• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7057 0

nearly twice as many as the Confederates’, the Union cavalry had come of age. Even Charles Francis Adams, Jr., whose squadron played only a small part in the fighting, gained confidence from the fight. But for Pleasonton’s mistiming of the two river crossings, he told Henry, they would have “whipped Stuart out of his boots.”29 Charles Francis Jr. was right. If Pleasonton had coordinated the corps better so that the two divisions had attacked simultaneously rather than six hours apart, Stuart would have been smashed to pieces. Reflecting on the battle many years later, one of Stuart’s officers commented that Brandy Station “made the Federal cavalry.”30 Similarly, the battle ruined Jeb Stuart’s aura of invincibility; the fact that he had ultimately held his ground did not excuse his carelessness in allowing the surprise attack or lessen the shame of his having to call on infantry reinforcements for help.

—

Lee could not afford to let the near debacle at Brandy Station slow the momentum of his army. The departure for Maryland proceeded as planned. The Second Corps under Ewell headed toward the lower Shenandoah Valley, with Longstreet following close behind. On June 13 the Third Corps quietly slipped away from Fredericksburg, leaving their Federal opponents to discover that the weeklong sparring had simply been a feint rather than the preparation for a large battle. General Hooker realized he had been tricked, but his latest intelligence told him only that the Confederate army was somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley. The best he could do was to keep the Army of the Potomac moving north while protecting Washington against surprise attacks.

The skirmishing at Fredericksburg had been a gentle introduction to warfare for Company F of the 7th Maine Infantry, a unit of new recruits that arrived in Virginia on May 23, 1863. Walking fresh into a battle-hardened regiment was not usually a pleasant experience for recruits. But the newest and youngest member of Company F had no difficulty in endearing himself to his comrades. Nineteen-year-old Frederick Farr was a runaway from England who had enlisted under the alias Frederick Clark. His father was the celebrated epidemiologist William Farr, who pinpointed the cause of the great cholera epidemic of 1848. The last that Farr Sr. had heard from his son was in January, when Frederick wrote to say he was studying hard for his civil service exams. Three weeks later, on February 26, Frederick had secretly boarded the Anglo-Saxon for Portland, Maine.

Back at home, Dr. Farr called at the American legation to swear an affidavit that Frederick was underage and had enlisted without his parents’ permission. He also fired off letters to his Northern friends in the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Statistics Office begging for their help. Joseph Kennedy of the Census Bureau petitioned Seward, Lyons, and even General Hooker on Farr’s behalf. Kennedy tried to have Frederick transferred to General Pleasonton’s staff, where his own son was an aide, and he engaged a local lawyer in Maine to visit the boy. The lawyer returned with unexpected news: the youth had only ever wanted to be a soldier and had refused his help. “He is very popular with his superior officers and is as disinclined to leave the service at present as they are indisposed to part with him.” All the lawyer could do for now was ask the regiment’s colonel and the governor of Maine (both of whom were personal friends) to take an interest in Frederick’s welfare.31

On June 8, Joseph Kennedy cornered Lord Lyons at a ball given by the Brazilian minister. Kennedy continued pressing Farr’s case until Lyons explained that even in the best circumstances—when the law had been clearly transgressed—his appeals to Seward often failed to win a release.32 That day, Lyons had been shown one of the saddest letters yet received by the legation. A Miss Hodges in Baltimore had written about her fiancé, Bradford Smith Hoskins, who had been killed on May 30, during a skirmish between Federal cavalry and Mosby’s Rangers. Hoskins had been in America for less than