idge over Antietam creek at the foot of the hill entering the
village; that after two repulses with heavy loss, Colonel Hartranft
(afterwards Governor of Pennsylvania) led his regiment, the Fifty-first
Pennsylvania Volunteers and the Fifty-first New York, in a magnificent
charge and carried the bridge and the heights above, and Sharpsburg was
ours. If any one would like to get an idea of what terrific work that
charge was they should examine that bridge and the heights on the
Sharpsburg side. The latter rise almost perpendicularly more than three
hundred feet. One of the "boys" who went over that bridge and up those
heights in that memorable charge was Private Edward L. Buck, Fifty-first
Pennsylvania Volunteers, formerly Assistant Postmaster of Scranton, and
ever since the war a prominent citizen of this city. That bridge is now
known as "Burnside's Bridge." Forty-one years afterwards, I passed over
it, and was shown a shell still sticking in the masonry of one of the
arches. It was a conical shell probably ten inches long, about half of
it left protruding.

Little of special interest occurred on this march until we reached the
Potomac, a short distance above Harper's Ferry. Here we were shown the
little round house where John Brown concealed his guns and "pikes" prior
to his famous raid three years before. This was his rendezvous on the
night before his ill-starred expedition descended upon the State of
Virginia and the South, in an insane effort to free the slaves. Our
division was headed by the Fourteenth Connecticut, and as we approached
the river opposite Harper's Ferry its fine band struck up the then new
and popular air, "John Brown's Body," and the whole division took up the
song, and we forded the river singing it. Slavery had destroyed the
Kansas home of old John Brown, had murdered his sons, and undoubtedly
driven him insane, because of his anti-slavery zeal. The great State of
Virginia--the "Mother of Presidents"--had vindicated her loyalty to the
"peculiar institution," and, let it be added, her own spotless chivalry,
by hanging this poor, crazy fanatic for high treason! Was there poetic
justice in our marching into the territory where these events transpired
singing:

"John Brown's body lies a mouldering in the grave,
His soul goes marching on?"

This couplet,

"We'll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple-tree,"

was sung with peculiar zest, though I never quite understood what the
poet had aga