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Arrived at Gordonsville, whence the army had departed for the Peninsula, we met orders to join Jackson in the Valley, and marched thither by Swift Run "Gap" the local name for mountain passes. Swift Run, an affluent of the Rapidan, has its source in this gap.
Blue forces held them stubbornly; smaller grey forces held as stubbornly the next bastion. On the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, within fifty miles of the imperilled Capital, were gathered by May one hundred and thirty thousand men in blue. Longstreet gone, there opposed them sixty-two thousand in grey. Late in April Fighting Joe Hooker put in motion "the finest army on the planet."
It was the work of two weeks to transport eighty or a hundred thousand men three hundred miles, and finding that Burnside's corps had already landed upon the Potomac, Stonewall Jackson determined to cross the Rapidan and cripple the fragment of Pope's forces stationed at Culpepper. Stonewall Jackson is one of the many men whose extraordinary military genius has been developed by the civil war.
He asked for food and drink, and I observed that his manner was very grave. "Are things in train, Andrew?" he asked. I told him "to the last stirrup buckle." "It's as well," said he, "for the trouble has begun." Then he told me a horrid tale. The Rapidan is a stream in the north of the dominion, flowing into the Rappahannock on its south bank.
It took summer, autumn, winter, and the early spring. Once across the Rapidan he was in the tract of scrubby jungle called the Wilderness. He had hoped to escape out of this unopposed and at the same time to turn Lee's right by a rapid march to his own left. But he found Lee in his way.
Then the army began to move; soon it resumed its former position; the cavalry was sent to watch the fords of the Rapidan; and Stuart returned to his own head-quarters near Orange Court-House, gayly singing, as he had left them to advance and meet the enemy. What gay memories are evoked by that familiar name!
I myself proceeded to Chancellorsville and fixed my headquarters at that place, whereon the 5th I was joined by Torbert's division. Meanwhile, General Meade had crossed the Rapidan and established his headquarters not far from Germania ford.
Our ears were greeted with the distant roar of artillery, which proved to be our artillery firing at a scouting party of United States cavalry. On through Culpepper we marched, to within one mile of Rapidan Station, our starting point of near two months before.
"That the writer who hereafter relates the true stories of this war, will be set down as a Baron Munchausen." "No doubt of that, general." "This escape of Colonel Mohun, for instance, will be discredited." "No matter, it took place; but I have not told you what brought me over, general." "Over?" "Yes, across the Rapidan. I did not go from Martinsburg to Richmond with Colonel Mohun.
Grant in Virginia.% Meantime Grant had set out from Culpeper Courthouse on May 4, 1864, crossed the Rapidan, and entered the "Wilderness," a name given to a tract of country covered with dense woods of oak and pine and thick undergrowth. The fighting was almost incessant.
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