The regiment left the good folks of Liberty, VA, and the light meal they’d provided for the soldiers, and rode on into the night. They arrived at Lynchburg, on the side of a mountain along the James River, on Saturday, July 20.

Changed trains and continued to Gordonsville and thence to Charlottsville, finally arriving at Manassas Junction about 10 p.m. “…after a ride of ten days and nights, during which we ate and slept but little,” Private Albert Wymer Henley, of Company H (K), the Spartan Band of Chickasaw County, wrote in his diary.

“We unloaded the cars,” Private Thomas David Wallace recorded, “which made it about 11 o’clock before we laid our blankets down and lay down on them and went to sleep without putting up our tents. We had enough cooked for breakfast the next morning, which was Sunday.”

Added Regimental quartermaster clerk William H. Hill: “We found the camp to contain about 3,000 troops and near 20,000 more…near the scene of the battle that is expected tomorrow.”

(Henley’s diary is available for photocopying at the National Military Park in Fredericksburg, VA., and Hill’s, also, at the Mississippi State Archives in Jackson.)