d come, because the _Virginia_ fearful of capture had
ceased to make trips from Fredericksburg to Lancaster, and there was no
railroad to that part of the state. Knowing that my uncle, Addison Hall,
was a member of the Convention, I determined to take a train to
Richmond and seek his advice. I felt relieved when he informed me that
he was going the next morning, and that I could go along with him. We
took an early train to West Point, and being ferried across the
Mattaponi river, obtained from one of his friends a conveyance to
Urbanna. We hired a sloop to take us to Carter's creek, and thence we
proceeded in a farm wagon to his home in the village of Kilmarnock. The
next morning he sent me to the home of the Rev. Dr. Thomas S. Dunaway,
my brother, and my guardian.

In a few days I enlisted in a company that was being raised by Captain
Samuel P. Gresham, who had been a student at the Virginia Military
Institute. And thus the student's gown was exchanged for the soldier's
uniform.

Before we were regularly mustered into service an expedition was
undertaken that indicated at once the forwardness of our people to
engage the enemy and their ignorance of military affairs. The report
having been circulated that a Federal gunboat was lying in Mill Creek
in Northumberland county, its capture, or destruction, was resolved upon
by about a hundred men, who had assembled at the county seat of
Lancaster. With no weapons except an old smooth-bore six-pound cannon,
and that loaded with scrap iron gathered from a blacksmith's shop, we
proceeded to Mill Creek and unlimbered on the bank in plain view of the
boat, and distant from it some two or three hundred yards. I have always
been glad that we had sense enough to refrain from shooting, for
otherwise most of us would have been killed then and there. Seeing the
hopelessness of an unequal combat, we retired from the scene somewhat
wiser than when we went. In that instance was not "discretion the better
part of valor"?

CHAPTER II

War, war is still the cry, "War to the knife."
--BYRON.

There was in the central part of the county a beautiful grove in which
the Methodists were accustomed to hold their annual camp-meetings. On
account of its location and the shelter afforded by its tents it was in
1861 transformed into a rendezvous of a radically different nature, the
military companies that had been raised in the county as