****LISTEN TO THE FIRST TWO EPISODES HERE IN ONE POST HERE: NARRATIVE EPISODE- Antietam to Gettysburg
https://youtu.be/tkmBKrpxvGw
We're re-releasing Narrative Episode 2, this time with all three parts strung together so you don't have to go searching for each part (click the link above for Episodes 1 and 2 strung together). This episode brings you through the month of June up the the night of June 30.
Excerpts from the script:
Synapse
[BEGIN “BEAR WALTZ”]
As 1863 began, the Union Army of the Potomac found itself in a general malaise. Its failed attempt at another push towards Richmond, known as the “Mud March,” had served as the nail in the coffin of army commander Ambrose E Burnside. When Joseph Hooker took his place as commander of the Army of the Potomac, the changes he implemented helped boost the morale and confidence of his troops. But Hooker squandered that goodwill by bungling the Chancellorsville Campaign, in the early days of May 1863. While many believed that drunkenness or the artillery round that knocked him out for a short time were the probable causes of such bungling, Hooker himself told Major General Abner Doubleday, while on the road to Gettysburg, “I was not hurt by a shell and I was not drunk. For once I lost confidence in Hooker, and that is all there was to it.”
After Chancellorsville, while Hooker was looking for ways to redeem himself, Robert E. Lee was setting the wheels in motion for his second invasion of the north.
Meanwhile, every day citizens in a bustling country town called Gettysburg, were going about their daily business while reading about the war in any or all of the town’s three newspapers. War had not left them untouched, however. They had sent their ablest young men off to fight for the Union cause and constant threats of invasion plagued them since they first sent their local militia, the “Gettysburg Blues”, to fight to preserve the Union, in 1861. By the Fourth of July of 1863, this small town of 2400 would be left with the daunting tasking of cleaning up the carnage and healing 10 times their number.
By mid-June, two great armies, totaling somewhere around 150,000 men, with tens of thousands of horses and mules, miles of wagons and, in one of those armies, human beings that were owned by other human beings, marched north into Pennsylvania. One army moving cautiously in order to determine its enemy’s intentions, while the other army smashd a Union garrison at Winchester and then happily ran roughshod over the lush and untouched farmlands of Pennsylvania while its citizens, like Gettysburg’s Sarah Broadhead wondered where their own army even was.
On the last day of June, a Tuesday, the lead elements of these two armies would be poised for the commencement of the greatest, bloodiest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere, but very few, if any, had any notion of that as they closed their eyes to sleep.
[BEAR WALTZ END]
...........
THE BATTLE OF BRANDY STATION
FRANK ROBERTSON: “The only time in my 14 month service with General Stuart that he seemed rattled was when Frank Dean, one of his couriers, dashed up and told him the Yankees were at Brandy Station. This was startling indeed. Frank Robertson, General Stuart’s Staff.”
[FADE IN DIFFERENT NIGHT SUMMER AMBIENCE][FADE IN GENTLE RIVER SOUND]
No fires were allowed in the Union cavalry camps on the night of June 8. Troopers ate cold dinners, then slept on the ground with their horses’ reins looped around an arm. All was quiet and calm, for, just across the Rappahannock, camped Jeb Stuart’s confederates.
Pleasonton's combined force of 11,000 cavalry and infantry was poised for a double-envelopment of JEB Stuart and his 9500 cavaliers.
Just around 4:30am, John Buford’s Union division, led by the brigade of Colonel Benjamin “Grimes” Davis, crossed the Rappahannock River at Beverly Ford [HORSES SPLASHING] in a thick fog and brushed aside confederate pickets from the 6th Virginia Cavalry. [LIGHT MUSKETRY]
CONFEDERATE SOLDIER: “At about daylight the Yanks drove in our pickets stationed at Beverly’s Ford on the Rappahannock and came near surprising us in bed...they charged up to our camp and killed and wounded several horses before we could get out. Confederate Artilleryman”....