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Updated: June 2, 2025
From prisoners taken during the day, I gathered that General Hunter, instead of coming toward Charlottesville, as I had reason to expect, both from the instructions given me and the directions sent him by General Grant, was in the neighborhood of Lexington apparently moving on Lynchburg and that Breckenridge was at Gordonsville and Charlottesville.
So, over the Hickory road, leading up the northern bank of the Appomattox, in the direction of Lynchburg amid the explosion of magazines, surging upward like volcanoes, the old army of Northern Virginia, reduced to fifteen thousand men, went forth, still defiant, into the night. Three hours afterward I was in Richmond.
If it did not, he would have been within easy distance of the James River Canal, on the main line of communication between Lynchburg and the force sent for its defence.
Sufficient cavalry should be left behind to look after Mosby's gang. From Lynchburg, if information you might get there would justify it, you will strike south, heading the streams in Virgina to the westward of Danville, and push on and join General Sherman.
Fearing the possibility of the enemy falling back to Lynchburg, and afterward attempting to go into East Tennessee or Kentucky, I have ordered Thomas to move the Fourth Corps to Bull's Gap, and to fortify there, and to hold out to the Virginia line, if he can.
He was arrested, of course, and being searched there was found in his boots this telegram in duplicate, signed by Lee's Commissary General. "The army is at Amelia Court House, short of provisions. Send 300,000 rations quickly to Burkeville Junction." One copy was addressed to the supply department at Danville, and the other to that at Lynchburg.
And it was his good fortune, rather than any lack of battle hazards, that brought him through the four fighting years to the Appomattox end of that last running fight on the Petersburg and Lynchburg road in which, with his own hands, he had helped to destroy the guns of his battery.
Finally, however, on the 12th of March, he did push down through the north-western end of South Carolina, creating some consternation. I also directed him to concentrate supplies at Knoxville, with a view to a probable movement of his army through that way toward Lynchburg. Goldsboro is four hundred and twenty-five miles from Savannah.
On the 31st of January I countermanded the orders given to Thomas to move south to Alabama and Georgia. Thomas did not get Stoneman off in time, but, on the contrary, when I had supposed he was on his march in support of Sherman I heard of his being in Louisville, Kentucky. I immediately changed the order, and directed Thomas to send him toward Lynchburg.
He could not go to Lynchburg as ordered, because the rains had been so very heavy and the streams were so very much swollen. He had a pontoon train with him, but it would not reach half way across some of the streams, at their then stage of water, which he would have to get over in going south as first ordered.
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