"Must" Vacation Reading !!

Could this really be Iraq, like maybe in 2008 ??? My goodness !!

Stephen W. Sears Sears' Gettysburg ....

I guess most likely those 'ole southern boys was most awful hungry -- and had a bad public - relations - media reputation....


Pages 110 - 111:


"What Lee's invasion [of Pennsylvannia] did trigger was a tidal wave of refugees flooding toward the Susquenna and Harrisburg.




"Merchants bearing their goods, bankers carrying their deposits, farmers driving their stock, free blacks evading Rebel slave - catchers, families fleeing the imagined horrors of [Confederate]military occupation -- all rushed to the capital from southern Pennsylvannia.





"Not to be outdone, there was a simultaneus exodus farther northward by Harrisburg's citizens.


"The city's railroad stations, reported Charles Coffin of the Boston Journal,





...were crowded with an excited people -- men, women, and children -- with trunks, boxes, bundles; packages tied up in bed - blankets and quilts; mountains of luggage -- tumbling it into the [railroad] cars, rushing here and there in a frantic manner; shouting, screaming, as if the Rebels were about to dash into the town and lay it in ashes ...


There was a steady stream of teams thundering across the bridge; farmers from the Cumberland valley, with their household furniture piled upon the great wagons ...;




..bedding, tables, chairs, their wives and children perched on the top; kettles and pails dangling underneath .....


"At a second Susquehanna bridge a massive traffic jam formed while the bridgekeeper insisted on collecting the regular toll.


"It took the intervention of General Couch to persuade the bridge company to waive the tolls in the emergency."


As the author quotes another contemporary observer, Louis Gottschalk, as saying:



"It is no longer a flight -- it is a flood. The panic increases. The poor are moving in wheel - barrows. The confusion is at its height. Cattle bellowing, frightened mules, prancing horses, the noisy crowd, the whistling locomotives, the blinding dust, the burning sun."


Wow! And to think I used to think Iraq was bad !!!