Jackson led the advance, Lee still marching left in front, giving the strictest of orders in reference to the marching and resting of his men, that they might be kept closed up, ready for meeting any attack from toward Washington, in passing, and wearied as little as possible by the dusty roads and the intense heat that had followed the preceding storms. He put a major-general, in command of a division, under arrest, while on the march, for failing to halt his command at the minute ordered, to show his officers that his orders must be promptly and thoroughly obeyed.
At Leesburg, the army was stripped of all superfluous transportation, broken down horses, and wagons and batteries not supplied with good horses, were left behind, and everything was put in the best possible condition circumstances would permit, for the campaign, under new conditions of the field of action, that was about to begin.
The glorious autumn days of the Southland had come, when, on the 5th day of September, to the martial strains of "Maryland, My Maryland" from every band in the army, and with his men cheering and shouting with delight, Jackson forded the Potomac at Edwards' ferry, where the river was broad but shallow, near the scene of Evans' victory over the Federals in the previous October, and where Wayne had crossed his Pennsylvania brigade in marching to the field of Yorktown in 1781. By the 7th of the month, Lee had concentrated the most of his army in the vicinity of Frederick City, in a land teeming with abundance. He had issued the most stringent orders, forbidding depredations on private property and requiring his quartermasters to purchase and pay for supplies for his army. On the 8th he issued a stirring proclamation, calling upon the men of Maryland to join the men of his command, gathered within their borders from their sister Southern States; appealing to their manhood to avail themselves of this opportunity to reassert their sovereign rights and join in securing the independence of the South, assuring them that his army had only come to aid them in throwing off a foreign yoke and to enable them "again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen and restore independence and sovereignty to their State." In closing he said:
