This text is part of:
[64]
the troops from further south.
Its camp was established on Bull Run just above Union Mills, and it served during the winter with the other regiments of the Fourth brigade, the Tenth and Thirteenth Virginia and the Third Tennessee, picketing the front from Wolf Run Shoals by Burke's Station up toward Fairfax Court House.
It was hard service.
The men were taken out of warm huts and sent on tours of three days duty in the open fields or in the woods without shelter Their huts had been occupied during their absence and they never saw them again.
Sleeping on the wet ground in sleet, snow and hail of necessity produced pneumonia and rheumatism.
Nevertheless they never lost their gay spirit.
Their march to picket and their return were always marked by shouts and yells and songs.
The song of ‘Maryland’ was too solemn for these spirited boys.
Its movement was too slow.
It was more like a dirge.
It had been introduced to them in the most picturesque way. During the summer at Fairfax Station, Hetty, Jenny and Constance Carey, who had run the blockade from Baltimore, came up to visit the regiment.
It was full of their brothers, their cousins and their beaux, and these beautiful young women in camp produced an effect on the mercurial Marylanders that can only be imagined, not described.
The boys and the officers were on their heads.
The young ladies were quartered in the field officers' tents, where they held court for several days.
One night the glee club of the regiment was serenading them, when the fly of Colonel Steuart's tent was thrown open and all three appeared, Jenny Carey in the center and her sister Hetty on one side and cousin Constance on the other.
Their pure voices rang through the summer night with the words and air of ‘My Maryland,’ and no such audience ever inspired songsters before or since.
The boys were carried away.
Silence, then cheers, then silence, then suppressed and not unmanly sobs attested the power of the
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.