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rattlesnake-infested country, without food or maps. Seven days later, Watson staggered into the border town of Van Buren, four hundred miles from Van Dorn’s stated destination of St. Louis. In retrospect, Watson admitted, “I never got what the Americans would call the ‘hang’ of this battle.… It was a mass of mixed up confusion from beginning to end.”38 Nevertheless the outcome was clear; the Confederates had suffered 2,000 casualties, the Federals 1,384, and General Curtis’s victory ensured that the key border state of Missouri would stay in Northern hands.

This Federal victory in the west made General McClellan’s failure to commit the Army of the Potomac in a major battle look all the more inexplicable. Lincoln had tolerated the general’s arrogance (though he did not know that McClellan referred to him as “the gorilla”) and shown leniency when the army did not advance into Virginia on February 22 as directed. But his patience was now at an end. Lincoln ordered McClellan to have the Army of the Potomac in motion no later than March 18. Russell could hardly believe that something was finally going to happen after almost eight months of anticipation. He visited McClellan’s headquarters and asked permission to accompany the march. McClellan agreed, with the usual proviso that Russell first obtain the necessary pass from the War Department. As Russell busily wrote letters of request, reports began to filter through of a general retreat by the Confederate army. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston had also heard of McClellan’s order to move south and had concluded that his own army of 40,000 men would be wiped out in its present position near Manassas. On March 8, Private Sam Hill and the 6th Louisiana were ordered to dismantle the camp that had been their home since July of the previous year and prepare to march twenty-five miles south of Manassas to the Rappahannock River. Leaving behind nearly everything of value, including precious batteries, food supplies, and arms, Johnston’s army trudged along single-track roads through incessant rain. Many fell sick with chills and diarrhea. “I remained doing what I could,” wrote Sam’s sister, Mary Sophia Hill, about her own activities during the dreadful trek through knee-deep mud. She had left the regiment in December in order to visit New Orleans “to see my sister, and get money from Ireland.” The blockade prevented her remittance from coming in, but Mary still raised $150 in donations for the regiment and obtained several boxes of clothes and medicines. Her efforts were for naught, however; by the time she eventually reached Virginia, all but one of her trunks had been stolen. The old civilities of the South were gradually giving way to a harsher reality. Richmond itself was under martial law.

Sam Hill’s brigade finally reached its new camp on the south bank of the Rappahannock on March 17, acting as the rear guard while the rest of Johnston’s army continued on to Orange Court House, an Italianate building in a town of that name, with sweeping steps and a rectangular bell tower not unlike some of the grand residences in New Orleans. Mary managed to find rooms in a little cottage nearby. Here was a pleasant place to rest, even under the leaden skies of a wintry spring. Although the Louisianans were waiting for orders, Mary was kept busy with wounds and injuries, often the result of fighting among members of Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat’s 1st Louisiana Special Battalion. The Louisiana “Tigers” were such a lawless lot that the commander of the Louisiana Brigade had two of them executed by firing squad. Major Wheat was a veteran of Garibaldi’s Sicily campaign, and in March he received a visit from a friend he had not seen since leaving Italy. The visitor was Henry MacIver, the young man who had annoyed William Howard Russell by asking for directions on how to sneak across Federal lines after Bull Run. MacIver had managed to escape his prison cell in Alexandria, steal the clothes and weapon of a Union soldier, and slip into Confederate territory. After being briefly detained as a