Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/96

 to succumb. Butler landed at Annapolis, opened communication with Washington, cut off Baltimore from the south and, working backward, soon had possession of that city and the secession movement in Maryland failed.

At the end of my mission, I took the raccoon and returned to Mont Clare, having seen the opening phases of the war in its nearest approach to our own homes.

When I was a child about seven years of age, my father one day took me to a house on Nutt's Road on the north side about a half mile from Phœnixville and within a short distance of the Corner Stores. In the house was a modest, diffident boy, perhaps a little larger than myself. My father said to me: “Sam, this is your cousin, Galusha Pennypacker,” and we played together about the yard. As he grew toward manhood, he found employment in the printing office of the Village Record at West Chester. At the very beginning of the war, he enlisted as a private, having declined the position of first lieutenant because he felt himself incompetent. When the company left West Chester a wise bystander said to his friend: “There is one man in that company who will never fight.”

“Who is it?”

“That young Pennypacker.”

At the close of the war he returned a brigadier-general and brevet major-general of volunteers, at twenty-two years of age, the youngest man who had ever held such high rank since the organization of the Government. He had been shot seven times in eight months. Commanding a brigade in the assault upon Fort Fisher, the only fortification taken by storm during the war, when the color-bearer of the regiment, of which he had been the colonel, had been killed, he seized the flag and planted it upon a traverse of the fort. At this moment a rebel placed a rifle at his thigh and fired. He was supposed to be dead. The main nerve had been severed. He lay at Fortress Monroe for a year 88