In late June 1863, the worn-out soldiers of the Army of the Potomac's II Corps marched northeast from Frederick on the road to Libertytown in rising heat that left their faces streaked with dust and sweat. Gen. John Gibbons, commanding the corps' Second Division, recognized that his volunteers were faltering, so when Col. Arthur F. Devereux ordered the 19th Massachusetts Infantry's glee club to the front, the singers broke into a stirring marching song whose effect, one Bay Stater remembered, was magical. Although they had hoped to bivouac in Libertytown, some of the reinvigorated soldiers marched almost 40 miles that day before halting in Uniontown that night. Gibbon's division was heavily engaged at Gettysburg on July 2-3 and suffered 1,651 casualties, while the 19th Massachusetts lost 77 killed, wounded, and missing, likely including several members of the glee club. By midday on June 29, 1863, new Union commander George G. Meade had ordered the Army of the Potomac north to engage the Confederate army under the best possible conditions while protecting Washington, D.C., and, learning that the Union army was close and getting closer, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee ordered his army to consolidate somewhere near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border.