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The next day, the 22nd, the army, with Ewell leading, moved quietly down the Luray Valley, and the advanced guard, Taylor's Louisianians, a six-pounder battery, and the 6th Virginia Cavalry, bivouacked that night within ten miles of Front Royal, held by a strong detachment of Banks' small army.
Fremont, using parallel roads, hung upon the right; he must be pushed back to the mountains as they passed up the Valley pike. All morning blue cavalry menaced the Stonewall; to the north a dense southward moving cloud proclaimed a larger force. Mid-day found Winder deployed on both sides of the pike, with four guns in position. The Louisianians sent back to know if they could help.
The two Democrats went further, and declared that Governor Kellogg himself held by no rightful tenure. But the Republicans backed a compromise offered by Wheeler, which the Louisianians accepted, the Democrats took the Legislature, while the Republicans kept the governorship. The returning board survived, to put in its deadly work two years later. We turn back to the course of national politics.
"Resolved, That as Louisianians, as Southerners, as Americans, we proudly claim our share in the fame of Lee as an inheritance rightfully belonging to us, and endowed with which we shall piously cherish, though all calamities should rain upon us, true poverty the poverty indeed that abases and starves the spirit can never approach us with its noisome breath and withering look.
An aide, stretched like an Indian along the neck of his galloping horse, came to the skirmishers. "All right, Cleave! Go ahead! The Louisianians are pawing the ground! Shade of Alexander Hamilton, listen to that!" "That" was the "Marseillaise," grandly played. Tramp, tramp! the Louisianians came on to its strains.
Glancing from the window, I noticed that for some better convenience our scouts had left the grove, and the prisoners had been marched in and huddled close to the veranda-steps, under their heavy marching-guard of Louisianians. One of the blue-coats called up to me softly: "Dying really?" He turned to his fellows "Boys, Captain's dying."
The tall, soldierly Tennesseeans, of whom their commander said, when asked if he could take and hold a position of transcendent danger, "Give me my Tennesseeans, and I'll take and hold anything;" the determined, ever-ready Texans, who, under the immortal Terry, so distinguished themselves, and under other leaders in every battle of the war won undying laurels; North Carolinians, of whose courage in battle I needed no better proof than the pluck they invariably showed under the torture of fevered wounds or of the surgeon's knife; exiled Kentuckians, Arkansians, Georgians, Louisianians, Missourians, Marylanders, sternly resentful, and impatient of the wounds that kept them from the battle-field, because ever hoping to strike some blow that should sever a link in the chains which bound the homes they so loved; Alabamians, the number of whose regiments, as well as their frequent consolidation, spoke volumes for their splendid service; Georgians, who, having fought with desperate valor, now lay suffering and dying within the confines of their own State, yet unable to reach the loved ones who, unknowing what their fate might be, awaited with trembling hearts accounts of the battle, so slow in reaching them; Mississippians, of whom I have often heard it said, "their fighting and staying qualities were magnificent," I then knew hundreds of instances of individual valor, of which my remembrance is now so dim that I dare not give names or dates.
Their coming was most opportune, and but a short time elapsed before the comparative quiet was interrupted first by volleys, followed by a continuous roar of battle. Our battery was now ordered to the left of our line, and on the way thither joined Raines's battery, of Lynchburg, and a battery of Louisianians eleven guns in all.
Being largely Valley of Virginia Virginians, Louisianians, Georgians, Texans, and North Carolinians, the army had acquaintance slight or none with the country through which it was passing. Gordonsville left behind, unfamiliarity began. "What's this county? What's that place over there? What's that river? Can't be the Potomac, can it? Naw, 't aint wide enough!"
But at this moment the lines of the assailant came to a sudden halt; and along the slopes of the Blue Ridge a heavy crash of musketry, the rapid discharges of the guns, and the charging yell of the Southern infantry, told of a renewed attack upon the battery on the mountain side. The Louisianians had come up in the very nick of time.
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