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Bluff, insisting his position was better defensively. Circumstances eventually proved him right, but he clearly, at the moment, was guilty of insubordination.
After the Cheat Mountain stalemate, Lee moved south and took command in the Kanawha Valley. There he found two generals who would not work together in harness, and a body of troops beaten down by thirty days of unceasing rain and cold, supjTplies short to the approach of famine, and epidemic illness (mainly measles) that cut the effectives almost in half. The roads were quagmires, and the supply wagons, bogged to their hubs, could barely move. Hospital accommodations were primitive or nonexistent; more soldiers were dying from disease and exposure than from bullets.
That was the picture that greeted Marion Francis Baxter and the rest of the 20th Mississippi when they wearily joined the Southern forces at Little Sewell Mountain. It was almost midnight on September 26 when they arrived. Private Baxter, the day before, celebrated his fourteenth birthday by marching nearly thirty miles.
The regiment had traveled the Virginia Central to Charlottesville and across the Blue Ridge. Its line wound across the Shenandoah Valley and finally ended at Jackson?s River, just short of Covington. From there on it was foot slogging all the way to Meadow Bluff and Little Sewell Mountain. And though the 20th Mississippi had done virtually no marching to date they did 75 muddy miles on the Lewisburg Turnpike in three days.
Those tough boots and the sturdy butternut jacket and pants from Handsboro served Baxter well on this grueling mountain march, but it?s unlikely he and Company E had the same crisp, martial air they displayed maching to the Mississippi City steamboat landing back in June. By the time they had slogged through the quagmire that passed for a turnpike they had discovered that soldiering was not flags flying and bands playing. Even the prospect of quick action against the Federals did little to boost their spirits.
Compounding all these troubles was the fact that the regiment arrived at Little Sewell Mountain without provisions,
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