From Chancellorsville to Gettysburg—Camp, March, and Battle.
Again we are in our old quarters. Details were sent out every day to gather up the broken and captured guns, to be shipped to Richmond for repairs. The soldiers had gathered a great amount of camp supplies, such as oil cloths, tents, blankets, etc. When a soldier captured more than a sufficiency for his own wants, he would either sell to his comrades or to the brigade sutler. This was a unique personage with the soldiers. He kept for sale such articles as the soldier mostly needed, and always made great profits on his goods. Being excused from military duty, he could come and go at will. But the great danger was of his being captured or his tent raided by his own men, the risk therefore being so great that he had to ask exorbitant prices for his goods. He kept crackers, cards, oysters and sardines, paper and envelopes, etc., and often a bottle; would purchase all the plunder brought him and peddle the same to citizens in the rear. After the battle of Chancellorsville a member of Company D, from Spartanburg, took the sutler an oil cloth to buy. After the trade was effected, the sutler was seen to throw the cloth behind a box in the tent. Gathering some of his friends, to keep the man of trade engaged in front, the oil cloth man would go in the rear, raise the tent, extract the oil cloth, take it around, and sell it again. Paying over the money, the sutler would throw the cloth behind the box, and continue his trade with those in front. Another would go behind the tent, get the cloth, bring it to the front, throw it upon the counter, and demand his dollar. This was kept up till everyone had sold the oil cloth once, and sometimes twice, but at last the old sutler began to think oil cloths were coming in too regularly, so he looked behind the box, and behold he had been buying the same oil cloth all night. The office was abolished on our next campaign.
Lee began putting his army in splendid trim. All furloughs were discontinued and drills (six per week) were now begun. To an outsider this seemed nonsensical and an useless burden upon the soldiers, but to a soldier nothing is more requisite to the discipline and morale of an army than regular drills, and the army given a good share of what is called "red tape." By the last of May, or the first of June, Lee had recruited his army, by the non-extension of all furloughs and the return of the slightly wounded, to sixty-eight thousand. It is astonishing what a very slight wound will cause a soldier to seek a furlough. He naturally thinks that after the marches, danger, and dread of battle, a little blood drawn entitles him to at least a thirty days' furlough. It became a custom in the army for a man to compute the length of his furlough by the extent of his wound. The very least was thirty days, so when a soldier was asked the nature of his wound he would reply, "only a thirty days'," or "got this time a sixty days;" while with an arm or foot off he would say, "I got my discharge" at such battle.
On the 27th of June Hooker was superseded by General Geo. B. Meade, and he bent all his energies to the discipline of his great army.
General Kershaw, on his promotion to Brigadier, surrounded himself with a staff of young men of unequalled ability, tireless, watchful, and brave to a fault. Captain C.R. Holmes, as Assistant Adjutant General, was promoted to that position from one of the Charleston companies. I fear no contradiction when I say he was one of the very best staff officers in the army, and had he been in line of promotion his merits would have demanded recognition and a much higher position given him. Captain W.M. Dwight, as Adjutant and Inspector General, was also an officer of rare attainments. Cool and collected in battle, his presence always gave encouragement and confidence to the men under fire. He was captured at the Wilderness the 6th of May, 1864. Captain D.A. Doby was Kershaw's Aide-de-Camp, or personal aid, and a braver, more daring, and reckless soldier I never saw. Wherever the battle raged fiercest, Captain Doby was sure to be in the storm center. Riding along the line where shells were plowing up great furrows, or the air filled with flying fragments, and bullets following like hail [223] from a summer cloud, Doby would give words of cheer and encouragement to the men. It seemed at times that he lived a charmed life, so perilous was his situation in times of battle. But the fatal volley that laid the lamented Jenkins low, and unhorsed Longstreet at the Wilderness, gave Doby his last long furlough, felling from his horse dead at the feet of his illustrious chieftain. Lieutenant John Myers was Brigade Ordnance officer, but his duties did not call him to the firing line, thus he was debarred from sharing with his companions their triumphs, their dangers, and their glories, the halo that will ever surround those who followed the plume of the knightly Kershaw.
The Colonels of the different regiments were also fortunate in their selection of Adjutants. This is one of the most important and responsible offices in the regimental organization. The duties are manifold, and often thankless and unappreciated. He shares more dangers (having to go from point to point during battle to give orders) than most of the officers, still he is cut off, by army regulation, from promotion, the ambition and goal of all officers. Colonel Kennedy, of the Second, appointed as his Adjutant E.E. Sill, of Camden, while Colonel Nance, of the Third, gave the position to his former Orderly Sergeant, Y.J. Pope, of Newberry. Colonel Aiken, of the Seventh, appointed as Adjutant Thomas M. Childs, who was killed at Sharpsburg. Colonel Elbert Bland then had Lieutenant John R. Carwile, of Edgefield, to fill the position during the remainder of the service, or until the latter was placed upon the brigade staff. Colonel Henagan made Lieutenant Colin M. Weatherly, of Bennettsville, S.C., Adjutant of the Eighth. All were young men of splendid physique, energetic, courteous, and brave. They had the love and confidence of the entire command. W.C. Hariss, Adjutant of the Third Battalion, was from Laurens. Of the Fifteenth, both were good officers, but as they were not with the brigade all the while, I am not able to do them justice.
The troops of Lee were now at the zenith of their perfection and glory. They looked upon themselves as invincible, and that no General the North could put in the field could match our Lee. The cavalry of Stuart and Hampton had done some remarkably good fighting, and they [224] were now looked upon as an indispensable arm of the service. The cavalry of the West were considered more as raiders than fighters, but our dismounted cavalry was depended upon with almost as much confidence as our infantry. This was new tactics of Lee's, never before practiced in any army of the world. In other times, where the cavalry could not charge and strike with their sabres, they remained simply spectators. But Lee, in time of battle, dismounted them, and they, with their long-ranged carbines, did good and effective service.
Grant had been foiled and defeated at Vicksburg. At Holly Springs, Chickasaw Bayou, Yazo Pass, and Millikin's Bend he had been successfully met and defeated. The people of West Virginia, that mountainous region of the old commonwealth, had ever been loyal to the Union, and now formed a new State and was admitted into the Union on the 20th of April, 1863, under the name of "West Virginia." Here it is well to notice a strange condition of facts that prevailed over the whole South, and that is the loyalty to the Union of all mountainous regions. In the mountains of North Carolina, where men are noted for their hardihood and courage, and who, once in the field, made the very best and bravest of soldiers, they held to the Union, and looked with suspicion upon the heresy of Secession. The same can be said of South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. These men would often go into hiding in the caves and gorges of the mountains, and defy all the tact and strategy of the conscript officers for months, and sometimes for years. It was not for want of courage, for they had that in abundance, but born and reared in an atmosphere of personal independence, they felt as free as the mountains they inhabited, and they scorned a law that forced them to do that which was repugnant to their ideas of personal liberty. Living in the dark recesses of the mountains, far from the changing sentiments of their more enlightened neighbors of the lowland, they drank in, as by inspiration with their mother's milk, a loyalty to the general government as it had come down to them from the days of their forefathers of the Revolution. As to the question of slavery, they had neither kith nor kin in interest or sentiment with that institution. As to State's rights, as long as they were allowed to roam at will over the mountain sides, distill the [225] product of their valleys and mountain patches, and live undisturbed in their glens and mountain homes, they looked upon any changes that would effect their surroundings as innovations to be resisted to the death. So the part that West Virginia and the mountainous regions of the South took in the war was neither surprising to nor resented by the people of the Confederacy.
By the middle of June Lee began to turn his eyes again to the tempting fields of grain and army supplies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. The Valley had been laid waste, West Virginia given up, the South was now put to her utmost resources to furnish supplies for her vast armies. All heavy baggage was sent to the rear, and Lee's troops began moving by various routes up and across the river in the direction of Culpepper Court House. But before the march began, General Lee renewed the whole of Longstreet's Corps, and the sight of this magnificent body of troops was both inspiring and encouraging. The corps was formed in two columns, in a very large and level old field. The artillery was formed on the right, and as General Lee with his staff rode into the opening thirteen guns were fired as a salute to the Chief. Certain officers have certain salutes. The President has, I think, twenty-one guns, while the Commander-in-Chief has thirteen, and so on. Wofford's Georgia regiment was on the right, then Barksdale's Mississippi, Kershaw's South Carolina and Cobb's Georgia constituted McLaws' division. The column wheeled by companies into line and took up the march of review. The bands headed each brigade, and played National airs as the troops marched by.