Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/225

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General Lee with his defeated columns up and down the river, when they could easily have found him at Bunker Hill, not twenty miles from the Potomac, waiting to give McClellan a chance for another " glorious victory." McClellan in the meantime was continually call- ing on Washinton for troops, asking that this general be sent to his army, and that general it may be, to repair the bridges at Harper's Ferry and other places, and it was not until late in the fall that the Army of the Potomac attempted to cross at Harper's Ferry, and advanced upon Culpeper and along the Rappahannock river. The probabilities are, therefore, that our little stand at the ford belotv Sheppardstown, where twenty guns and 175 infantry held McClellan 's "victorious" army for a whole day, and again on the next day, when General Hill drove his " reconnoissance in force" back with such loss, impressed the enemy with such profound respect for the shooting qualities of the "ragged rebels" that the whole Federal army had to be recruited " almost anew " and outfitted, as is shown by the official reports filed, before willing again to challenge General Lee to a battle. Before General McClellan, however, who was a good soldier and a gallent man. could get himself ready, some one else was put in charge of his army, with instructions to take Rich- mond whether or no.

The late Cuban war has taken up the attention of the people of the present generation, so that we "old fogies" of '61 to '65 are relegated to the rear, and when we begin to talk about war, fighting, suffering, sleepless nights and dreary days, without clothes, without shoes, with nothing but the unconquerable spirit which made the Army of Northern Virginia the grandest army the world ever saw, when Jackson's "Foot Cavalry," Longstreet's "Heavies," and Hill's " Light Infantry," would march twenty or thirty miles from dawn of one day to the beginning of a second, then fight all day and possibly two, the boys of the present day are inclined to laugh and say, " Old man, you are a back number," and so we are. Year by year the men who held the Southern Cross for four long, weary years against overwhelming odds, and whipped and killed more men than they at any time had in the army, are fast passing away, and it will be but a few years before all of them shall have " passed over the river to rest under the shade of the trees."

I say "whipped," and say so deliberately; they never whipped us, but wore us out; and on April 8th and gth of 1865, there was as much fight in the eight or ten thousand veterans who had followed General Lee to Appomattox as there had ever been, and some as