Virginia and the Carolinas. In the Piedmont country
east of the Blue Ridge, and in the tide-water country beyond, until the
war came there were great plantations, where wealthy, or well-to-do, and
highly educated planters lived in state with multitudinous slaves to
till their fertile fields.
West of the Blue Ridge and between that range and the Alleghenies lay
the Valley of Virginia, a land as fruitful as Canaan itself.
In that Valley there dwelt in simple but abundant plenty the sturdy
"Dutchmen," as they were improperly called,--men of German descent,--who
had pushed their settlements southward from Pennsylvania along the
Valley, establishing themselves in the midst of fertile fields, owning
few slaves, and tilling their own lands, planting orchards everywhere,
and building not only their houses, but their barns and all their
outbuildings stoutly of the native stone that lay ready to their hands.
That region was now as barren as Sahara by reason of the devastation
that Sheridan had inflicted upon it with the deliberate and merciless
strategic purpose of rendering it uninhabitable and in that way making
of it a no-thoroughfare for Confederate armies on march toward the
country north of the Potomac, or on the way to threaten Washington
City.
The little mountain homesteads had been spared this devastation. But
their case was not much better than that of the more prosperous
plantations on the east, or that of the richly fruitful Valley farms on
the west. In war it is not "the enemy" alone who lays waste. Such little
cribs and granaries and smoke houses as these poor mountain dwellers
owned had been despoiled of their stores to feed the armies in the
field. Their boys, even those as young as fourteen, had been drawn into
the army. Their hogs, their sheep, and the few milch cows they
possessed, had been taken away from them. Their scanty oxen had been
converted into army beef, and those of them who owned a horse or a mule
had been compelled to surrender the animal for military use, receiving
in return only Confederate treasury notes, now worth no more than so
much of waste paper.
Nevertheless Guilford Duncan perfectly understood that he must look to
the impoverished people of the high mountains for a food supply in this
his sore extremity. Therefore, instead of crossing the range by way of
any of the main-traveled passes, he pushed his grass-refreshed steed
straight up Mount Pleasant to its topmost heights.
The
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