I do not know how far this feeling extends in the army. “I have seen and heard of expression of discontent in the public journals at the result of the expedition. “A gloom rests over the city the hopes and affections of the people were wrapped in the regiment.… Ah! what a terrible responsibility rests upon those who inaugurated this unholy war.”
“Thus the band that once was the pride of Clarksville has fallen,” a citizen lamented, and he went on to explain something of what he and those around him felt.
This was only one among the forty-odd regiments in the charge there were others that suffered about as cruelly but to those wives and sweethearts, parents and sisters and younger brothers who had remained at its point of origin, fifty miles down the Cumberland from Nashville, the news came hard. These five dozen survivors, led by a captain on the third day, went forward with Fry against Cemetery Ridge, and there-where the low stone wall jogged west, then south, to form what was known thereafter as the angle-all but three of the remaining 60 fell. When Archer took them across Willoughby Run on the opening day of Gettysburg they counted 365 bayonets by sunset they were down to barely 60. “The 14th Tennessee, for example, had left Clarksville in 1861 with 960 men on its muster roll, and in the past two years, most of which time their homeland had been under Union occupation, they had fought on all the major battlefields of Virginia.
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