![]() Two weeks later, he was dead of a wound received in a minor skirmish as the rearguard of the Army of Northern Virginia recrossed the Potomac back to the Confederacy. Pettigrew was, by his own lights, engaged in another struggle for liberty, that of his own people from a Union that had grown hateful. ![]() Exactly four years later (the Fourth of July 1863), he was beside the Emmitsburg road near a Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg, nursing a useless right arm which had been smashed by grapeshot and waiting for an enemy counter-attack that never came.Īll about him were the survivors of the North Carolina soldiers that the day before he had led through a mile of frontal and flank fire to within a few yards of the now eternally famous stone wall on Cemetery Ridge. By pure chance it was the Fourth of July, not only the birthday of American independence but also, as it happened, Pettigrew’s own birthday, his thirty-first. ![]() His mission was to take part in a struggle for liberty, the liberation of Italy from the yoke of Austria. In the opening passage the author describes himself crossing the Alps on his way to seek service in the army of the king of Sardinia. This is James Johnston Pettigrew’s only book, privately printed in Charleston in the first weeks of the War between the States and here for the first time published. ![]()
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