Come, for thy shield is bright and strong,
Maryland!
Come, for thy dalliance does thee wrong,
Maryland!...”
From the thirteenth to the twenty-first they bivouacked on and near the battle-field of Sharpsburg. By now they were used to revisiting battle-fields. Kernstown—Manassas—many another stricken field; they knew them once, they knew them twice, they knew them times again! On the twenty-first, Ewell had orders from Lee to march northward into Pennsylvania, then eastwardly upon Harrisburg on the Susquehanna. “Old Dick” broke camp at dawn of the twenty-second.
South of the Potomac waited Lee with the First and Third Corps. He waited watching “Fighting Joe Hooker,” willing to give him battle in Virginia if he so elected. On the twentieth he sent a dispatch from Berryville to Richmond, to Mr. Davis.
Mr. President:—I have the honour to report, for the information of your Excellency, that General Imboden has destroyed the bridges on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad over Evarts’s Creek, near Cumberland; the long bridge across the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal below Cumberland; the iron bridge across the North Branch of the Potomac, with the wooden trestle adjoining it; the double-span bridge across the mouth of Patterson’s Creek; the Fink’s patent iron bridge across the mouth of the South Branch of the Potomac, three spans of 133⅓ feet each, and the wooden bridge over Little Cacapon.
All the depots, water tanks, and engines between the Little Cacapon and the Cumberland are also destroyed, with the block-houses at the mouth of the South Branch and Patterson’s Creek.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, about two miles above Old Town, where the embankment is about forty feet high, has been cut, and General Imboden reports that when he left it the entire embankment for about fifty yards had been swept away.
A similar crevasse with like results was also made in the canal about four miles from Old Town.