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Then, snatching up the precious parchment on which the Declaration of Independence was written, and which contained the names of the fifty-six signers of that document, she entered the carriage with her sister and two others, and the four were driven away to a place of safety beyond the Potomac. The picture was saved, and it now adorns one of the reception rooms in the White House.
Doubtless this outbreak had been intended at the time of the darkest and most disastrous days of the Republic; when the often-defeated and sorely dispirited Army of the Potomac was marching northward to cover Washington and Baltimore, and the victorious legions of traitors under Lee were swelling across the border, into a loyal State; when Grant stood in seemingly hopeless waiting before Vicksburg, and Banks before Port Hudson; and the whole people of the North, depressed and disheartened by the continued series of defeats to our arms, were beginning to look each at his neighbor, and whisper with white lips, "Perhaps, after all, this struggle is to be in vain."
These she should tie up in a salt bag, and put in the next box sent by the society of which she seemed to be head and front, "kind of fust directress," she said, and Bell was interested at once, for among the soldiers down by the Potomac was one who carried with him the whole of Bell Cameron's heart; and who for a few days had tarried at just such a dwelling as the farmhouse, writing back to her such pleasant descriptions of it, with its fresh grass and shadowy trees, that she had longed to be there too.
Meanwhile very few salmon reach the spawning grounds, and probably four years hence the fisheries will amount to nothing; and this comes from a struggle between the associated, or gill-net, fishermen on the one hand, and the owners of the fishing wheels up the river. The fisheries of the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Potomac are also in a bad way.
He studied maps of campaigns and battle-fields, until they became alive with human passion and struggle; he knew the Army of the Potomac by brigade and division, with the names of commanders, and their faces, and their ways-until they lived and spoke, and the bare roll of their names had power to thrill him.
The mansion was beautifully situated on a swelling height, crowned with wood, and commanding a magnificent view up and down the Potomac. The grounds immediately about it were laid out somewhat in the English taste. The estate was apportioned into separate farms, devoted to different kinds of culture, each having its allotted laborers.
We would then have the Potomac to bring our supplies, and the tributaries would protect our flanks while we moved out. I listened respectfully, but did not suggest that the same streams would protect Lee's flanks while he was shutting us up." Grant set out for the front in Virginia.
When the attempt to take Petersburg in conjunction with the mine explosion resulted in such a dismal failure, all the operations contemplated in connection with that project came to a standstill, and there was every prospect that the intensely hot and sultry weather would prevent further activity in the Army of the Potomac till a more propitious season.
My uncertainty of what had happened to the Army of the Potomac in our absence, and as to where I should find it, made our getting back a problem somewhat difficult of solution, particularly as I knew that reinforcements for Lee had come up from the south to Richmond, and that most likely some of these troops were being held at different points on the route to intercept my column.
Then we had the great river or bay of Chesapeake to cross, which is where the river Potomac falls into it, near thirty miles broad, and we entered more great vast waters whose names I know not, so that our voyage was full two hundred miles, in a poor, sorry sloop, with all our treasure, and if any accident had happened to us, we might at last have been very miserable; supposing we had lost our goods and saved our lives only, and had then been left naked and destitute, and in a wild, strange place not having one friend or acquaintance in all that part of the world.
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