by Rod Gragg
Hungry Confederate soldiers take a break from the march to enjoy corn confiscated from a roadside cornfield.
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
As they took up the “route step”—a steady, measured marching pace—Lee’s soldiers knew they were heading toward the North and toward battle, even if they did not know their exact destination. “Some think we are going to Maryland,” one wrote home, “but we don’t know.” Penned another, “I must confess it seems to me ... that it would be quite as well to concentrate everything in the valley of Va. and advance on Philadelphia.” Other soldiers wrote to loved ones what they knew might be final farewells. “If I never see you again my prayer is to meet you in heaven,” one man corresponded to his wife. “Take good care of my little girl and train her to love God....”
Lee’s march occurred during a sweltering summer heat wave, which cloaked the marching columns in clouds of dust and left the roadsides lined with exhausted, sweating soldiers. Some even died of heatstroke. “It looked hard to see so many men lying on the side of the road almost smothering with heat,” one soldier wrote. “May the Good Lord take care of the poor soldiers.” In some areas along the route, the severe heat was interrupted by thunderstorms, which brought different but equal misery to the troops. Virginia soldier George S. Bernard, a private in Lee’s Third Corps, would later pen a memoir of the march based on a detailed journal he kept.
Wednesday, June 17.—Started this morning about 10 o’clock and marched the first three or four miles very rapidly. The weather to-day excessively hot and straggling commenced very early. The roadsides were soon lined with stragglers, many of whom were completely exhausted by the heat, many suffering from and some dying, it was said, with sunstroke. When the brigade made its first halt to rest, it was a mere skeleton of what it was when it started, so many were behind. About sunset the division went into camp ... at night the heat was so great that it was difficult to sleep.
As depicted in this period sketch, Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley offered a sheltered highway from Virginia into Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Library of Congress
Friday, June 19.—Started about sunrise and halted about midday on a high hill within a mile of and overlooking the village of Front Royal [Warren] county, having crossed the Blue Ridge at Thornton Gap. The scenery along the route was exceedingly beautiful—in some places very wild. We were struck with the luxuriant richness of the country on both sides of the mountains. How it contrasted with the worn out and devastated country to which we had so long been accustomed! About 4 o’clock P.M. our march is resumed. We pass through the town of Front Royal, our bands playing and the men cheering as the ladies wave their handkerchiefs to us.
Saturday, June 20—Last night was very bad on the men in consequence of the heavy rain. Just as my messmate and myself had about fallen asleep the water from the soft and wet ground where our bed was made soaked through our underlying oil cloth and blanket, and through the thick sleeves of my woolen shirt and coat, and reaching my skin thus reminded me of the uncanny condition of things. We at once got up and found it raining a little, but some of the men had already begun to make fires from the rails of a neighboring fence. To one of these fires we repaired and spent the remainder of the night alternately drying and warming one side of our clothes and bodies whilst the other side was getting a fresh wetting from the falling rain.
Sunday, June 21—This morning one day’s rations of corn bread issued to us. The country through which we are now marching is very beautiful. The lands very fine. The roads are general macadamized roads, made with limestone, which abounds in this region.
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“The Ladies Wave Their Handkerchiefs to Us”
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[Tuesday,] June 23—Left our camp near Berryville about 12-1/2 P.M., yesterday, passed through Berryville and halted about sunset about three miles from Charlestown, marching 9 miles. Started again this morning soon after daylight, marched through Charlestown and halted a few minutes ago, 11 A.M., at this place, having marched about 12 miles. Berryville is an ugly little place, but Charlestown on the other hand is quite pretty. The ladies of the latter place turned out in large numbers to see us. I scarcely ever before heard such cheering as the boys gave this morning.
Wednesday, June 24.—On Picket near Shepherdstown. Last evening about sunset our regiment was ordered on picket, and is now on duty about 3/4 of a mile east of the point we left, and in the direction of Harper’s Ferry. Everything quiet last night. We heard yesterday that Gen. Lee has issued very stringent orders to secure respect for private property when we get into the enemy’s country. We are all still utterly ignorant of Gen. Lee’s design in making this move, but the army was never in better spirits or more confident of success.3
“We Crossed the River in Primitive Style”
Lee’s Army Leaves the South Behind and Advances toward Pennsylvania
Preceded by Jenkins’s cavalry, troops from Lee’s Second Corps began crossing the Potomac River on June 15, followed, over the course of more than a week, by the rest of the army. The bridges spanning the Potomac in the region had been burned earlier in the war, so the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the river at long-standing fords near Williamsport, Maryland, and Shepherdstown, Virginia. Although claimed by the Confederacy, Maryland was firmly secured in the Union by Federal forces, and Lee’s troops viewed fording the Potomac into Maryland as symbolically crossing into enemy country. Twenty-eight-year-old Julius Lineback, a musician in the 26th North Carolina Infantry, recorded his regiment’s crossing in his personal diary.
June 25th—We made an early start again. Sam still being and I not at all well. The colonel ordered that in the future as we were going into camp, we should play, “The Campbells Are Coming” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me” when leaving. Soon we came to the Potomac River, which was pretty wide and a halfthigh deep. Taking off our shoes, socks, pants and drawers, we made a comical looking set of men. Many did not take the trouble of undressing even partially.
Just as I reached the Maryland side of the river, I stumbled and fell on my knees, doing involuntary homage to the state. When we were again dressed, one of the men asked us to play “Maryland, My Maryland.”
For nineteen-year-old Private Thomas Perrett, a soldier in Lineback’s regiment, the amusing image of thousands of naked soldiers wading through the river in “primitive style” was not the overwhelming memory he would retain from the event. Instead, what he would never forget was the rough, plaintive chorus of “Maryland, My Maryland” sung by legions of young Southern soldiers as they stepped onto the Maryland shore.
Lee’s soldiers doff uniforms and equipment to ford the Potomac River.
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
This 1863 sketch by artist Alfred Waud depicts troops of Lee’s army as they appeared while crossing the Potomac near Williamsport, Maryland.
Library of Congress
We marched on to the Potomac near Shepherdstown, where we crossed the river in primitive style and stopped on the Maryland side to adjust deranged apparel and get the Regiment in line. While here in waiting, some soldier boys strike up the song “My Maryland,” and by inspiration it is taken up by many voices and sung with much fervor and pathos.
This incident has lingered with me all through long years as the sad memory of a trouble dream. Many of my comrades, companions of my youth, were then looking for the last time upon the receding shores of their beloved Southland, and were marching away to meet a soldier’s fate and fill and unmarked grave. As the last song floats away and dies in echo on the bosom of the river, we take up the line of march again....4
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“The Sad Memory of a Troubled Dream”
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“Look at Pharaoh’s Army Going to the Red Sea”
Lee’s Army Encounters a Land of Plenty in Pennsylvania
By June 27, all three corps of Lee’s 75,000-man army had crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania—on North
ern soil. “They came in close marching order,” a Northern civilian would later remember. “Many were ragged, shoeless, and filthy, [but] all were well-armed and under perfect discipline.” Unlike much of war-torn Virginia, the Pennsylvania countryside was green and flourishing as it neared harvest time—“overflowing with wealth & fatness,” noted a young Southerner. “Our men have purchased vast numbers of chickens, ducks, pigs, and lots of butter, milk and honey, at Yankee prices,” reported another, “paying for them with Confederate money.”
As the dust-covered Confederate legions tramped through the small hamlets of south-central Pennsylvania—each “a little one-horse town,” in the words of one Southern soldier—they were viewed with a mixture of curiosity, fear, and hostility by Northern civilians. “We find the people here cowed by the presence of our army,” one of Lee’s soldiers observed. “The men are cringing, cowardly scoundrels and perfect dollar worshippers. Some of the women are spirited and spunky....” One bold Northern woman yelled out at the passing Rebels, “Look at Pharaoh’s army going to the Red Sea.” Another taunted, “What rags and tatters!” to the passing troops. “Very true, very true,” shouted a Southern soldier in response, “but we always put on our worst duds when we start out to butcher”—a reply that caused the female heckler to visibly pale.
In this nineteenth century postwar photograph, Pennsylvania farmers near Gettysburg gather their hay harvest much as they did in the summer of 1863.
Library of Congress
“I felt when I first came here, that I would like to revenge myself upon these people for the desolation they have brought upon our own beautiful home,” a Confederate officer wrote his wife, “yet I could not find it in my heart to molest them.” Horses, mules, cattle, and supplies were officially commandeered for Lee’s army in large quantities, but were usually paid for—in Confederate currency or promissory notes. Railroad tracks, bridges, trestles, an ironworks, and other designated military targets were destroyed—largely by Major General Jubal Early’s division of advance guard troops, who, at one point, formed a bucket brigade to extinguish fires that had spread to civilian structures. “With the exception of a few instances,” a Pennsylvania civilian observed, “private houses were not entered with hostile intent. I must say that from all the conceptions from history of the desolation of an invading army ... this invasion of our State widely differed.”
Confederate foragers round up horses, cattle, and other livestock in Pennsylvania—paid for with Confederate money.
Leslie’s Illustrated
The difference may have been the result of Lee’s orders, which commanded his troops to respect private property and maintain discipline in the ranks, and which were generally enforced by his officers. For example, General Order Number 73 stipulated that the Army of Northern Virginia “make war only upon armed men.”
Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia
General Order, No. 73
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, June 27, 1863
The commanding general has observed with marked satisfaction the conduct of the troops on the march, and confidently anticipates results commensurate with the high spirit they have manifested. No troops could have displayed greater fortitude or better performed the arduous marches of the past ten days. Their conduct in other respects has with few exceptions been in keeping with their character as soldiers, and entitles them to approbation and praise. There have however been instances of forgetfulness on the part of some, that they have in keeping the yet unsullied reputation of the army, and that the duties expected of us by civilization and Christianity are not less obligatory in the country of the enemy than in our own.
Thirsty Southern soldiers take a break from the march to haul water from a farmhouse well.
National Archives
The commanding general considers that no greater disgrace could befall the army, and through it our whole people, than the perpetration of the barbarous outrages upon the unarmed, and defenceless and the wanton destruction of private property that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country. Such proceedings not only degrade the perpetrators and all connected with them, but are subversive of the discipline and efficiency of the army, and destructive of the ends of our present movement.
It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.
The commanding general therefore earnestly exhorts the troops to abstain with most scrupulous care from unnecessary or wanton injury to private property, and he enjoins upon all officers to arrest and bring to summary punishment all who shall in any way offend against the orders on this subject.
R. E. Lee
General5
“He Acts like a Man without a Plan”
General Hooker Resigns Command of the Army of the Potomac
In happier times, General Joseph Hooker, seated second from right, posed for a group photograph with his staff prior to his resignation from command.
National Archives
President Lincoln urged General Hooker to attack Lee’s army while it was on the march. On June 14, the president sent Hooker a telegram, noting that Lee’s army was then stretched from Fredericksburg through the Shenandoah Valley and almost to Maryland—and was surely vulnerable to attack. “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville,” Lincoln wrote, “the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?” Hooker, however, was still unnerved and indecisive from his humiliating defeat by Lee at the Battle of Chancellorsville. “He acts like a man without a plan and is entirely at a loss what to do,” one of Hooker’s staff confided to his diary. “He knows that Lee is his master & is afraid to meet him in fair battle.”
Hooker dutifully put the Army of the Potomac on the march, heading northward on a route that shielded Washington, D.C., from attack, but for two weeks he did little more than trail Lee. Fretting that he was outnumbered, he exaggerated the size of Lee’s army to more than 100,000 troops. He also grew increasingly resentful to questions and proposals from his immediate superior, General in Chief Henry W. Halleck, and even from President Lincoln. “The nature of the control to be exercised by me I would like to have distinctly and clearly fixed and understood,” he grumbled to Halleck at one point. Finally, on June 27, 1863, after Halleck had advised him to include protection of the Federal garrison at Harpers Ferry in his plans, Hooker peevishly tendered his resignation. Instead of offering reassurances, the General in Chief simply forwarded Hooker’s request to President Lincoln, reprinted below.
Sandy Hook, June 27, 1863, 1 p.m.
Major General H.W. Halleck,
General-in-Chief:
My original instructions require me to cover Harper’s Ferry and Washington. I have now imposed upon me, in addition, an enemy in my front of more than my numbers. I beg to be understood, respectfully but firmly, that I am unable to comply with this condition, with the means at my disposal, and earnestly request that I may at once be relieved from the position I occupy.
Joseph Hooker,
Major-General.
President Abraham Lincoln, summer of 1863.
Library of Congress
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“He Knows That Lee is His Master”
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Washington, D.C.,
June 27, 1863, 8 p.m.
Major General Hooker,
Army of the Potomac:
Your application to be relieved from your present command is received. As you were appointed to this command by the President, I have no power to relieve you. Your dispatch has been duly referred for Executive action.
H.W. Halleck,
General-in- Chief 6
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“Let Each Man
Determine to Do His Duty”
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“Meade Will Fight Well on His Own Dunghill”
The Army of the Potomac Gets a New Commander
President Lincoln quickly relieved General Hooker of command, acting within hours of receiving the general’s request. He worried aloud about changing commanders on the eve of what was certain to be a major battle. “While crossing a stream,” he observed, “it is too late to change horses.” He considered Hooker to be “a beaten general,” however, and seized the opportunity to remove him as army commander. But who could he name as a replacement? Including Hooker, three high-ranking officers now had been appointed—and removed—as heads of the Army of the Potomac.
