AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
that because of it he gained knowledge of great value to him and his cause in the coming contest. After encountering the enemy on the Chambersburg Pike, and again at Dillsburg, after escaping threatened capture, the regiment, by hard marches across a country filled with foes, found its way to Harrisburg. The men had lost all of their baggage and equipments. From Friday morning until Saturday night they had been without food, and until Sunday afternoon almost without rest. They had fired the first shots and drawn the first blood upon the battlefield of Gettysburg. Students of the history of the war have been attracted by the unique relation of the regiment to that decisive battle and some of them have regarded it as an essential factor. Circular No. 8, Series of 1894, of the Loyal Legion of the United States, says: “It was the only emergency regiment which participated in that decisive battle of the war and it is an historical fact that owing to the advance movement of Colonel Jennings' regiment, Gettysburg became the battle ground.”
Spear, in his The North and the South, after pointing out that the coming of a scout with news of the approach of Meade did not lead to the concentration of Lee's army, as Lee wrote, for the reason that the order was given at 7.30 A. M. on June 28th, and the scout did not arrive until the night of that day, declares that the concentration was the result of our combat on the 26th of June. He says, page 97: “It was the beginning of a series of events which colored and determined all the issues of this campaign in a military sense. This regiment was as unconscious of the resultant consequences of its action as was Lee himself. It was one of those insignificant events that so often are the important factors in great results.”
On the wall at Pennypacker's Mills there hang together the knapsack I carried, the shoes I wore, a broken carbine made in Richmond in 1862 and picked up at the scene of our conflict, and a ramrod I found in a
