State

Costly Cigar Wrapper The Lost Order By BURKE DAVIS In the first week of September 1862. when the roasting ears were ripening in Maryland and his troops were close to starvation. Marsc Robert Lee took his army of Northern Virginia north¬ ward over the Potomac. Like most breathless moments of history, it was lacking in grandeur. It was an army of scarecrows, fresh from a staggering series of battles of the first modern war. It was on its way to con¬ quer the North and finish the Civil War. There was reason to believe it might do just that. Since June. Lee had whipped off a vastly superior army which surrounded Richmond, and Stonewall Jackson had routed three armies which had been chasing him through the Shenandoah. This army had always outdone the Yankees. Now it was going to sack the big cities of the North, and tear apart the Union army on its own ground. The troops, cadaverously lean, limp¬ ing and barefoot, with guns on squeal¬ ing. wobbling wheels, the horses bonebags, poured over the shallow Potomac for two days. Eye-witnesses were strongly impressed: "They were the dirtiest set of men I ever saw. a most ragged, lean and hungry set of wolves. Yet there was a dash about them that the Northern men lacked. They rode like circus riders. . . . They were profane beyond belief, and talked incessantly." wrote a boy who saw them enter Maryland. A newspaper correspondent watched the lank-haired, unshaven, filthy, ragged stream of men: "Ire¬ land in her worst straits could present no parallel." he wrote. At any rate, the army waded to Maryland, its tom battle flags flying, and its muskets clean and ready. It also dropped off thousands of men in its wake, for desertion then was crip¬ pling Lee. He took about 50.000 to the river with him. Near Frederick, on September 9, he and Stonewall Jackson laid their plans: They would sweep northwest to Hag¬ erstown. unopposed, and then would lie only 71 miles from Harrisburg, capital of Pennsylvania. They could tear up two vital railroads, the В & О and Pennsylvania, and thus cut the Union in to. preventing reinforce¬ ments from the west. Then Lee could deal with General George McClellan and his host, and sack the Yankee cities at his will. The plan seemed reasonable to al¬ most all the high Confederate officers that night, and. in light of the situa¬ tion of the time, still seems so. A tiny scrap of paper, carelessly handled, was to put it all to naught, and dim the brightest hope of the Confederacy. A world-famed copy of that notor¬ ious scrap of paper, the most talkcd- about document in American military history, is now in the files of the Stale Department of Archives and History in Raleigh. On the night of Septem¬ ber 9. 1S62, in Lee's tent outside Fred¬ erick. Md., no one dreamed of such a course of events. Lee, ever the painstaking strategist, put his mind to the complicated moves his army would have to walk through before he could plunge into the North. He would capture Harpers Ferry first, removing a Yankee outpost on his rear. Finding of this scrap of paper may have saved the north from sacking by Lee’s army. Top, General Stonewall Jackson; be low. General I). II. Hill. and making safe his line of supply am communication. To do so, he wa obliged to split his army into severa segments, virtually in the face of th< enemy. Lee knew- what he was about, am that he was taking long chances, bu he also knew his opponent. McCIcl Ian, an old friend of Mexican Wa days. He knew that McClellan wouk be over-cautious, despite the fact th he outnumbered Lee by almost 2 to He knew the Yankees would be slov to commit themselves. Lee told a subordinate: "McClellai will not think his army fit to move fo; three or four weeks. By that time hope to be on the Susquehanna." Bu for the ironic touch Fate was about tc THE STATE. January 17. 195!