After finishing our lunch, as we passed out of the dining room, General Blair asked me, if I did not want some saddle-blankets, or a rug for my tent, and, leading me into the hall to a space under the stairway, he pointed out a pile of carpets which had also been sent up from Charleston for safety.  After our headquarter-wagons got up, and our bivouac was established in a field near by, I sent my orderly (Walter) over to General Blair, and he came back staggering under a load of carpets, out of which the officers and escort made excellent tent-rugs, saddle-cloths, and blankets.  There was an immense amount of stores in Cheraw, which were used or destroyed; among them twenty-four guns, two thousand muskets, and thirty-six hundred barrels of gunpowder.  By the carelessness of a soldier, an immense pile of this powder was exploded, which shook the town badly; and killed and maimed several of our men.

We remained in or near Cheraw till the 6th of March, by which time the army was mostly across the Pedee River, and was prepared to resume the march on Fayetteville.  In a house where General Hardee had been, I found a late New York Tribune, of fully a month later date than any I had seen.  It contained a mass of news of great interest to us, and one short paragraph which I thought extremely mischievous.  I think it was an editorial, to the effect that at last the editor had the satisfaction to inform his readers that General Sherman would next be heard from about Goldsboro’, because his supply-vessels from Savannah were known to be rendezvousing at Morehead City:—­Now, I knew that General Hardee had read that same paper, and that he would be perfectly able to draw his own inferences.  Up to, that moment I had endeavored so to feign to our left that we had completely, misled our antagonists; but this was no longer possible, and I concluded that we must be ready, for the concentration in our front of all the force subject to General Jos.  Johnston’s orders, for I was there also informed that he had been restored to the full command of the Confederate forces in South and North Carolina.

On the 6th of March I crossed the Pedee, and all the army marched for Fayetteville:  the Seventeenth Corps kept well to the right, to make room; the Fifteenth Corps marched by a direct road; the Fourteenth Corps also followed a direct road from Sneedsboro’, where it had crossed the Pedee; and the Twentieth Corps, which had come into.  Cheraw for the convenience of the pontoon-bridge, diverged to the left, so as to enter Fayetteville next after the Fourteenth Corps, which was appointed to lead into Fayetteville.  Kilpatrick held his cavalry still farther to the left rear on the roads from Lancaster, by way of Wadesboro’ and New Gilead, so as to cover our trains from Hampton’s and Wheeler’s cavalry, who had first retreated toward the north.  I traveled with the Fifteenth Corps, and on the 8th of March reached Laurel Hill, North Carolina.  Satisfied that our troops must