In the morning the Legion cleaned their uniforms. They used wire brushes, button sticks, blacking and soap until their woolen coats and trousers, leather boots and webbing belts, were as spotless as honest effort could achieve. They blacked their ammunition pouches, scrubbed their canteens and haversacks, and tried to unwrinkle the pasteboard tops and visors of their forage caps. They polished their belt buckles and hat badges, then oiled the walnut stocks of their rifles until the wood shone. At eleven o’clock, anticipating the girls who would even then be gathering in the grounds of Seven Springs, the companies formed in full uniform and kit. The fifty cavalrymen made an eleventh company that formed ahead of the others, while the two cannon, which had been pulled from the ruts their wheels had made in the long grass and then attached to their limbers, paraded with the regimental band at the rear of the Legion.

The Colonel was waiting at Seven Springs, leaving Major Pelham in temporary command. At five minutes past eleven Pelham ordered the Legion to stand to attention, to order arms, to fix bayonets and then to shoulder arms. Eight hundred and seventy-two men were on parade. They were not the Legion’s full strength, but those recruits who were too new to have learned their drill had been sent ahead to Seven Springs where they were employed in nailing strips of red baize to the church benches, which were being used for the communal dinner. Two massive tents had been raised on the south lawn to offer shade to the visitors, and a cook house established close to the stables where a pair of beefs and six hogs were being roasted whole by sweating cooks who had also been seconded from the Legion. The ladies of the town had donated vats of beans, bowls of salad, trays of corn cakes and barrels of dried peaches. There were pones of cornbread, and stands of sweet cured hams, smoked turkey and venison. There was hung beef with apple sauce, pickled cucumbers and, for the children, trays of doughnuts sprinkled with sugar. The teetotalers were provided with lemonade and sweet water from Seven Springs’s best well, while the rest had casks of ale and barrels of hard cider brought from the cellar of Greeley’s Tavern. There was wine available in the house, though past experience suggested that only a handful of gentry would bother with such a refined beverage. The provisions were generous and the decorations lavish as they always were at Seven Springs on Independence Day, but this year, in an attempt to demonstrate that the Confederacy was the true inheritor of America’s revolutionary spirit, Washington Faulconer had been especially munificent.