Lee's guns opened the fateful day. For hours his lines blazed with the
steady sullen boom of artillery and rattle of musketry. Hooker's hosts
replied in kind.
At noon a shout swept the Federal lines that Lee's army was in retreat.
Sickles' division could see the long grey waves hurrying to the rear.
They were close enough to note the ragged, dirty, nondescript clothes
Jackson's men wore. No man in all the Union hosts doubted for a moment
that Lee had seen the hopelessness of his position and was hurrying to
save his little army of sixty-two thousand men from being crushed into
pulp by the jaws of a hundred and thirty thousand in two grand divisions
closing in on him. It was a reasonable supposition--always barring the
utterly unexpected--another name for Stonewall Jackson, whom they seemed
to have forgotten for the moment.
Sickles, seeing the "retreat," sent a courier flying to Hooker, asking
for permission to follow the fugitives with his twenty thousand men.
Hooker consented, and Sickles leaped from his entrenchments and set out
in mad haste to overtake the flying columns. He got nearly ten miles in
the woods away from the battle lines before he realized that the ghostly
men in grey had made good their escape. Certainly they had disappeared
from view.
It was five o'clock in the afternoon when Jackson's swift, silent
marchers began to draw near to the unsuspecting right wing of Hooker's
army under the command of General Howard.
Pages:
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411