The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War StoryEggleston, George Cary
History
The Master of Warlock: A Virginia War Story
Eggleston, George Cary
Virginia -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction
First of all there was the problem of getting the men. The able-bodied
citizens of the county had already volunteered for the most part, but
some were still waiting for one reason or another, and Baillie, who knew
everybody, sent hurried notes to all of these, by special negro
messengers, asking each to send an immediate reply to him at the
Court-house. On this service he employed all his young negroes, mounting
them on all his mules. The men appealed to responded almost to a man,
for the master of Warlock was a man under whose command his neighbours
eagerly wanted to serve, and Baillie found more than half of them
awaiting him at the county seat, when he got there in mid-afternoon.
Still better, he found a messenger there from one of the men whom he had
summoned. This messenger came from a camp at a little distance, where
were assembled about sixty or seventy men and boys peculiarly situated.
These men and boys had belonged to a company composed mainly of college
students, which had gone out with the earliest volunteers. The company
had been captured at Rich Mountain, and the men composing it had been
sent home on parole. Within the two days preceding Baillie Pegram's call
for volunteers, official notification had come of the discharge of all
these men from parole by virtue of an exchange of prisoners. Thereupon
the men, thus left free to volunteer again, had met in camp to consider
what should be done. Their company had been officially disbanded, and
there were now not enough of them left to secure its reorganisation.
When Baillie Pegram's call for volunteers came, therefore, the men were
called together, and in pursuance of a resolution, unanimously adopted,
a messenger was sent to the Court-house to say that sixty-two men of the
disbanded company offered themselves for enrolment under Captain Pegram,
and that they would report for duty on the following morning at the
Court-house.
Thus before four o'clock Baillie was assured of his hundred men or more.
The next problem was to secure horses. He called together such of his
men as were present, and said:
"Each of you is mounted. We shall need your horses. The government will
have them valued, and will pay the assessed price for any that may die
in the service. It will pay monthly for their services. How many of you
will enlist your horses as well as yourselves, as all our cavalrymen
have done?"
The response was general, and many of the planters offered additional
horses on the same terms, so that, before night fell Baillie Pegram had
more than a hundred men and about a hundred and thirty horses secured.
Forty or fifty more horses must be had, but Baillie knew how to secure
them, and so he sent off his note to Stuart. Then he turned to Marshall
Pollard, and said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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