The group of men, some on foot, some on horseback, some civilian and some military, stopped on the summit of the bare knoll. The rising sun marvelously illuminated the landscape before them, showing the wooded valleys, fenced pastures and bright glimpses of the stream beyond which the Confederate Army waited for its defeat.

Captain James Elial MacPhail Starbuck was at the center of the small group. The young Boston lawyer sat his horse like a man more accustomed to a leather padded chair than to a saddle, and indeed, if James had to pick the one aspect of soldiering that he most disliked it would be the ubiquitous presence of horses, which he considered to be large, hot, smelly, fly-ridden beasts with yellow teeth, scary eyes and hooves like ungoverned hammers. Yet if riding a horse were necessary to end the slaveholders’ revolt, then James would willingly straddle every horse in America for, though he might lack his father’s eloquence, he was just as fervent in his belief that the rebellion was more than a blight on America’s reputation, but an offense against God himself. America, James believed, was a divinely inspired nation, uniquely blessed by the Almighty, and to rebel against such a chosen people was to do the devil’s work. So on this Christian Sabbath, in these green fields, the forces of righteousness would advance against a satanic rabble, and surely, James believed, God would not permit the northern army to be defeated? He prayed silently, beseeching God for victory.

“You reckon we can walk down to the battery, Cap’n?” One of the civilians interrupted James’s reverie, gesturing at the same time to an artillery battery that was arranging its complicated affairs in a field that lay beside the Warrenton Turnpike at the foot of the knoll.

“It is not permitted,” James responded curtly.

“Ain’t it a free country, Cap’n?”

“It is not permitted,” James insisted in the authoritative voice that always proved so effective in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s Court of Common Pleas, but which merely seemed to amuse these newspapermen. The civilians accompanying James were reporters and sketch artists from a dozen northern papers who had come to Brigadier General McDowell’s headquarters the previous night and had been told to attach themselves to the general’s sous-adjutant. James already had the responsibility of escorting a half-dozen foreign military attachés who had ridden from their countries’ Washington embassies and who were now treating the impending battle as though it were a fine entertainment laid on for their benefit, but at least the foreign military officers treated James with respect while the newspapermen merely seemed to aggravate him.

“What in hell’s name is a sows-adjutant?” a reporter from Harper’s Weekly had asked James in the raw small hours after midnight when, all around them, the northern army had been stirring itself ready for its march into battle. “A kind of Indian fighter?”