Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/105

 with the Pottstown company at the outset, his regiment would have been filled and he would have taken the place part way up the valley to which Colonel Thomas' regiment was sent. We constituted the first and one of eight regiments sworn into the service of the United States for the existing emergency. We were the only body of troops during the entire war which entered the military service of the Government for a period of uncertain duration, and, with Lee invading the state, that period might well have extended into the indefinite future.

When we arrived at Gettysburg we found Major Granville O. Haller, of the United States Army, in command there, and the only force at his disposal was our regiment. On the other side of the mountain in the Cumberland Valley, not ten miles away, was Lee with the Army of Northern Virginia. Rodes, being in the advance, marched toward Harrisburg to carry the war into the heart of the state and possibly to Philadelphia. Early, with a division—artillery, cavalry and infantry—was sent over the mountain by the Chambersburg pike to Gettysburg. On the 26th of June, in the early morning, in obedience to the order of Major Haller, we marched out the Chambersburg Pike to confront the approaching host. To this regiment of seven hundred and thirty-two men who had left their homes only a few days before, unacquainted with their officers and comrades, and unfamiliar with the ways of warfare, was assigned the task of stopping the progress of the army of Lee. The order has often been criticised, but it was absolutely correct. The occasion required that what they were capable of doing, whether much or little, should be done. The reports of Early show that they held back his division an entire day. On the Hunterstown Road we had an engagement with the rebels lasting over half an hour in which we lost some wounded and one hundred and seventy-six men captured. The rebel general, John B. Gordon, in his reminiscences of the Civil War, calls it a “Diminutive Battle” and claims Rh