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

a small yard without trees.”
    These soldiers were warm and volatile people, given to emotional excesses, and their own land reflected their carelessness about bookkeeping. Mr. Hoke was wrong in assuming that the tidy husbandry of his fellows discouraged a more profligate people. The Southerners were impressed by all the grain and vegetables, stock and dairy products and fruits, not because such cultivation suggested the might of the enemy but because the yield promised good eating that day and perhaps the next.
    There was some private grumbling about Lee’s orders against pillaging, and, despite the strictly enforced orders, individuals managed to evade the cordon and undertake private foraging parties. The more guileful evolved a system by which they stole way during the brief confusion when camp was being pitched and before the night guards were posted.
    Away from the eyes of the sentries, they strolled up to any likely-looking house and asked for food. The natives found the soldiers rather frightening. Although Lee’s published orders had been intended to reassure the Pennsylvanians, the men were a fearsome-looking lot and appeared less disciplined than they actually were. Most had long since stopped shaving, and camp barbers scarcely brought a “trim look” to their hair. The results, combined with their gaunt, weather-stained faces and rough, nondescript clothes, their swagger and bold eyes, gave Lee’s men as individuals a curiously lawless look. Then, they were “Rebels,” and proud of it.
    Usually the house-owners supplied them with food in order to get rid of them, though on occasions the men had to be ravenous to eat under hostile silent stares. Sometimes the inhabitants, finding no harm in the men, became cordial and even friendly. They asked questions about the South and discussed the war. Twenty-year-old Edward Moore, who had enlisted in the Rockbridge Artillery during his freshman year at Washington College, visited a house with three pretty daughters who actually encouraged him on the invasion. “They said,” he reported, “they did not dislike rebels, and if we would go on to Washington and kill Lincoln, and end the war, they would rejoice.”
    In Moore’s four-gun battery there was a Maryland volunteer from Hagerstown, Private Merrick, a lawyer who had been educated abroad and who had become the battery scarecrow. Campaigning in Virginia, he had been too far from home to supplement his uniform with old civilian clothes, as did the others, and a particularly skinny six-foot frame made it impossible for Merrick to get a fair fit from the government issue or battlefield gleanings. His coat and pants always failed to meet by several inches, and, in the space between, his soiled white cotton shirt looked like some kind of raffish sash. Merrick insisted on covering his thin hair with a gray cap, and his shoes somehow got to be the color of rust.
    On the trip northward the beggarly-looking scholar disappeared from camp without a word. Later a handsome carriage drove up to the battery’s bivouac, and three stylishly dressed gentlemen stepped out. One of these fashion-plates was Merrick. He introduced his friends, who passed a bottle around, and the Rockbridge battery-composed almost entirely of former college students from the Lexington, Virginia, area-never spent a more pleasant evening. Then the elegant friends departed, and Merrick, still without a word of explanation but still in his fashionable clothes, returned to his place on the gun-limber as the guns and caissons rolled northward.
    Such desperate need as Lawyer Merrick’s was required to evade the unusually strict discipline under which the Army of Northern Virginia marched on the invasion. On their own land the men of this most informal of armies had never behaved so well.
    With whole communities of their homeland in ashes behind them and thousands of dispossessed families crowding into its cities, they did not burn a single house. They were