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Having thus secured the passage of the Pedee, I felt no uneasiness about the future, because there remained no further great impediment between us and Cape Fear River, which I felt assured was by that time in possession of our friends. The day was so wet that we all kept in-doors; and about noon General Blair invited us to take lunch with him.
Lord Cornwallis remained at Wynnsborough, preparing to commence active operations, so soon as he should be joined by Leslie. The position he occupied on the Pedee was about seventy miles from Wynnsborough, and towards the north of east from that place.
Hardee had availed himself of his only remaining railroad, by Florence to Cheraw; had sent there much of his ammunition and stores, and reached it with the effective part of the garrison in time to escape across the Pedee River before our arrival.
He had already ordered his pontoon-bridge to be laid across the Pedee, there a large, deep, navigable stream, and Mower's division was already across, skirmishing with the enemy about two miles out. Cheraw was found to be full of stores which had been sent up from Charleston prior to its evacuation, and which could not be removed.
The Broad is nearer than the Pedee; and ours is the weaker of the two jaws." "Right you are," said I. "And now we know what we have to discover." "Anan?" he queried. "We must learn by hook or crook who is to be sent against Dan Morgan, and when." "That should be easy if the use of it afterward be not choked out of us at a rope's end." "We can divide the rope's-end chance of failure by two.
We remained in or near Cheraw till the 6th of March, by which time the army was mostly across the Pedee River, and was prepared to resume the march on Fayetteville. In a house where General Hardee had been, I found a late New York Tribune, of fully a month later date than any I had seen.
It was planned by the assailants to convey a portion of their force secretly down the Pedee, and land them in the water suburb of the town, which, being deemed secure, was left unguarded. This body was then to move in two divisions. The first was to force the commandant's quarters the place of parade to secure him, and all others who might flock thither on the alarm.
The floods of the Savannah, the swamps of the Combahee and Edisto, the "high hills" and rocks of the Santee, the flat quagmires of the Pedee and Cape Fear Rivers, were all passed in midwinter, with its floods and rains, in the face of an accumulating enemy; and, after the battles of Averysboro' and Bentonsville, we once more came out of the wilderness, to meet our friends at Goldsboro'. Even then we paused only long enough to get new clothing, to reload our wagons, again pushed on to Raleigh and beyond, until we met our enemy suing for peace, instead of war, and offering to submit to the injured laws of his and our country.
She had a crew of eighty men to do her fighting, and the commander confidently expected to pick up a better steamer than the Pedee, to which the greater portion of the ship's company were to be transferred. "I saw your steamer yesterday afternoon," said the captain; "but she had several other vessels near her, and I thought she might have a whole blockading squadron with her.
But no such accident happened, and towards midnight we reached the bridge across the Great Pedee River, where our train was stopped by a squad of Rebel cavalrymen, who brought the intelligence that as Kilpatrick was expected into Florence every hour, it would not do to take us there.
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