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197 CHAPTER SIX • GuardingtheRapidan 18 September–27 December 1863 Early on 26 June, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Carter and his battalion left Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, with orders to march up the lush Cumberland Valley toward the town of Carlisle. From there, Major General Robert Rodes’s division intended to make its way to Harrisburg. Once the Confederates reached Carlisle on the twenty-seventh, however, they remained there for only two days before General Lee recalled them to the Gettysburg area. A southern spy had revealed to Lee on the night of the twentyeighth that the Union army, now under Major General George Gordon Meade, was north of the Potomac River and moving through Maryland toward the Confederate army. On 30 June Rodes’s division marched due south for twenty-two miles until it reached the hamlet of Heidlersburg, where it bivouacked for the night. Gettysburg was still ten miles away.1 By 1:00 P.M. on 1 July, the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the division reached a point a few miles north of the town. Rodes, following the sounds of battle off to his right front, established his brigades in a line anchored on a piece of high ground known as Oak Hill. On the bare, forward slope of the hill, Tom Carter unlimbered his battalion of artillery in front of Rodes’s infantry. While the division commander was still forming his lines, Carter’s guns opened “with very decided effect” on the exposed right flank of Union brigades as they were being pushed from the west by Confederates from A. P. Hill’s 3rd Corps. After about an hour, Union guns arrived on the scene to contest the Confederates on Oak Hill. Their fire forced Carter to relocate his batteries toward the far left of Rodes’s line. At one point, the Morris Artillery took so much enemy fire that its commander reported to Carter that it needed relief. Carter, as “mad as a hornet ” over its vulnerable position, rode up to General Rodes and demanded 1. Macaluso, Morris, Orange, and King William Artillery, 44; OR 27[2]:552. 198 • Guarding the Rapidan to know “[w]hat fool put that Battery yonder?” After an awkward pause, Rodes responded, “You had better take it away Carter.” Not long after, the Confederates on the northern part of the battlefield, now bolstered by the arrival of Jubal Early’s division, drove the Union I and XI Corps through the town and onto Cemetery Hill. Carter’s guns fired “from time to time” at the retreating Federals to prevent them from organizing any resistance. That action ended Carter’s major participation in the battle. On 1 July the battalion lost eight men killed and thirty-three wounded. The Morris Artillery alone lost seventeen horses. The next day, Carter’s men rested as the action shifted mainly to the southern end of the battle- field. On 3 July Carter placed his rifled guns near the Lutheran seminary and opened fire on Union artillery on Cemetery Hill to divert them from bombarding Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s divisions during their doomed attack against the Union center on Cemetery Ridge. During the Confederate retreat from Gettysburg, Carter’s battalion crossed the Potomac River at Falling Waters, West Virginia, on 14 July and protected the pontoon bridge from advancing Federals. Once back in the Shenandoah valley, two of Carter’s batteries helped defend Manassas Gap against Union cavalry in a small action on 24 July.2 By the end of July, the bulk of Lee’s army was located in Orange and Culpeper Counties. Carter and his men remained encamped at Liberty Mills in Orange County from then until the early part of September. On the fourteenth, Carter’s battalion participated in a heavy skirmish against amixedforceofUnioncavalryandartillerythatattemptedtocrossSomerville Ford on the Rapidan River. The Confederates managed to hold the ford. Federal losses amounted to eight killed and forty wounded, while Carter reported six killed and seventeen wounded in the battalion. In the middle of October, Rodes’s division and Carter’s battalion marched across the Rappahannock River in the Bristoe Campaign, which was R. E. Lee’s attempt to get his army between Meade’s and Washington, D.C. Carter’s men engaged the enemy near Auburn Mills in Fauquier County on the fourteenth. After A. P. Hill’s disastrous fight at nearby Bristoe Station on the same day, Lee withdrew the bulk of his army to the west bank of the Rappahannock River...

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