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Updated: June 5, 2025
Through the past winter, while our army lay opposite Fredericksburg, the like strings of ambulances were of frequent occurrence along Seventh street, passing slowly up from the steamboat wharf, with loads from Aquia creek. The soldiers are nearly all young men, and far more American than is generally supposed I should say nine-tenths are native-born.
The Federals fought magnificently, nine against twenty thousand men. Then followed some anxious days at Federal Headquarters. Jackson vanished; and Pope's cavalry, numerous as it was, wore itself out trying to find the clue. MeClellan was still busy moving his men from Harrison's Landing to Fortress Monroe, whence detachments kept sailing to Aquia. What would Lee do now?
The soldier from Massachusetts died in a few days; the other was able to go home in four weeks. Some time after this, I received orders to report at Camp Convalescent, Alexandria. I stayed there two weeks and then started off with a squad for the front. We arrived at Aquia Creek, on Saturday, October 13. We were put into camp there and told to wait until after the battle before proceeding further.
The camps were north and east of Slaughter Mountain, and Jackson instructed Captain Boswell, his chief engineer, who had lived in the neighbourhood, to report on the best means of turning the enemy's left flank and reaching Warrenton, thus intervening between Pope and Washington, or between Pope and Aquia Creek.
"Will they try to cross, sir?" asked Dick of the colonel. "I don't think so, but if they do we ought to beat them back. Meanwhile, Dick, my boy, every day's delay is a fresh card in our hand. McClellan is landing his army at Aquia Creek, whence it can march in two days to a junction with us, when we would become overwhelming and irresistible.
Well, at Aquia we had a great time getting the horse on the boat, indeed, he fell off the gangway, and we had to fish him out of the water. The passengers crowded me, with the horse, into a little corner in the stern of the boat, and looked at me as if I deserved lynching for bringing him on board. But that was nothing to the trouble I had with him in Washington.
If these men are half-hearted, they will write no better than they fight, and I guess if the truth could be got at, they are responsible for most of the clogging in the Commissary and Quarter-Master Departments. But you've got me off my story. At ten o'clock I staved in, just as I was, my uniform shabby, and my boots with a tolerably fair representation of Aquia mud upon them.
It is a known fact that thirty-six people were killed on the Rappahannock in one raid and that Indian retaliations of one nature or another caused the English settlements that had reached Hunting Creek to recede to Aquia, where they stayed for the next ten years.
During the time since we left Harrison's Landing Lee had cut across the country and was making it warm for Gen. Pope in the Shenandoah. The army of the Potomac, in place of following in the rear of Lee, made its slow way down the peninsula, and then shipped up the Chesapeak and Potomac, unloading at Aquia Creek, Alexandria, etc.
A week was spent at New Baltimore, and then another week on the banks of Aquia creek, not far from Stafford Court House.
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