The Boy and His Gang (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ESCAPE OF LEE FROM GETTYSBURG The Escape Of Lee. ? How It Was Efpected. ? What He Left Behind. ? A Council Of War. ? Why No Attack Was Made. Williamsport, Mo., Tuesday noon, July 14. YOU have been informed, by telegraph, of the time and manner of Lee's escape. The last six hours have demonstrated the fact that for the Eebel army to recross the Potomac, intact since Gettysburg, is nothing less than an escape. It is now palpable that from that hour, Friday night, July 3d, when Lee began to fall back, he has bent every energy to the one end of placing the Potomac between his own army and a better one. He has not for a moment ceased to elude battles. He dared not hazard another. He has improved the first practicable opportunity of recrossing the river -which limits his master's pseudo empire. Always opposing to our advancing columns a heavy rearguard, for the last five days he held each parallel ridge as though he would retreat no further, but there, once for all, accept battle. But not so. Each succeeding morning he held another line, apparently in better position and in more force than before. Half of our army was led to believe that of all things he most desired battle. Officers high in command reasoned that he could not afford to go back bleeding from defeat, but, nerved and stung by disaster, would risk everything in the " do or die " of another struggle. And was it an unreasonable hope that, in a position of his own choosing, his battered army fighting with safety ? ay, and Washington and peace ? hanging upon the result, he had more than half the chances ? The crafty Eebel leader did not think so. He remembered Gettysburg, and knew that to meet theArmy of the Potomac again would be to meet it at Philippi. And so all those days we were closing in upon him he ...