Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation by Clifford Dowdey Read Free Book Online Page A

twenty-five-year-old lawyer stared in admiration at the untouched land “covered with the richest green; clover and timothy knee high and thick as the best wheat.…”
    His battery, with Ewell’s corps, crossed the Potomac into Maryland at Shepherdstown. Henry Kyd Douglas, another young lawyer, had grown up in that region. A former staff officer with Stonewall Jackson, Douglas now served on the staff of division commander Edward Johnson in the old corps.
    When Ewell’s advance forces reached John Bloom’s toll-gate, the old gatekeeper recognized the neighborhood boy and said to Douglas: “Who is going to pay for all the horses and wagons I see coming?”
    “I am, Mr. Bloom,” the staff officer answered. “I’ll give you an order on President Davis. Take it to Richmond and get the money.”
    “Jeff Davis! I’ll see him in hell!” the old man spluttered. Then he resignedly told Douglas to take “this crowd” on through and said: “I’ll charge the toll to profit and loss.”
    Longstreet’s First Corps, accompanied by General Lee on his gray horse, crossed the Potomac farther north, at Wil-liamsport. The men took off their shoes, socks, and patched pants, made them into bundles on their rifle barrels, and waded across the river in a steady rain. They were leaving Confederate territory, but there were still many friends about, and the citizens were as curious about the Confederates as the soldiers were about the country. Especially, the people wanted to see General Lee.
    Beyond Hagerstown the troops soon marched into Pennsylvania. Lieutenant Caldwell, of the 1st South Carolina, said: “This was, we felt, our really first invasion of Federal soil.” Maryland they did not regard truly as enemy country. At the beginning of the war the Southern states had hoped that Maryland would join the Confederacy, and, though the state remained with the Union, many of its citizens joined Lee’s army. “But,” wrote Lieutenant Caldwell, “Pennsylvania was quite another thing.”
    The men became acutely aware of being on foreign soil. Jacob Hoke, the observant merchant in Chambersburg, believed that the Confederates were awed “at the rich and beautiful country,” and commented that “the evident superiority of the country north of the Potomac to that south of it … exercised a discouraging effect upon the soldiers. …”
    This was a hopeful assumption. From Mr. Hoke’s city, Captain Blackford, of Lynchburg, Virginia, recently transferred from cavalry to Longstreet’s staff, wrote his wife: “We are now in the Cumberland Valley, and a fine country it is, that is as yankees count fineness-small farms divided into fields no larger than our garden, and barns much larger than the houses in which live their owners, their families and laborers. The land is rich and highly cultivated, much more highly than the men who own it. …”
    Among the people, Blackford wrote, “while I note physical comfort, I see no signs of social refinement. All seem to be on a dead level, like a lot of fat cattle in a clover field. … You never saw a country so densely populated. …” And: “Never in my life have I seen as many ugly women since coming to this place. … The men are not remarkable either way. They have an awkward, Dutch look. …” The Dutch appearance of the stolid men who observed the Confederates caused the soldiers to yell: “Och, mine contree.”
    Impressed they were by the richly cultivated land, but, like Captain Blackford, the men were more oppressed than awed by the smallness of the farms. They commented on the closeness of the farms to one another, the lack of timber and of shade, and the cramped atmosphere in comparison to the breadth of their land-holdings. In a North Carolina regiment there was a preacher’s son, twenty-year-old George Wills, a tall and quiet boy who had grown up on a farm. He wrote home: “Their quantity of land is so limited, that they haven’t the woodland to spare for groves, but have