I was ordered to join the Army of the Potomac wherever I could find it.  As I left Harrisburg, I learned that a battle was in progress.  Before I could reach the field the great combat had taken place.  The two contending armies had made Gettysburg historic.

I joined our army on the day after the battle.  I could find no person of my acquaintance, amid the confusion that followed the termination of three days’ fighting.  The army moved in pursuit of Lee, whose retreat was just commencing.  As our long lines stretched away toward the Potomac, I walked over the ground where the battle had raged, and studied the picture that was presented.  I reproduce, in part, my letter of that occasion:—­

“Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 6,1863.

“To-day I have passed along the whole ground where the lines of battle were drawn.  The place bears evidence of a fierce struggle.  The shocks of those two great armies surging and resurging, the one against the other, could hardly pass without leaving their traces in fearful characters.  At Waterloo, at Wagram, and at Jena the wheat grows more luxuriantly, and the corn shoots its stalks further toward the sky than before the great conflicts that rendered those fields famous.  The broad acres of Gettysburg and Antietam will in future years yield the farmer a richer return than he has hithto received.

“Passing out of Gettysburg by the Baltimore turnpike, we come in a few steps to the entrance of the cemetery.  Little of the inclosure remains, save the gateway, from which the gates have been torn.  The neat wooden fence, first thrown down to facilitate the movement of our artillery, was used for fuel, as the soldiers made their camp on the spot.  A few scattered palings are all that remain.  The cemetery was such as we usually find near thrifty towns like Gettysburg.  None of the monuments and adornings were highly expensive, though all were neat, and a few were elaborate.  There was considerable taste displayed in the care of the grounds, as we can see from the few traces that remain.  The eye is arrested by a notice, prominently posted, forbidding the destruction or mutilation of any shrub, tree, or stone about the place, under severe penalties.  The defiance that war gives to the civil law is forcibly apparent as one peruses those warning lines.

“Monuments and head-stones lie everywhere overturned.  Graves, which loving hands once carefully adorned, have been trampled by horses’ feet until the vestiges of verdure have disappeared.  The neat and well-trained shrubbery has vanished, or is but a broken and withered mass of tangled brushwood.  On one grave lies the body of a horse, fast decomposing under the July sun.  On another lie the torn garments of some wounded soldier, stained and saturated with blood.  Across a small head-stone, bearing the words, ’To the memory of our beloved child, Mary,’ lie the fragments of a musket shattered by a cannon-shot.