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Plunder was more in the line of these gentry than honest fighting. I spoke to the leader of the post, and he was for falling upon them in the narrows of the Rapidan. Their victory over the Meebaws had fired the blood of the Borderers, and made them contemptuous of the enemy. Still, in such a predicament, when we had to hold a frontier with a handful, the boldest course was likely to be the safest.
The field was yet in our hands; yet the battle could hardly be called a decided victory for our arms. Jackson retreated rapidly across the Rapidan, in the direction of Gordonsville, leaving many dead and wounded along the road from Cedar Mountain to Orange Court House.
But they were menaced both from the mountains and the sea; and if the Union forces conquered Virginia and Georgia, then the Carolinas were certain to be ground into subjugation between Grant's victorious forces on the north and Sherman's on the south. Grant fixed his own headquarters with the Army of the Potomac at Culpeper Court House, north of the Rapidan.
Men who have been honoured with their leader's confidence, and who grasp the purpose of the efforts they are called upon to make, will co-operate, if not more cordially, at least more intelligently, than those who are impelled by the sense of duty alone. As it was, so much time had been wasted that Jackson would have been fully warranted in suspending the movement, and halting on the Rapidan.
It's the business of an aide-de-camp carrying despatches to steal as quietly as possible through an enemy's country, and the one fatal thing is to be captured. So I concluded I wouldn't get into the thick of it till I had to, but would turn west and make a détour, crossing by Morton's Ford, farther up the Rapidan.
This military expression suddenly sent my thoughts elsewhere; and for some time the rattling of the cars sounded in my ears like another rattling, and the gentle Charles River was to my eyes the historic Rapidan or Rappahannock. "Don't you think," unobtrusively ticked my watch, "that the exhortation to encourage home-industry has a peculiar force just now?
I ought to relate at length how they were not dead, and how they in due time recovered, but for the moment I think of a fine sight, and a weeping face, which I saw in the woods below Verdiersville. Let us ride thither, reader, it will not take long. In December, then, General Meade crossed the lower Rapidan, and advanced to assail General Lee in his works above. A fiasco followed.
Burnside, Sedgwick, and Warren had all kept up an assault during all this time; but their efforts had no other effect than to prevent the enemy from reinforcing his right from the troops in their front. I had, on the 5th, ordered all the bridges over the Rapidan to be taken up except one at Germania Ford. The troops on Sedgwick's right had been sent to enforce our left.
I started south of the Rapidan, to cross it and go north, hoping to find our army victorious and south of the Rappahannock. Which I didn't but that's farther along. Well, we were off at daylight, ten men and the officer me. It was a fine spring morning, and the bunch of horsemen made a pretty sight as the sun came up, moving through the greenness the foliage is well out down there in May.
Hancock, with the 2d corps, moved by another road, farther east, directly upon Ely's Ford, six miles below Germania, preceded by Gregg's division of cavalry, and followed by the artillery. Torbert's division of cavalry was left north of the Rapidan, for the time, to picket the river and prevent the enemy from crossing and getting into our rear.
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