January 3 — Sunrise found us on the march in a northwestern direction across the northern portion of Berkeley County. We passed North Mountain depot on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and came through Hedgesville, a small village about eight miles north of Martinsburg, crossed Back Creek this afternoon, and this evening we are camped in a pine thicket in Morgan County.
The weather is cold, disagreeable, and very unfavorable for outing; we have no shelter save some pine brush thrown together on the hog-shed fashion.
This afternoon a company of our cavalry passed us, armed with lances, which consisted of a steel spear about ten inches long mounted on a wooden shaft about eight feet long. These were some of the identical weapons that the saintly martyr, John Brown, had at Harper’s Ferry, to place in the hands of liberated slaves for the purpose of murdering men and women and perhaps children.
And yet, if all accounts be true, there are long-faced men and women in the North to-day who think that they are worshiping the great Jehovah by singing the praises of John Brown. O ye prejudiced, hypocritical souls, if you would have lived a little over eighteen hundred years ago you would have been in the crowd that shouted, ” Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” especially if you would have had a lamb or two to sell.
