On the following morning and the morning after, Ewell’s corps followed Longstreet in two divisions toward the general rendezvous at Culpeper Court House, but Lee himself, although most of his troops were now gone, did not yet move. Hill’s corps had been held to cover any movement of the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg, and Lee and his staff remained there for three days after Longstreet’s departure.
The Invincibles had gone, but Harry and Dalton were just behind Lee, who sat on his white horse, Traveler, gazing through his glasses toward a division of the Army of the Potomac which on the day before had crossed the Rappahannock, under a heavy fire from Hill’s men.
But Harry knew that it was no part of Lee’s plan to drive these men back across the river. A. P. Hill on the heights would hold them and would be a screen between Hooker’s army and his own. So the young staff officer merely watched his commander who looked long through his glasses.
It was now nearly noon, and the June sky was brilliant with the sun moving slowly toward the zenith. Lee at length lowered his glasses and, turning to his staff, said:
“Now, gentlemen, we ride.”
Harry by some chance looked at his watch, and he always remembered that it was exactly noon when he started on the journey that was to lead him to Gettysburg. He and Dalton from a high crest looked back toward the vast panorama of hills, valleys, rivers and forest that had held for them so many thrilling and terrible memories.
There lay the blackened ruins of Fredericksburg. There were the heights against which the brave Northern brigades had beat in vain and with such awful losses. And beyond, far down under the horizon, was the tragic Wilderness in which they had won Chancellorsville and in which Jackson had fallen. Harry choked and turned away from the fresh wound that the recollection gave him.
Lee and his staff rode hard all that afternoon and most of the night through territory guarded well against Northern skirmishers or raiding bands, and the next day they were with the army at Culpeper Court House. Meanwhile Hooker was undecided whether to follow Lee or move on Richmond. But the shrewd Lincoln telegraphed him that Lee was his “true objective.” At that moment the man in the White House at Washington was the most valuable general the North had, knowing that Lee in the field with his great fighting force must be beaten back, and that otherwise Richmond would be worth nothing.
It was Harry’s fortune in the most impressionable period of life to be in close contact for a long time with two very great men, both of whom had a vast influence upon him, creating for him new standards of energy and conduct. In after years when he thought of Lee and Jackson, which was nearly every day, no weighing of the causes involved in the quarrel between the sections was made in his mind. They were his heroes, and personally they could do no wrong.
As Lee rode on with his staff through the fair Virginia country he talked little, but more than was Jackson’s custom. Harry saw his brow wrinkle now and then with thought. He knew that he was planning, planning all the time, and he knew, too, what a tremendous task it was to bring all the scattered divisions of an army to one central point in the face of an active enemy. This task was even greater than Harry imagined, as Lee’s army would soon be strung along a line of a hundred miles, and a far-seeing enemy might cut it apart and beat it in detail. Lee knew, but he showed no sign.
Harry felt an additional elation because he rode westward and toward that valley in which he had followed Jackson through the thick of great achievements. In the North they had nicknamed it “The Valley of Humiliation,” but Jackson was gone, and Milroy, whom he had defeated once, was there again, holding and ruling the little city of Winchester. Harry’s blood grew hot, because he, too, as Jackson had, loved Winchester. He did not know what was in Lee’s mind, but he hoped that a blow would be struck at Milroy before they began the great invasion of the North.