THE WAR
rebel camp a few days later at Chambersburg on our way to join Meade.
The bronze figure of a young man clutching a musket, who has just run up upon the top of a native boulder, stands at the point where the Chambersburg Pike leaves the town of Gettysburg to commemorate the services of the regiment.[1] The names of those enrolled on it, cut in a bronze tablet, will be placed in the Pennsylvania Memorial on the battlefield before the close of the present year. When I returned home, I was at once drafted. I had no idea of returning to the service in this way and my grandfather, who was much pleased with the outcome of my military experience, paid $300 for a substitute at Norristown only too willing to go to the front in my stead. I do not know of his name or his fate.
In the fall of 1863 I went to Philadelphia and boarded with a Miss Mary Whitehead on Chestnut Street below Fifth, where my Uncle Joseph had two rooms. We had a wood stove in the back room, the wood for which I threw into the cellar from Chestnut Street and there cut into pieces. Right opposite to us was the office of The Age, a newspaper which represented the Copperhead proclivities then gaining strength over the North. One of its witticisms I recall; “A Union League is three miles from any battlefield.” Richard Vaux, who had been mayor of the city, and in his youth had danced with Queen Victoria, pointed out as the man who never wore an overcoat or carried an umbrella, and who kept a long beard tucked away under his clothing, also found a Union League obnoxious. He made it a point of conduct never to walk in the square in which this club had its quarters. Perhaps the most conspicuous and at the same time the most disliked of those regarded as Copperheads in the city were William B. Reed and Charles Ingersoll. Both of them were lawyers.
- ↑ It was Governor Pennypacker who suggested that the statue should show the trousers tucked into the boot-legs to indicate the sudden change from peaceful life to the battlefield.
