The Advance on Fredericksburg

Then came the winter campaign in West Virginia in which three of my other brothers served in the 10th Virginia cavalry. One of them brought me a captured Derringer rifle, the only one I ever saw of that make, a remarkably accurate hard-hitting weapon. He also brought a captured horse that was turned over to me to ride and get in condition for service again, like all their jaded mounts whenever one of them would come home for a fresh horse. In this way I and my next oldest brother had all the riding stock we wanted, for our best horses were used for cavalry mounts.

Our family were still at Pine Grove when the armies fell back from the Potomac and Rappahannock in the spring of 1862 to meet Gen. McClellan on the Peninsula below Richmond. As soon as we learned the bridges across the river and Fredericksburg were to be burned we took a house over in town [3] and afterwards moved up to Belair[4], our old family home 30 miles back from Fredericksburg on the North Anna River in Spottsylvania County, where we remained throughout the war and afterwards.[5]

From the town side of the river I witnessed the burning of the bridges at Fredericksburg by military orders -- a most impressive sight when the whole mass of red hot iron and timbers of the heavy R.R. bridge, span after span, plunged into the deep river below, like tempering enormous sections of metal basket work.

In a few days some Federal artillery moved up to the opposite Stafford hills overlooking the town, and when I saw one red-shirted fellow on the abutment of the R.R. bridge looking over at us from our Pine Grove side of the river, hardly 200 yards off, I started for my gun to try a shot at him. But old man Layton, former bridge watchman, reproved and forbade me. So the bombardment of Fredericksburg was postponed eight or ten months longer, till the battle of Dec. 13, 1862, and I escaped I don't know what, for we had no military force at Fredericksburg then.