-base on
which they rest forming the apex of a right-angled
triangle, the sides of which are sharp precipitous
mountains covered from ridge to foot with all the
foliage of the forest, and with the dark, wild foaming
waters of the New River or Green River, as
it is variously styled, plunging on in mad and
roaring race beneath them—the mountain-echoes
multiplying and thunder-toning all the chafings
and many-voiced leaps of the imprisoned stream,
and the overhanging mountains for ever gloriously
mirrored in the deep, swift, and narrow channel
through which—striking against the foot of the
Hawk's Nest, and then glancing sharply off—this
impetuous river rushes to join the Gauley, a few
miles further down; these united streams thereafter
forming the bright Kanawha.