Sunday, September 28, 2014

Diary of Major Rutherford B. Hayes: Sunday, August 18, 1861

Last night, about ten or eleven, five companies of Colonel Moor's (Second German Regiment) Twenty-eighth Regiment arrived from Clarksburg under Lieutenant-Colonel Becker. My partner, L. Markbreit, is sergeant-major. This morning, raining hard. Exciting rumors and news. A Tennessee regiment and force coming through the mountains east of Sutton — a battery of four guns, one thirty-two-pounder!! What an anchor to drag through the hills! Absurd! Danger of all provisions below here with vast stores being taken by the enemy. We are ordered to cook three days’ rations and be ready to move at a moment's warning, with forty rounds of ammunition. All trains on the route to Sutton are ordered back or to take the way to Buchanan [Buckhannon] via Frenchtown. Eighty thousand rations are ordered to same place from here. All is war. I pack my portmanteau and prepare to move. Oh, for a horse which wouldn’t founder, or get lame, or stumble! At night no order to move yet.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 71-2

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