“We have not General Jackson and General Lee.”
“No, but the Government should give General Johnston free hand. He is the third.”
“Oh, War!—When will it end and how?”
“When we have fought to a stand-still. There is a Trojan feel to it all.... How beautiful you are!—fighter of floods, keeper of home! warrior and sufferer more than I am warrior and sufferer! I do not know how to say good-bye.”
He had in Virginia three days. There was no time nor leave for Greenwood. His father was upon the Rappahannock, but in Richmond he saw Fauquier Cary. He had in Richmond two days.
The town lay in May sunshine, in bloom of the earliest roses. They mantled the old porches, the iron balconies, while above the magnolias opened their white chalices. The town breathed gladness for the victory in the Wilderness, and bitter grief for the many dead, and bitter grief for Stonewall Jackson. Edward heard in Richmond the Dead March for Jackson and watched him borne through the sighing streets. He heard the minute guns, and the tolling bells, and the slow, heroic music, and the sobbing of the people. He saw the coffin, borne by generals, carried into the Capitol, upward and between the great white Doric columns, into the Hall of the Lower House, where it rested before the Speaker’s chair. He was among the thousands who passed before the dead chieftain, lying in state among lilies and roses, shrouded in the flag of Virginia, in the starry banner of the Confederate States. All day he heard the tolling of the bells, the firing of the minute guns.
On the morrow began the return journey to the Mississippi, long and slow on the creeping, outworn train, over the road that was so seldom mended. On the train crept, for many hundred miles, until just within the boundaries of Mississippi, at a crowded station, the passengers heard grave news. Jackson, the capital of the State, was in Federal hands!—there had been a desperate and disastrous battle at Baker’s Creek, as desperate and more disastrous than Port Gibson!—there had been a Confederate rout at Big Black Bridge.... The colonel of the ——th Virginia, and the three or four officers and men with him, left the train, impressed horses, struck north, and then west and south. After three days they came upon a grey picket line, passed, and entered Vicksburg, where they found Pemberton with something over twenty thousand effectives,—the troops that had met defeat at Baker’s Creek, with others not engaged,—all under orders from Richmond to hold Vicksburg at all hazards.
On the eighteenth, the Federal forces appeared on the Jackson and Grapevine road, east of the town. The two following days were spent by the blue in making their lines of circumvallation. The grey and the blue lines were about eight hundred yards apart. On the twenty-second, the ironclads came up the river from Grand Gulf. When they opened fire on the town and its defences, which they did almost immediately, the siege of Vicksburg was formally begun.
CHAPTER VIII
IN VIRGINIA
Thirty guns of the horse artillery moved into position—not for battle, but for a splendid review. Right and left, emerging from the Virginia forest and the leafy defiles between the hills, came with earth-shaking tread the cavalry, a great force of cavalry, Jeb Stuart’s splendid brigades! In the misty, early morning they moved into line, having come up from Brandy Station to a plain north of Culpeper Court-House. It was the eighth of June, something more than a month after Chancellorsville.