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Confederate Veteran

Misc

Confederate Veteran, Vol. XI, No. 5 Nashville, Tenn., May, 1903.

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THE SOUTH VINDICATED - REUNION ORATION BY HON. J. H. ROGERS

Hon. J. H. Rogers

Mr. Commander, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Fellow-Comrades: No man could be insensible of so great a privilege and honor as this occasion confers on me. This uncounted multitude finds itself assembled in the greatest of all Southern cities. Every inch of its soil has been consecrated by the blood of heroes and patriots. Here, in Jackson Square, fragrant with the magnolia, jasmine, and rose, adorned with evergreens, shrubbery, and flowering plants, stands, and should forever stand, Mill's equestrian statue of the Sage of the Hermitage, clustering around whose name and fame, entwined with the early fortunes of this beautiful metropolis, are holy memories more lasting than marble and brass; preserving forever the noblest examples of civic and military achievements, and giving inspiration, hope, and courage to the countless millions of his countrymen. Why are we here?

No fanatical religious crusade prompted this immense concourse. Here are to be found all creeds and faiths and beliefs, in perfect peace with each other, freed from all antagonisms to excite the passions of men. In yonder sky are no angry clouds of pestilence or war; no impending danger threatens our land, demanding consultation and means of protection from enemies within or without. We are at peace at home and abroad! Neither are we weary pilgrims to a holy Mecca, seeking absolution of our sins, nor are we aspirants for social or political preferment. This is no vast political convention or mass meeting, assembled for purposes. of considering grave matters of state or seeking to confer honors on fav6rite sons. Nay, nay, none of these. What is it that has brought us together?

This great assembly hall, festooned with bunting and flags, emblems of liberty and power; its amphitheater filled with the brave manhood and lovely womanhood of the South; these venerable men, the survivors of the tremendous conflict of the sixties---all these things tell of a deep, underlying cause. This great sea of upturned faces, glowing with life, intelligence, and sympathy---if not with joy unmingled with sorrow---proclaim that the purpose of our assembling has made a deep impression upon our hearts. We need not repress the emotions by which we are agitated. Whenever and wherever these reunions occur, we are standing amid the sepulchers of our dead. Every foot of our beloved Southland is distinguished by their courage, their sublime fortitude, their self-denial, their unwavering devotion and patriotism, and sanctified by the shedding of their blood. Thirty-eight years separate us from the events of which I shall speak. "Time and nature have had their course" in diminishing the numbers of those who surrendered at the close of the great "Civil War," but neither time nor nature can relieve those who survive of the duties they owe to the memory of our unrecorded dead, to our posterity, to our beloved Southland, and to ourselves. We are here to-day to discharge, as we may, those duties, and to renew old friendships, forged in the white heat of common sufferings, and hallowed and sanctified by the conscious conviction that in the hour of trial and peril we were true to the Constitution as it was framed and handed down to us by Washington and his compatriots.

We are here also to pay tribute to that noble band of Southern women, the mothers and daughters of the Confederacy, to whom the great Southern chieftain dedicated his. book, "The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy," in words ever to be remembered:

"To the women of the Confederacy, whose pious ministrations to our wounded soldiers soothed the last hours of those who died far from the object of their love;

"Whose domestic labors contributed much to supply the wants of our defenders in the field;

"Whose zealous faith in our cause shone a guiding star undimmed by the darkest clouds of war;

"Whose fortitude sustained them under all the privations to which they were subjected;

"Whose floral tribute annually expresses their untiring love and reverence for our sacred dead;

"And whose patriotism will teach their children to emulate the deeds of our revolutionary sires."

All hail to these splendid women, nobly represented here this day by the Confederated Southern Memorial Association, which took upon itself, when peace came, to care for our dead and erect monuments to their memory. Welcome, welcome to them and to the representatives of all other true organizations which are contributing toward the works of love in which we all feel the deepest concern.

A gifted and distinguished son of Alabama, the author, the statesman, the scholar, and the man of God, the late Dr. Curry, has written two books, one entitled "The Southern States of the American Union," and the other, "The Civil History of the Confederate States." Both should be carefully read and studied by every intelligent man and woman, North and South, who wishes to know the truth and where to find it, and to do justice to the South. In the former is found this passage:

"The establishment of truth is never wrong. History, as written, if accepted as true, will consign the South to infamy. If she were guilty of rebellion or treason, if she adopted or clung to barbarisms, essential sins, and immoralities, then her people will be clothed, as it were, with the fabled shin of Nessus, fatal to honor, to energy, to noble development, to true life."

The same author uses this striking language:

That the conquerors should make laws for the conquered seems a political, as it is the ordinary, consequence of the conquest. It is not so obvious, nor so logical, that they should make history."

In another passage he says:

"One of the most singular illustrations ever presented of the power of literature to conceal and pervert truth, to modify and falsify history, to transfer odium from the guilty to the innocent, is found in the fact that the reproach of disunion has been slipped from the shoulders of the North to those of the South."

No thoughtful man can pass lightly over such statements. If true, they are a warning to us that if we value our good names, our parts had in the tragic struggle of the sixties; if we would not have our very children in the near future, if not ashamed and apologizing for us, then unable to defend us, we must not be idle in preserving, recording, and teaching the real facts upon which the righteousness of our actions must depend.

I find no fault with the New England States, that from the moment the Pilgrim Fathers touched foot on Plymouth Rock they began and have continued day by day to record their own deeds; but it cannot be truthfully said that their writers and statesmen have always been as just and faithful in their interpretation and treatment of the actions of others as they have been diligent in recording their own deeds, and afterwards in escaping their responsibility and logical consequences. It is a misfortune to the South that her sons, if not indifferent, then carelessly neglected to preserve for the historian like records.

"The true record of the South, if it can be related with historic accuracy, is rich in patriotism, in intellectual force, in civic and military achievements, in heroism, in honorable and sagacious statesmanship, of a proper share of which no American can afford to deprive himself. So much genius in legislation, in administration, in jurisprudence, in war, such great capacities, should expel partisan and sectional prejudices."

Let us see where the seeds of disunion were first sown where and when it was first agitated, and under what circumstances it was threatened. If to the doctrine of disunion or secession odium should attach, then simple justice demands that the responsibility be fixed and that the guilty be not permitted to escape their proper place in history. If no odium could justly attach, no one need feel any dread if the truth is made clear. In no sectional, party, or resentful spirit is the inquiry made. It is due to us, to the truth, to cur children, and to the statesmen and leaders of political thought in the old South, that the inquiry be made; it is due to the dead we this day honor.

For much of what I shall say on this subject, I am indebted to Dr. Curry's two books, already mentioned.

The South is reproached for disunion---secession! It is the basis for the charge of treason; of disrupting the Union; of violating the Constitution; of rebellion; of making war on the United States. It must not be forgotten that there is a wide difference between secession and rebellion. The South made no war on the States remaining in the Union. Secession meant disunion so far as the seceding States were concerned, but it meant neither war nor rebellion. It meant a Union intact so far as all the States were concerned which did not secede, and a Union, too, under the Constitution. As the States entered the Union, each under acts of ratification of its own, so secession meant the resumption by each State of its delegated powers, by repealing the acts under which each seceding State entered the compact; but the repeal of such acts did not and could not affect the acts by which the remaining States entered into the Confederacy. The States of North Carolina and Rhode Island did not ratify the Constitution until long after Washington's administration began, and of course were not members of the Union. But the Union existed nevertheless, and existed under the Constitution, as much as it did after these States became members. So when the Confederate States seceded from the Union, the States remaining under the compact were as much a Union under the Constitution as before.

The whole history of secession shows conclusively that in seceding the South had no intention of assailing their former confederates. To their credit, every step taken in the matter of secession, in view of the deep feeling and intense excitement, was marvelously conservative, marked with statesmanlike conduct, and a decent regard for the United States. Its peace commissions, its diplomacy, its unpreparedness for war, all make clear to those who wish to know that the South sought a peaceful withdrawal from the Union, leaving the remaining States unharmed and undisturbed.

Had a State, under the Constitution as interpreted and understood for fifty years after its adoption, the right, for any reason, to withdraw from the Union? It must be admitted that if such right ever existed it continued up to the "Civil War," for the Constitution had never been changed in that regard. It must also be admitted that if, for any reason, a State had the right to withdraw of necessity it had the sole right to determine when the reasons were sufficient; and it must also be remembered that up to 1861 the question was unsettled, since for its determination no tribunal had ever been created, nor was any such power confided by the terms of the Constitution to the United States. These statements, it is confidently asserted, are historically axiomatic.

I may be permitted to quote two authorities. Mr. Madison has been justly called the "Father of the Constitution." If any men of his day had a right to love the Union, they were Washington and Madison. Both of them contributed, above all others, to its existence and early maintenance; both of them deprecated its destruction, frowned upon all efforts for disunion or secession, and to the last days of their lives were its ardent and devoted friends. Mr. Madison, than whom no purer and nobler statesman this country has produced, said:

"Where resort can be had to no tribunal superior to the authority of the parties, the parties themselves must be the rightful judges in the last resort, whether the bargain made has been pursued or violated. The Constitution of the United States was formed by the sanction of the States, given by each in its sovereign capacity. The States then, being parties to the constitutional compact and in their sovereign capacity, it follows of necessity that there can be no tribunal above their authority to decide, in the last resort, whether the compact made by them be violated, and consequently that, as the parties to it, they must themselves decide, in the last resort, such questions as may be of sufficient magnitude to require their interposition."

"An assemblage of citizens of Boston in Fanueil Hall in 1809 states, in a celebrated memorial, that they looked only to the State Legislatures, who were competent to devise relief against the unconstitutional acts of the general government. "That your power is adequate to that object is evident from the organization of the Confederacy."

Here is distinctively recognized the doctrine that each sovereign State has the right to judge alone of its own compacts and agreements. This must, of necessity, be true unless the right to interpret the compact or agreement has been waived, or the power conferred upon another. This language of Madison is buttressed by the acts of ratification of the Constitution by some of the States. Virginia said in her ratification act:

"The delegates do, in the name of Virginia, declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will."

New York was even more specific, and Maryland and other States showed equal concern and jealousy in safeguarding the sovereignty of the States.

In the prior history of the country repeated instances are found of the assertion of the right of secession and of a purpose entertained at various times to put it into execution. Notably is this true of Massachusetts---indeed, of all New England. In 1786, when the States were bound by the Articles of Confederation, we are told the situation was "dangerous in the extreme." "The agitation in Massachusetts was great, and it was declared that if Jay's negotiations, closing the Mississippi for twenty years, could not be adopted it was high time for the New England States to recede from the Union and form a Confederation by themselves."

Plumer traces secession movements in 1792 and 1794, and says: "All dissatisfied with the measures of the government looked to a separation of the States as a remedy for oppressive grievance."

In 1794 Fisher Ames said: "The spirit of insurrection has tainted a vast extent. of country besides Pennsylvania."

In 1796 Gov. Wolcott, of Connecticut, said: "I sincerely declare that I wish the Northern States would separate from the Southern the moment that event [the election of Jefferson] shall take place."

Horatio Seymour, on October 8, 1880, in a public address in New York City, thus spoke: "The first threat of disunion was uttered upon the floor of Congress by Josiah Quincy, one of the most able and distinguished sons of Massachusetts. At an early day Mr. Hamilton, with all his distrust of the Constitution, sent word to the citizens of Boston to stop their threats of disunion and let the government stand as long as it would. When our country was engaged with the superior power, population, and resources of Great Britain, when its armies were upon our soil, when the walls of its' capitol were blackened and marred by the fires kindled by our foes, and our Union was threatened with disasters, the leading officials and citizens of New England threatened resistance to the military measures of the administration. This was the language held by a convention of delegates appointed by the Legislatures of three New England States and by delegates from counties in Vermont and New Hampshire: 'In cases of deliberate, dangerous, and palpable infractions of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of a State and liberties of the people, it is not only the right but the duty of such State to interpose for their protection in the manner best calculated to secure that end.' 'This covers the whole doctrine of nullification.' I may add, it covers the whole doctrine of secession, for it recognized the right of the State to determine when infractions of the Constitution have occurred, and to apply their own remedies."

The men who uttered these threats, which gave "aid and comfort" to the enemies of this country while they were burning its capitol, were held in high esteem. To this day the names of George Cabot, Nathan Dove, Roger M. Sherman, and their associates are honored in New England."

The acquisition of Louisiana, in 1803, created much dissatisfaction throughout New England, for the reason, as expressed by George Cabot, Senator from Massachusetts, and the grandfather of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (in whose "Life of George Cabot" the statement is made):

"That the influence of our [northeastern] part of the Union must be diminished by the acquisition of more weight at the other extremity." At the time secession, or separation of the States, was freely discussed, and with no suggestion of any idea among its advocates that it was treasonable or revolutionary.

Col. Timothy Pickering, an officer in the Revolution, afterwards Postmaster General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet, and afterwards for many years a Senator from Massachusetts, was also a leading secessionist in his day. In Lodge's "Life of Cabot," his letters to Senator Cabot reveal his convictions of the power in a sovereign State to sever its connection with the Union. In one of his letters, written in 1803 to a friend, he says: "I will not despair. I will rather anticipate a new Confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting influences and oppressions of the aristocratic Democrats of the South. There will be (our children at the furthest will see it) a separation. The white and black populations will mark the boundary."

In another letter he says: "The principles of our Revolution point to the remedy---a separation; that this can be accomplished without spilling one drop of blood, I have little doubt."

Other quotations to the same point found in the letters of Col. Pickering might be given. The occasion forbids. Such were his views of the nature of the compact under the Constitution. He was a revolutionary patriot, a friend and associate of Washington, and a trusted servant, during many long years, of Massachusetts.

In 1811, in the debate of the bill for the admission of Louisiana into the Union, Josiah Quincy, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, said:

"If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of the Union; that it will free the States from moral obligation, and as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some definitely to prepare for that separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must."

Cabot, Quincy, and Pickering were strong Federalists, not "misguided advocates of State rights," but friends of a strong, centralized, Federal government.

All of us know of the Hartford Convention, held in 1814, growing out of the war with Great Britain, in which were representatives regularly elected by the Legislatures of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and representatives irregularly chosen from New Hampshire and Vermont. They sat with closed doors, but it is known that their object was the discussion of the expediency of those States withdrawing from the Union and setting up a separate Confederation. They determined upon its inexpediency then, but published to the world the conditions and circumstances under which its dissolution might become expedient.

In the years 1844-45, when measures were taken for the annexation of Texas, the Legislature of Massachusetts passed a resolution that:

"The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation; but that it is determined, as it doubts not the other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth," and that the "project for the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union."

In the convention which framed the Constitution itself the proposition was made and lost, giving authority to employ force against a delinquent State, but Mr. Madison said:

"The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it may have bound."

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in his "Life of Webster," says:

"It was probably necessary---at all events Mr. Webster felt it to be so---to argue that the Constitution at the outset was not a compact between the States, but a national instrument, and to distinguish the cases of Virginia and Kentucky in 1799, and of New England in 1814, from that of South Carolina in 1830. Unfortunately, the facts were against him in both instances. When the Constitution was adopted by the votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to say there was not a man in the country, from Washington and Hamilton on the one side to George Clinton and George Mason on the other, who regarded the system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the States, and from which each and every State had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised."

Wendell Phillips, a lawyer, an author, and a statesman, in New Bedford, Mass., in 1861, said that the States who think their peculiar institutions require a separate government "have a right to decide that question without appealing to you or me."

"A convention in Ohio in 1859 declared the Constitution a compact to which each State acceded as a State, and is an integral party, and that each State had the right to judge for itself of infractions, and of the mode and measure of redress, and to this declaration Giddings, Wade, Chase, and Denison assented."

At Capon Springs, Va., June 28, 1851, Daniel Webster said:

"I do not hesitate to say and repeat that if the Northern States refuse willfully and deliberately to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Congress provide no remedy, the South would no longer be bound to. observe the compact. A bargain broken on one side is broken on all sides."

Writing to a committee of New York lawyers in 1851, Mr. Webster said:

"In the North, the purpose of overturning the government shows itself more clearly in resolutions agreed to in voluntary assemblies of individuals, denouncing the laws of the land, and declaring a fixed intent to disobey them. I notice that in one of these meetings, holden lately in the very heart of New England, and said to have been very numerously attended, the members unanimously resolved 'That as God is our helper we will not suffer any person charged with being a fugitive from labor to be taken from among us, and to this resolve we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.' He conjured his fellow-citizens to reject all such ideas as that disobedience to the laws is the path of patriotism, or treason to your country duty to God.'"

I need not array further evidence as to where and when the seeds of disunion were first sown. The truth is, they antedate the Constitution, and the nursery and hotbed in which they were cared for and cultivated in the first fifty years of the republic was in the North, principally New England. The truth I believe is that, from the very beginning, a large majority of the South believed in the constitutional right of a State to secede and some believed in the doctrine of nullification as a remedy for flagrant violations of the Constitution; but they loved the Union, and, largely controlling its destinies for sixty out of seventy years, they held it steadily within its constitutional limits. They never nursed any doctrine looking to its destruction. In its early perils, when its enemies within and without threatened its existence, when at best it was an experiment, the South was found entangled in no hostile machinations. As in her revolutionary struggles the South sent to the army no Benedict Arnold, so in the weakness of her infancy she furnished no Shay's rebellions nor Hartford conventions.

Alexander Stephens has said, and it is worth remembering, that:

"No Southern State ever did, intentionally or otherwise, fail to perform her obligation as to her confederates under the Constitution, according to the letter and spirit of its stipulated covenants, and they never asked of Congress any action or invoked its powers upon any subject which did not lie clearly within the provisions of the Articles of Union."

I affirm, therefore, if odium is to attach to the South for the act of secession, it must also attach to the great North and East, where it was, for political, economical, and industrial reasons, sedulously agitated and inculcated up to the Mexican war, and the right distinctly recognized by its leading statesmen up to 1860. History ought to not allow them to slip this odium, if odium it be, from their shoulders to the shoulders of the South.

It is true, South Carolina inaugurated nullification in 1830, a doctrine which was never generally accepted by the Southern statesmen, and which, to my mind, has always seemed illogical, if not unethical; a doctrine which, as I have always understood, President Davis never approved, and a doctrine which President Jackson unceremoniously stamped out; a doctrine, nevertheless, as we shall see, which permeated all the abolition States of the North.

Our children should know that the Confederate States, by the act of secession, made no war on the United States; that the war between the States was not rebellion. It was the result of an effort by the United States to coerce States against their will to remain in the Union, a power not to be found in the Constitution, a power which all the earlier fathers believed did not exist, a power utterly inconsistent with the right of secession, which it is believed all parts of the country recognized when the Constitution was framed and for many years thereafter.

If the Southern States had the power, notwithstanding the Constitution, to withdraw from the Union in 1803, in 1812 and in 1845, as New England statesmen then affirmed, they had the same power in i86i. No change of the Constitution had been made, and the relations of the States to each other were unaltered. If that power existed at all, the expediency of withdrawing was one solely for each State to decide for itself.

The New York Tribune, the organ of the abolitionists of that day, said: "If the Cotton States wish to withdraw from the Union, they should be allowed to do so," and that "any attempt to force them to remain would be contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and to the fundamental ideas upon which human liberty is based," and that "if the Declaration of Independence justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of subjects in 1776, it was not seen why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southerners from the Union in 1861."

I make no apology for quoting a single paragraph from that instrument, the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

Assuming the power existed, I affirm that if at any time in all our history secession was ever justifiable it was in 1861. No less than fourteen Northern States had, by Legislative enactments, nullified the fugitive slave law; and what of this fugitive slave law?

When the Constitution was framed slavery was lawful in all the States, and actually existed in nearly all. True, it had been forbidden by a congressional ordinance in the Northwest Territory, but that ordinance was accompanied by a proviso for the rendition of fugitive slaves, and this proviso, says Dr. Curry, "was the precursor of the fugitive slave clause, embedded the same year in the Constitution, without a dissenting voice."

In the Dred Scott case, Mr. Justice Nelson said: "We all know, the world knows, that our independence could not have been achieved, our Union could not have been maintained, our Constitution could not have been established, without the adoption of those compromises which recognized its continued existence, and left it (slavery) to the responsibility of the States of which it was the grievous inheritance."

Mr. Justice Story, in the Prigg case, said: "Historically, it is well-known that the object of this clause was to secure to the slaveholding States the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves, as property, in every State of the Union into which they might escape from the State wherein they were held in servitude."

But the truth demands that it should be stated that neither that ordinance nor the constitutional proviso referred to was the origin of the fugitive slave law. "In 1643 Articles of Confederation were formed by the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven for mutual help. The Articles provided that all servants running from their masters should, upon demand and proper evidence, be returned to their masters and to the colonies whence they had made their escape. This New England and Puritan fugitive slave law was the first enacted on this continent."

This fugitive slave law, thus nullified by fourteen States, was an Act of Congress, passed in pursuance of the express mandate of the Constitution. The temper of the North at that time may be best illustrated by a few quotations.

Mr. Seward said: "There is a higher law than the Constitution which regulates our authority over our domain. Slavery must be abolished, and we must do it."

Others formulated their creed into this sentence: "The times demand and we must have an antislavery Constitution, an antislavery Bible, and an antislavery God."

Mr. Edmund Quincy thus voiced the idea of his school:

"For our part we have no particular desire to see the present law repealed or modified. What we preach is not repeal, not modification, but disobedience."

A reverend and active abolition agitator said: "The citizen of a government tainted with slave institutions may combine with foreigners to put down the government."

In addition to the action of various Northern States in nullifying an act of Congress, John Brown had, in October, 1859, heading a band of armed conspirators, invaded the State of Virginia, seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and was pursuing a concocted plan to arouse the slaves of Virginia to insurrection, to plunder, to murder, and to overthrow the government of that State.

Judge Taney, second to no one who ever sat on the Supreme Court bench, unless it be Marshall, was assailed in the bitterest and most vituperative term's for his decision in the Dred Scott case. The solemn judgment of that court was audaciously and insolently set at naught as arbitrary and void. The whole North was angry and convulsed; the voice of law was silent. Mr. Lincoln, the President elect, and the idol of his party, had said: "The Union cannot permanently exist half slave and half free."

In the campaign of 1860 Mr. Seward had affirmed that:

"There was an irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery." It was equivalent to a declaration of war by the most prominent and influential statesmen of the victorious party upon an institution peculiar to the South.

The people of this generation cannot comprehend the intense excitement and deep feeling existing in the South, and the bitterness growing out of this question between the sections. The South had two billions invested in slaves when Mr. Lincoln was elected. The Constitution had been nullified already. His position on the slavery question was well understood.

Such is dim portrayal of the situation by which the South was confronted in 1860.

What had she to hope or expect in the Union? No such conditions had ever previously existed. No such consequences had provoked New England to threats of disunion. It was not a question of the control of the government, or an economical or industrial question; it was not a question of preserving the balance of power or the equilibrium of the sections, such as was felt in New England when the Louisiana and Florida purchases were made, and Texas acquired. It was a question of civilization, of constitutional liberty, of the preservation of the principles of the Constitution; and the South, when the alternative was presented of abandoning the principles of the Constitution, or giving up the Union, with alacrity, but with the deepest reluctance that the necessity existed, chose the latter. She was overcome, she has suffered, but she ought not to be maligned or misrepresented.

I must not be misunderstood. The whole question of secession and disunion has been forever settled, so far as the domain of constitutional law is concerned. The decree was rendered at Appomattox, and was written in the best blood of all sections of this land. It was rendered in the court of last resort, where all the laws but those of war are silent. From it no appeal can be had except to revolution, which God forbid.

From the clear skies His blessed finger points to a restored Union, and His beneficent smile is spread all over the land where dwells a people, the strongest, the most enlightened, the most prosperous and happy to be found on the habitable globe. In all our struggles we have not been forgotten; His mighty hand has been felt, lifting us up from our calamities, chastened but made better and stronger by His loving-kindness. "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth; and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth."

"Slavery has been called the trembling needle which pointed the course amidst the tumultuous discussions of our Congresses until the war between the States began."

But the South did not go to war for slavery alone. Thousands and thousands of soldiers from every State in the South, perhaps not less than eighty per cent of them, entered the army willingly and deliberately, and served through the war, who never owned and never expected to own a slave. It was unmistakably interwoven among the causes of the war. It was inseparable from all the great industrial, economic, and sectional questions involving the policy and control of the government. It embittered the discussion of every public question, and afterwards embittered the great war itself. It was inextricably interwoven with the cause of the Confederacy. It brought down upon it the prejudices of many in this country who believed in the great principle for which the South contended, but who would not identify themselves with a cause involving the perpetuation of slavery. It brought upon the South the moral sense of foreign nations. It taught us what Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had long before recognized---that the moral sense of mankind did not sustain it. It was the bane of our social order, and it was the chronic cancer which gnawed at the vitals of our future greatness. It perished, like secession, as one of the incidents and results of the war.

Thank God it is gone forever! and that we have a reunited country under one flag, the emblem of a free people in an inseparable Union of coequal States, and never destined, we pray God, to become the emblem of imperial power at Leme or abroad, or to float over vassal States and subject peoples anywhere against their will.

Ours was not a war of conquest; it was not a war of pelf; it was not a war of desolation; it was not a war of fanaticism; it was not a war of envy and malice; it was not a war on defenseless and homeless noncombatants: it was not a war of coercion. Ours was a war of self-defense, a war for home, for self-government, for State sovereignty, for the right to peaceably withdraw from the Union into which we had voluntarily entered, but to which no power had been delegated to coerce a State. It was a war to establish the true lines between the powers reserved to the States and those delegated to the general government. It was a war to preserve our form of government as the fathers understood it when it was framed.

"No higher encomium can be rendered to the South than the fact, sustained by her whole history, that she never violated the Constitution; that she committed no aggressions upon the rights of property of the North; that she simply asked equality in the Union and the enforcement and maintenance of her clearest rights and guarantees."

The South had no hatred for the Union. The highest evidence of that is that the Confederate Constitution was substantially the same as the Constitution of the United States, modified so as to make clear the construction for which the South had always contended. There were few other changes; and they looked, in the main, to the correction of abuses and errors Which experience had discovered. It distinctly inhibited the foreign slave trade, prohibited their introduction into the Confederacy from any other Territory or State except the slaveholding States and Territories of the United States, and gave the Congress the power to prohibit that also. True, it recognized slavery, as did the Constitution of the United States, and afforded like guarantees.

No, the South had no hatred for the Constitution, and no hatred for the Union. It was her Constitution and her Union, in common with all the other States created by the wisdom and courage of all their sons. The ashes of her children consecrated the battlefields of the Revolution. They had led suffering and half-clad, but victorious armies for American Independence.

Washington and Henry Lee, Marion, Sumter, and Pinkney, John Paul Jones and George Rogers Clark were among her illustrious soldiers in the great struggle for independence.

Camden, King's Mountain, the Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, Eutaw Springs, and Yorktown were all hers. It was our Andrew Jackson, commanding Southern soldiers, largely Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, and Mississippians, who fought the battle of New Orleans, terminating the war of 1815, the war which has been called the second war of Independence, the effect of which was to vindicate our equality and independence among the nationalities of the world. It gave us a position of dignity, importance, and power which has never been diminished. It was a wholesome agency in promoting national unity, in developing national patriotism and courage, military and naval skill and ability, in quieting for many years sectional discord, and demonstrating our unaided competency to defend our soil and coasts, and to cope successfully with the best-disciplined army and the most formidable navy of the old world."

In this centennial year of the celebration of the acquisition of Louisiana Territory, I can hardly resist the temptation to suggest what might have b~en the destinies of the Great Republic if the prevision of Thomas Jefferson, a Southern statesman, had not comprehended the tremendous importance to the commercial development of the United States and the preservation of the Union that the "Father of Waters" should forever remain under their control. But this digression, however inviting, cannot be indulged.

The names and battlefields I have mentioned cannot be separated from the Union any more than the light from the sun. The history of the South, with all its tender memories and glorious triumphs in war and in peace, were bound up in the history of the colonies, the Confederation, and finally in the Union.

Why was it not dear to her people? Why should she not desire to preserve it? Why should five millions of people, as a single man, rise to leave their father's house, but for some overshadowing cause and impending danger. In all history did ever like occur?

And when the North determined upon coercion, did ever any people stand together as did the people of the South? With her ports blockaded, cut off from the outer world, with no army or navy, destitute of arms and ammunition, almost without manufacturing industries of any kind, the South for four years conducted, single-handed and alone, against the trained army and navy of the Union, backed by the extensive industries of the North with it., enormous population and wealth, with its immense shipping and commerce, and with its legions of mercenaries from other lands, the most stupendous war of modern times. Do these old veterans themselves realize the achievements of the armies of the Confederacy? One in whose accuracy I have implicit faith states that more than half as many men were enrolled in the Union army as the entire white population of the Southern States proper, including all the women and children. The records show that more than two million, eight hundred and fifty thousand troops were furnished the Union army by the States and while, for the lack of official data, I cannot state, to a man, the enlistment in the Southern army from first to last, the estimate has the sanction of high authority, deemed reliable, that the Confederate forces available for action during the war did not exceed six hundred thousand soldiers, of whom there were not more than two hundred thousand arms-bearing men at any one time, and when the war closed, half that number covered the whole effective force, of all arms, in all quarters of the Confederacy.

Besides the disparity in the land forces, there was the Federal navy, the gunboats and the ironclads, without which many believe Grant's army would have been lost at Shiloh and McClellan's on the Peninsula.

When the Union army dissolved, four hundred thousand more men were borne on its roll than the estimated enlistments of the Southern army, from the spring of 1861, to the spring of 1865, and during that time there had been two hundred and seventy thousand Federal prisoners captured.

Three hundred thousand Federal soldiers sleep in eighty-three beautiful Federal cemeteries, rightly cared for by the government, to tell to posterity the awful story of that mighty fratricidal conflict.

How shall we account for these things? Has all history afforded a parallel? What is it that made the South a unit and molded its armies for terrible battle? Let the unpartisan and truth-seeking historian of the future answer; but whatever his answer may be, if he could challenge the respect of mankind, let him not say the cause, the sentiment, the conviction, or whatever it was that inspired them to brave and noble deeds did not have the abiding faith and solemn sanction of her armies in the field or her people at their homes. Until the ragged and half-starved remnants of Lee's and Johnston's armies laid down their arms and accepted the cold, stern award of defeat; until the ever-increasing and overpowering numbers of Grant's and Sherman's armies made battle no longer possible, unfaltering they stood together without a murmur, still hoping against hope for the triumph of their cause; and when the end came, and disaster and ruin met the eye on all sides, and when at every fireside was a vacant chair; when blackened chimneys identified spots where happy homes had stood; when poverty and want stalked abroad; when aliens came to rule that they might plunder; when ignorance and audacity flaunted themselves in high places, and corruption had its ready and rich rewards---still they were true; true to themselves, true to their comrades and the memory of their martyred dead, true to their old leaders, true to their great captain, and true to their States and to their beloved South. Their armies had gone down in defeat, their cause had failed, their fortunes had been swept away, disappointment and sorrows and strange conditions hovered on all sides and darkened all the ways; but there was no treacherous and cowardly turning, to fix upon their civil or military leaders the responsibility for the origin or results of the war. They had staked everything for a principle in vain. Courageous and true, they accepted their fate, and turned again to build up their wasted fortunes and prostrated commonwealths.

To me the sweetest and noblest chapter in the book of our misfortunes and sorrows was the treatment which the South accorded the fallen chief of the Confederacy. His was a pure, a great, and an incorruptible career. He had served the Union with great distinction in high stations, in war and in peace. No ambitious longings for place or power now remained. All hope for his preferment had gone out in the darkness of defeat. Imprisoned and in irons, he suffered for them all. Released without trial, no plea for pardon, disfranchised, broken in health, and tottering with care and age, he returned to his people, to be welcomed as no other man, and in the calm dignity of a private citizen, in his quiet home, he remained their idol, their counselor, and their friend, devoting the last days of his noble life to the preparation of a defense and justification of that people for whom he had been made a vicarious sacrifice. He had never lost their faith, their confidence, their admiration, or their love. There is something strong and deserving of all honor in a people like this.

We are assembled here for no ignoble ends. We are here to revive no issues settled by that unhappy conflict. We are not here to defame others, or pervert or warp the truth. We are not here to exaggerate or magnify the glory or virtues of one section of our common country at the expense of another; nor are we here to desecrate this occasion by the gratification of personal ambition, or the acquirement of social distinction or political preferment. We are here that mankind may not forget nor falsehood nor calumny cloud or tarnish the calm judgement of posterity, as to the sincerity of the motives and inc honorable conduct of the Confederate soldiers. We affirm our desire that our children may understand these things; that they may the more reverence their ancestry; that they may know of their sufferings and sacrifices and be able to defend their good names, and, proud of their achievements, emulate, in the great struggles of the future, if such await our country, the fidelity, patriotism, love of home and country attested by the veterans of i86i on a hundred bloody battlefields.

Who would have them forget the Lees, the Johnstons, the Jacksons, and the Hills? Who would have them forget Bragg, Beauregard, Hardee, Price, Polk, and Hood? Who would have them forget that great wizard of the saddle, Bedford Forrest, and our own little Joe Wheeler, Pat Cleburne, the lamented Walthall, and innumerable others? Who would have us forget the grand old man yet with us, and others still spared; and the hosts who made for them names that can never perish from the earth as long as genius and courage and patriotism challenge the admiration of mankind?

Who would have them ignorant of the glorious charge of Pickett and others at Gettysburg? Who would have them forget the death struggle at Franklin, Tenn., where the Confederates won a glorious victory, but at a cost of eleven general officers killed and wounded and six thousand men---nearly one-fifth of the army---in five hours? Where Gist and Adams and Strahl and Granberry and the intrepid Pat Cleburne fell---fell in the very forefront of battle, and around them in great numbers were strewn their gallant dead? Who would have them forget Chickamauga, where friendly darkness shielded the army of the Cumberland from destruction? Who would have them forget Jackson in the Valley of Virginia, whose campaigns have challenged the military critics of England and Germany to find a single error?

Dr. Hunter McGuire, Jackson's corps surgeon, in an address delivered in Richmond in 1897, made this statement:

"Therefore it is with swelling heart and deep thankfulness that I recently heard some of the first soldiers and military students of England declare that within the past two hundred years the English-speaking race had produced but five soldiers of the first rank---Marlborough, Washington, Wellington, Robert Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. I heard them declare that Jackson's campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, in which you, and you, and myself in my subordinate place, followed this immortal, was the finest specimen of strategy and tactics of which the world has any record; that in this series of marches and battles there was never a blunder committed by Jackson; that his campaign in the Valley was superior to either of those made by Napoleon in Italy. One British officer, who teaches strategy in a great European college, told me that he used this campaign as a model of strategy and tactics, and dwelt upon it for several months in his lectures; that it was taught for months in each session in the schools of Germany, and that Von Moltke, the greatest strategist, declared it was without a rival in the world's history. This same British officer told me that he had ridden on horseback over the battlefields of the Valley, and carefully studied the strategy and tactics there displayed by Jackson; that he had followed him to Richmond, where he joined with Lee in the campaign against McClellan in 1862; that he had followed him in his detour around Pope, and in his management of his troops at Manassas; that he had studied his environment of Harper's Ferry and its capture, his part in the fight at Sharpsburg and his flank movement around Hooker---and that he had never blundered. Indeed, he added, "Jackson seemed to be inspired." Another British officer told me that "for its numbers the Army of Northern Virginia had more force and power than any army that ever existed."

It is cruel to discriminate, but this tribute from such a source is too rich to be lost. It should go into history as the priceless heritage of our people.

I ought not to specify, but will you bear with me for one further incident, pathetic as it is heroic, and glowing with the spirit which animated the sacred dead we strive to honor?

At Lexington, Va., where the remains of Gens. Lee and Jackson now sleep, is the Virginia Military Institute. It was in successful operation in May, 1864, when Seigel advanced up the Valley. Gen. John C. Breckinridge was sent with an inadequate force to arrest his advance. A corps of cadets, boys seventeen and under, from this school, consisting of a battalion of four companies of infantry, and a section of three-inch rifled guns, were ordered to report to him at Staunton. The march was made in two days. Two or three short marches brought him in touch with Breckinridge's veterans. Their bright, gaudy uniforms, clean and new, their smooth, girlish faces, trim step, and jaunty airs subjected them to severe raillery and all manner of fun from the old soldiers. Breckinridge did not want to use them if it could be avoided. Having determined to receive the attack of Seigel at New Market, the boy corps was ordered, in a beating rain, to report to Gen. Echols. It was not long until the bright, new uniforms, bedraggled with rain and mud, presented the corps in a dilapidated and pitiable state; but they moved on and took position on the extreme left of the reserve line of battle. Wharton's brigade was in advance, and the boy corps, brigaded with Echols, was in the reserve. The order to advance soon came. A slight knoll was reached, and the batteries opened; but, not having the range, little damage was done to Wharton's men. But when Echols's men reached it they had the range, and their fire began to tell with fearful accuracy. Let their Colonel tell the rest. He says:

"Great gaps were made through the ranks; but the cadet, true to his discipline, would close in to the center to fill the interval, and push steadily forward. The alignment of the battalion under this terrible fire, which strewed the ground with killed and wounded for more than a mile on open ground, would have been creditable even on a field day. They moved steadily forward for more than a mile beyond New Market. When within three hundred yards of the enemy's batteries, they opened with canister, case shot and long lines of musketry at the same time. The fire was withering---it seemed impossible that any living creature could escape---and here we sustained our heaviest loss. The commander fell, but a cadet captain took command of the battalion and moved forward until they had gotten into the first line, when all took shelter behind a fence, and then, after a few minutes, with a shout, a fusillade, and a rush, the enemy fled and the day was won.

They had gone as far as the best troops in the army. There were none to guy them then. They had challenged the love and admiration of the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia, and fifty-two of their battalion, of the two hundred and fifty composing it, killed and wounded that day, won them a place they can never lose in history.

I cannot tell you what it was that inspired those beardless boys to deeds of noble bearing and death. Whatever it was ran through the Confederate armies. These were the sons of the old South. Is it to be despised? Where shall brighter or nobler examples of heroism and sacrifice be found?

And may I not revert to the manner in which the war was conducted by the Confederates? To this I point with justifiable pride. It was a splendid race of men that built up the old South. They were the descendants of the Cavaliers. They, like other men, had their faults, but they cherished the glorious memories of a long line of ancestry who despised all that was contemptible, little, and mean; they were sticklers for the observance of the highest sense of honor; they built their lofty characters on the observance of the truth; they hated moral and physical cowardice, and their homes were the habitations of virtue, chivalry, and hospitality; but they were conservative; they were lovers of home and the devoted friends of civil and religious liberty. They believed in as little government as was consistent with the maintenance of law and order, and that whatever went beyond this was an infringement upon the liberty of the individual, destructive of that love the citizen owed the State, and tended to destroy the self-reliance and independence of the individual upon. whose love, strength, and manhood rested the temple of free constitutional government. What contributions æthey have made to the betterment of mankind, and what inspiration they have given the great masses who have builded this wonderful country of ours!

The great Mississippian, the lawyer, the statesman and the General, as great in peace as in war, himself having borne a conspicuously brilliant and honorable part in the heroic struggle of which I speak, in an address delivered at the unveiling of a monument to the Confederate dead at Jackson, Miss., said of these men of the old South of whom I speak, that: "From among them came the statesman who wrote the Declaration of Independence; and, strange as it may sound in this day of universal freedom, it is said that all who signed the Declaration, except those from the State of Massachusetts, and perhaps one or two others, were slaveholders. From among them came the Father of His Country, the Father of the Constitution, and the greatest of all its expounders. At the head of the great armies, in the presidential office, in cabinet and court, and in all the nation's high councils, everywhere, in peace and in war, great Southern lights, illuminate the annals of America, and shed upon our country's name its chief honor and renown. From the foundation of the government, through all the epochs of peace and arms, down to 1861, Southern statesmen and orators, Southern philosophers and judges, Southern patriots and soldiers have enacted the brightest chapters of this country's history, and to them we are indebted for the fundamental sources of its present power."

The descendants of such men as these conducted the war on the Confederate side. Is it surprising that it was conducted on the highest plane of modern warfare? In no single instance is it recorded, even in the partisan histories already written, that ruin and desolation followed in the footsteps of its armies; nor that their marches were known by ôpillars of fire by night and clouds of smoke by day,ö nor that the birds of the air could not follow them without carrying their rations. Sherman's march to the sea, as told by himself, and Sheridan's raid through the Valley of Virginia, as characterized by his own pen, find no counterpart in Lee's march to Gettysburg or Antietam, or in Morgan's raid through Ohio. No Confederate general ever recorded any boast of his cruelty to noncombatants, or felt a pride in making a Warsaw of any part of American soil. To emphasize these statements, I invoke your patience while I read an order issued by a man while in the enemy's country, whom I believe to represent the highest type of genuine and true manhood, to be found in all history:

HEADQUARTERS OF ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA, CHAMBERSBURG, PA., June 27, 1863.

"The Commanding General has observed with marked satisfaction the conduct of the troops on the march, and confidently anticipates results commensurate with the high spirit they have manifested. No troops could have displayed greater fortitude or better performed the arduous marches of the past ten days. Their conduct in other respects has, with few exceptions, been in keeping with their character as soldiers, and entitled them to approbation and praise.

"There have, however, been instances of forgetfulness on the part of some, that they have in keeping the yet unsullied reputation of the army, and that the duties exacted of us by civilization and Christianity are not less obligatory in the country of the enemy than our own. The Commanding General considers that no greater disgrace could befall the army, and through it the whole people, than the perpetration of the barbarous outrages upon the innocent and defenseless and the wanton destruction of private property that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country. Such proceedings not only disgrace the perpetrators and all connected with them, but are subversive of the discipline and efficiency of the army, and destructive of the ends of our present movements. It must be remembered that we make war only on armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered, without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemy, and offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.

"The Commanding General, therefore, earnestly exhorts the troops to abstain with most scrupulous care from unnecessary or wanton injury to private property, and he enjoins upon all officers to arrest and bring to summary punishment all who shall in any way offend against the orders on the subject."

Who could have written this order except Robert E. Lee?

Years after the war had closed, at a time, it is true, when its passions had not subsided, and bitterness in the hearts of people of one section toward their countrymen in the other still lingered, in a spirit of splendid magnanimity, the victorious conqueror, the great Captain of the Union army taught the grand lesson of forgiveness and fraternity in the imperishable words, "Let us have peace."

But this order of Gen. Lee was penned in the very midst of the furious struggle, when every heart was filled with re sentiment and indignation at the cruel outrages upon innocent and defenseless noncombatants and wanton and malicious destruction of private property, even the family portraits and heirlooms, and household effects essential to the comfort of the unprotected wives and children of the soldiers in the field. Contrast it with Sherman's march to the sea and Sheridan's raid in the Valley; with the wanton destruction by fire of the captured cities Atlanta, Columbia Charleston; and finally with that order of that other Virginian, Hunter, by which the torch was applied even to the institutions of learning, and the building and library an apparatus, the accumulations of forty years, of the Virginia Military Institute, and the library and apparatus of Washington College, endowed by the Father of His Country perished in the angry flames; or contrast it with the con duct of Butler in New Orleans.

In peace Grant gloriously triumphed over the passion engendered by war; but Lee, horrified by the heartless atrocities of the invading foe, in the midst of the enemy country, with every opportunity for revenge, triumphantly rose above all the natural instincts of the human heart for revenge, to inculcate and to practice the teachings of the Saviour of mankind, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay."

Peerless, glorious Robert E. Lee! Glorious in prosperity---more glorious in adversity; glorious in victory---more glorious in defeat; resplendent in life---triumphant in death.

What a monument is this to the character of the Southern army!

One who followed Bragg through Kentucky could no have known by observation that an army had passed along the highway unless he had seen where it had camped a night, and not then because any fence had lost a rail or any orchard its fruit.

Is there not something in the history of a people like that worth preserving? May no lessons here be drawn for the elevation of mankind; no memories worthy of the children of the South? We must not forget that a large number o the survivors of that conflict have taken up their abode in the Silent City, and those who remain are admonished that white heads are the companions of failing memories Whatever they shall do by way of fixing the true status o the Confederate soldier must be done in the near future, for

"To the past go more dead faces every year;

Everywhere the sad eyes meet us;

In the evening's dust they greet us,

And to come to them entreat us,

Every year.

May I permitted to trespass a moment longer? It is to the Confederate soldiers in peace I would speak. I cannot---nor would I if I could---portray the ceaseless chain of wrong and oppression which followed in the wake of the great "Civil War;" and it came upon a defenseless, desolated and impoverished land---a land rich in nothing but noble men ant women and the precious memories of the glorious race from which they sprung and in the priceless heritage of high achievements.

If those who fell in battle could have spoken from their graves, they would scarcely have envied the fate of the survivors.

Sir, if anything exceeds in constancy, in patience, in courage and fortitude, the Confederate soldier, who from 1863 to 1865, half-clad, hungry, and almost without hope of success, followed with weary but steady footsteps the tattered battle flags of the South until the star of the Confederacy went out, it was the same soldier who, for the decade that followed the war, in poverty and in want, disfranchised and despised, overrun by aliens and strangers, steadily and with a sublime constancy and devotion resisted wrong and oppression, turned his back upon place and power, while ignorance and dishonesty held high carnival, until, by the very logic of events reason supplanted bitterness and passion, ignorance and vice gave way to intelligence and personal worth, and his long-deferred redemption came.

Did any other people ever face and overcome adversity as did the Southern people? The same spirit which gave her armies unity, power, and endurance followed the survivors back to the civil life to point the way to a new birth such as no other country has ever experienced. The South gave to her armies all of her male population, including beardless boys and gray-haired men, and they went from every walk, profession, and calling and station in life. Neither the bench, the pulpit, nor the institutions of learning were spared. All answered with alacrity and determination the call to arms. When it closed there were none upon whom to rely but the ex-Confederate soldier. He it was who took up the new problems which the changed conditions of his desolate land presented. Standing by the graves of his comrades, inspired by their noble deeds, chastened and disciplined by the horrors, self-denials, and sufferings of war, encouraged by the high achievements of his revolutionary sires, and loving to veneration the traditions of his ancestry, interwoven as they were with the history of his beloved South, undismayed but hampered by the prejudices and passions which war had leit behind, he began the work of rebuilding her shattered fortunes and rehabilitating her dismantled commonwealths. But as the South had fought for the principle of local selfgovernment and failed, so in the disjointed logic of the times she was to be denied its application in the reestablishment of her State governments. The South, yet unadjusted to its changed conditions, struggling under its burdens of misfortune and impending dangers, misjudged, misunderstood, and mistrusted, may have blundered in many things; and the great North, forgetting or ignoring the great qualitiesùthe fidelity and honor, the genius for constructive statesmanship and good government which her fallen foe had always exhibited in war and in peaceùgave rein to unrestricted passions and prejudices, alike harmful to itself and ruinous to the South.

It sent the carpetbagger, who, aided by those who had never exercised the simplest rights of citizenship, were expected to set up and administer such governments as were fit for a people who, for nearly three-quarters of a century, had, in the main, guided and directed the splendid progress and development of the great republic. I would not dwell, if time permitted, upon the riotous conditions into which a helpless and defenseless people were plunged by this characterless horde of insatiable cormorants who assembled at our State capitals, to blaspheme the very name of civil government, and plot schemes to oppress a fallen foe, that they might prolong their opportunities for peculation. This is not the time nor place, but it must be left to the future historian, in the interest of truth and as a lesson to posterity, and as a warning to us all that there is no freedom where one man is permitted to govern others against their æwills, to drag away the sheet that covers the rotten corpse of reconstruction. It fell, as in the nature of things it could not endure. Time gradually assauged the passions of the war; commerce and business struggled under its withering influences and demanded better things; and the conscience of the great victorious North was stricken at the cruelties and follies and ruin it wrought; but a decade had passed, a weary, withering, blighting decade of misrule on the one hand, and patient endurance and long-deferred hope on the other. Again the ex-Confederate took up the burden of civil government. I think sometimes we forget the strong characters of those who, Moses like, led us out of the wilderness of our woes. Few of them are now left, and their faces recede with the flying years.

They were ex-Confederates, true and tried. Some yet live, and to call names would be invidious; but we owe them a double debt of gratitude, and to their memories reverence and love.

With the South's overwhelming problem still unsolved, she has nevertheless, under the auspices of her own people, fallen upon safe and peaceful, if not happy and prosperous, times. Her sons and daughters have resumed their rightful station, and whatever the future has in store of good for her must rest upon the traits and characteristics of her people. She will be patient; she will be prudent. To all the knightly and queenly virtues she will hold fast, trusting in God and the future for the noble and good. The South will not despair.

I read the other day in one of Talmage's sermons these words: "There is a flower in Siberia that blooms only in January, the severest month in that cold climate. It is a star-shaped flower, and covered with glistening specks that look like diamonds. A Russian took some of the seeds of that flower to St. Petersburg and planted them, and they grew, and on the coldest day of January they pushed back the snow and ice and burst into full bloom. They called it the snow flower; and it makes me think of those whom the world tries to freeze out and snow under, but who, in the strength of God, push through and up and out and bloom in the hardest weather of the world's cold treatment, starred and radiant with a beauty given only to those who find life a struggle and turn it into victory."

These sturdy, venerable veterans, bearing the scars and wounds of battle in their bitterest days, like the snow flowers of Siberia, pushed their way up and out and through all the ice and snows of the cold winters of adversity, and, thank God! they stand for all that is strong and conservative and safe in government. Will their posterity do less?

Providence, as a kind Father, took by the hand our liberty loving ancestors and guided them here. Generation after generation lived, ruled, and passed away, retaining the purity and freshness of virtuous power. Greed of gain and lust of power, culminating in plutocratic usurpation of all the branches of government, have never found favor or encouragement here. Our population, Anglo-Saxon still, has never been dominated by foreign elements ignorant and careless of the principles of our government and the practices of our fathers. We still have our splendid inheritance, except as modified---let us believe for the better--by war.

I believe, as I live, that if our institutions are to be preserved much, so much, will depend upon this goodly South of ours. Our deepest concern should be for a better and more righteous national character. All the bounteous elements of earth and sky beckon us away from the base fascination of pelf which dishonors and destroys our country.

Let us invite all her people into paths of law and order, inculcating peace, and keep alive our sense of justice and human freedom, and let all our advancement and growth be characterized by such a recognition of the rights of man as shall make her people feel that the blessings of Providence are theirs under a government of just and equal laws.

May our beloved Southland build all her temples, not upon the shifting quicksands of selfish expediency, but upon the everlasting principles of right! Let us not forget that. in the great armory of Divine Providence, Justice forges her weapons long before her battles are fought; that in the everlasting courts of heaven every man must suffer the penalties of hi; disobedience, and all nations the penalty of injustice and wrong. Whatever may be our burdens or calamities, let us bear them with that courage and fortitude that becomes a just and a great people; and may our children and our children's children be inspired to walk along the very mountain ranges of an enlightened Christian civilization, always in the path of duty, and preserve and keep sacred the same great qualities that made their ancestry respected and beloved of mankind!

A SKETCH OF JUDGE ROGERS.

John Henry Rogers, soldier, lawyer, Congressman, and jurist, was born on a plantation near Roxobel, Bertie County, N. C., October 9, 1845 the third child of Absalom and Harriet Rogers, and grandson of William Rogers, a farmer and mechanic, who lived and reared a family of twelve children in Pitt County, N. C. His father was a wealthy planter before the war, but, being deprived of his slaves and everything but his lands, was reduced to poverty by that disaster. In 1852 the family, consisting of his parents, brothers, and two sisters, removed to a cotton plantation in Madison County, Miss. He attended schools near his home until 1861, and, in addition to the ordinary branches and a little Latin and Greek, he acquired some proficiency in military drill.

This accomplishment he made useful at the outbreak of the war, when he was chosen drillmaster of those of his schoolmates who were over fifteen years of age; and in the following fall he acted as instructor of a company of home guards, although most of its members were between forty and sixty years of age. In March, 1862, he was mustered into the Ninth Regiment, Mississippi Infantry, at Canton, Miss., as a private. In the battle of Munfordville (Green River), Ky., he was wounded while charging the enemy's breastworks. He was subsequently in the battles of Murfreesboro (Stone River), Tenn., Chickamauga, Ga., Mission Ridge, near Chattanooga, Tenn., and Resaca, Ga. He was in the engagements before Atlanta, July 26 and 28, 1864, and was wounded at Jonesboro, Ga., in September, 1864. He fought at Franklin, Tenn., November 30, 1864, and at Nashville, Tenn., December 15, 1864. In April, 1865, although but nineteen years of age, he was promoted by special order of Gen. Johnston to the rank of first lieutenant, and he commanded Company F of the Ninth Mississippi Regiment until the capitulation of Johnston's army.

Returning home by foot, about one thousand miles, he began reviewing his studies, and entered Center College, Danville, in September, 1865, and the University of Mississippi in 1867, where he was graduated in 1868. He was admitted to the bar at Canton, Miss. After teaching a short time, he began his legal practice at Fort Smith, Ark., in February, 1869, and shortly after his arrival at that place entered the office of Judge William Walker. From 1871 to 1874 he was in partnership with that eminent lawyer; for the following three years he practiced alone, and then for five years served as first circuit judge of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit. This office he resigned, on account of impaired health, in May, 1882, and in the following November was elected a member of Congress, where he served in the forty-eighth, forty-ninth, fiftieth, and fifty-first Congresses. Throughout his public career he made few set speeches, but worked laboriously on committees, and took an active part in the daily proceedings. During the last six years he was a member of the Judiciary Committee, ana especially devoted his energies to securing legislation amending the criminal laws of the United States, and reorganizing the Federal judiciary system. He was successful in securing the writ of error to persons convicted of felony, and witnessed the creation of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, largely the outcome of his own persistent efforts to have them established as a remedy for the congested condition of the business of the Supreme Court. The bill passed was, however, only a modification of his own plan of abolishing the Circuit Courts, and making the District Courts the great repository of original jurisdiction, civil and criminal, while the Circuit. Courts of Appeal should be composed of the circuit judges then in office and two others to be appointed. Thus a stable court of three judges would be secured, and the supreme judges relieved of all Circuit Court duty. The Supreme Court of the United States would be a great constitutional court, but would retain limited supervisory control, as before, over the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, to the end that harmony of decision on questions of general law might be secured. Such an arrangement Judge Rogers still hopes to see established, and is encouraged by the fact that it has. already been partially adopted in the Eighth Circuit, where four circuit judges now constitute the court.

In the fifty-first Congress Judge Rogers came prominently before the public as the opponent of the Speaker, his speeches assailing what he believed to be the arbitrary and oppressive conduct on the part of that official being published by the press throughout the country. Many of these speeches, in their biting satire and argument, were considered masterpieces of their kind. In the interest of his constituents he secured, while in Congress, the passage of a bill donating the abandoned United States military reservation adjoining the city of Fort Smith to that city in trust for the public schools, which have since realized a munificent trust fund from this source. He also secured the construction of a handsome public building for use as a post office and by the United States courts, and of a commodious prison, while through his efforts a United States Circuit Court was established at Fort Smith in place of a United States District Court formerly held there, which had Circuit Court powers, and exercised jurisdiction over a part of the State of Arkansas, and criminal jurisdiction over all the Indian Territory. Retiring from public life, after the fifty-first Congress, Judge Rogers practiced law at Fort Smith, in partnership with James F. Read, until November, 1896. when he was appointed by President Cleveland successor of Hon. I. C. Parker, late United States District Judge for the Western District of Arkansas. He is President of the Board of Education of Fort Smith. In 1895, on the occasion of his delivery of the annual address to the alumni of Center College at Danville, Ky., that institution conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL.D.

Judge Rogers was married October 9, 1873, to Mary Gray, only daughter of Dr. Theodore Dunlap and Elizabeth Gray, of Danville, Ky. Four sons and one daughter are living, their first child, Theodora, having died at the age of two years.

Confederate Veteran, Vol. XI, No. 8 Nashville, Tenn., August, 1903.

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BATTLE OF THE CRATER

W. A. Day, Sherrill's Ford, N. C.

I see the accounts of battles written by comrades who participated in them are growing fewer in number every year. Can it be that the packed knapsack under the heading, "The Last Roll," is responsible for it? Comrades, it has been thirty-eight long years since we fought our last battles. The sons and daughters of the South will need our help after we are all gone, so let us help them while we live. Let us give them true sketches of those terrible battles, so that in the days to come the descendants of the old Confederate soldiers may read of the brave days of old.

The battle of the crater has been known in story and in song as the bloodiest battle of the war. I give this history as I saw it. I was a private soldier, twenty years of age, in Company I, Forty-Ninth North Carolina Regiment, Ransom's Brigade, Gen. Bushrod Johnson's Division. We were among the first troops to arrive at Petersburg when Butler moved his army up the James. Our division had been engaged in all the battles around Drewry's Bluff and Bermuda Hundred, and when Gen. Grant crossed the James at City Point and moved up the river were among the first to arrive at Petersburg, marching all night and reaching the city at sunrise. We rested a few minutes at Blandford Cemetery, then double-quicked two miles out on the Jerusalem plank road, where we aided the militia in checking the advance of Grant's army as it rapidly approached the city. This was the beginning of the siege of Petersburg, which lasted two hundred and seventy days. Our division occupied the trenches during the entire siege, and was under the fire of the Yankee guns every day and night of the time, except fourteen days when we were sent out on the right, where our division was nearly all killed and captured at the disastrous battle of Five Forks.

But it is in regard to the crater that I write now. I have heard disputes concerning the troops who made that grand charge in the afternoon of July 30, 1864, known as Mahone's charge. I believe that Tennessee, Virginia, South Carolina; and North Carolina were all represented. I know the Twenty-Fifth North Carolina Regiment was.

The battle commenced at daylight and ended with the charge of our troops in the afternoon, which cleared the breastworks of the Yankees and reestablished our lines.

I had been out all night on picket, returning just before day on the morning of the 30th, and had seen nothing unusual on the Yankee side. I was very sleepy and tired, and went into a bombproof a few paces in rear of the works, and in a few minutes was asleep. I was suddenly awakened by a tremendous jar, which loosened the timbers overhead and let the dirt roll in on me, almost covering me up. I was first under the impression that a sixty-four pounder mortar shell had struck the bombproof and caved it in, but in a few minutes, with a thunder that shook the hills, the enemy opened two hundred pieces of artillery, massed for the purpose on our lines, and the earth trembled under the shock. I seized my gun and ran out into the works. The men were all under arms, and about the time I got into my place in the ranks the orders came to move down the line of breastworks to the right at double-quick.

Pegram's battery stood on the top of a hill in the open field, the ground sloping off gently in front for a distance of one hundred and fifty yards, then abruptly down to the railroad, near where the tunnel was started. In the rear, at some distance, was a small ravine, then rising ground back to Cemetery Ridge, half a mile in the rear, which the enemy intended to crown with artillery should they succeed in gaining the ridge through the breach in the works. There the whole country around would have been at the mercy of their guns. On the right and left were ravines, a small stream running through the one on the left, heading at a spring two hundred yards above. On the left the woods reached up to within seventy-five yards of the battery. The place was known as Elliott's salient.

There were two regiments between ours (the Forty-Ninth North Carolina) and the battery---viz., the Twenty-Fifth North Carolina and a South Carolina regiment. The South Carolinans were nearest the crater, and lost a number of men by the explosion. A few weeks before we had thrown up a work in the rear of the battery, connecting with the main line on each side. This line saved us that day. It was known as "the cavalier line."

Capt. Wright's masked battery of six guns stood on the hill above the ravine on the left, just in the rear of the main line, with an enfilading fire on the enemy's works. When our orders came we moved rapidly along the works, which made a bend just above the ravine in front of Capt. Wright's battery, and soon came in full view of the crater over on the other hill. The place where the battery stood was now a hole in the ground, one hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, and thirty feet deep, with the smoke rising in great clouds out of it. By that time it was light enough to see a considerable distance, and our men could be seen running rapidly to the rear, and the whole field in front full of Yankees and negroes charging up to the crater. The great burly negroes in their ill-fitting uniforms, half drunk it was said, were shouting at the top of their voices, "No quarter to the Rebels! No quarter to the Rebels! and butchering every man they found alive in the works. The soldiers who fought in that battle will never forget it. That dreadful shout, "No quarter!" from the negro troops rang in our ears for days afterwards. We plainly saw the position we were in. To be captured by the negro troops meant death not only to ourselves but, it appeared, to the helpless women and children in Petersburg. The shots from Capt. Wright's battery were flying low over our heads, plowing great lanes through the Federals. We dashed down the works, across the ravine, and up the hill, shouting to our retreating comrades to "Hold on; we are coming!" Arriving at the cavalier line, the Forty-Ninth, under Lieut. Col. Flemming, filed to the right in line, and halted with half the regiment in the cavalier line and half in the main works on the left, with the colors at the angle. The enemy were still charging into the crater and into the works on each side. They were so thick that they had no lines. Thirteen United States flags were flying in our front, planted on our works near the crater. The moment we halted we were ready for them, with plenty of ammunition and a whole field full to shoot into. Our officers ran along the lines with their naked swords in their hands, shouting to us that we were fighting for our lives and for everything we held dear on earth, and not to let them force us out. Two hundred pieces of artillery were playing on us, but we held on to the works. The flames flew out in solid sheets from the muzzles of our guns, mowing them down in heaps, and they could not stand it. All who could not get into the crater and the works on each side made a rush back to their own works, but very few ever reached them. This gave us a little time to rest and let our guns cool. The firing soon ceased, with the exception of a few pieces of artillery and the sharpshooters. The smoke which had been lit up by the flashes of the guns soon became so dense that we could scarcely see through it. We were soon moved farther down the works, so as to have more room, and with an order to keep a sharp lookout in front. This move brought us down to where the woods were in our front. A fresh lot of ammunition being brought in and distributed so that we would have nothing to do but pick it up, and the smoke having somewhat cleared away, we lay about an hour watching a mortar battery, which we had planted in a rear ravine, pitch shells into the crater, which was packed full of both white and black. Every shell sped true to the mark and crashed in among them. Some tried to get out and run back to their own works, but the sharpshooters dropped them before they were halfway.

The enemy waited until we were well rested and our guns cool, then made another heavy charge on the works on the left of the crater and in our immediate front. The lookouts gave the alarm, and, springing to our posts, we saw heavy lines of the enemy charging up through the woods and in about fifty yards of the breastworks. They were sheltered by the timber, and came very near getting into our works, but we poured the bullets into them so heavily that they had to fall back. We watched for them to re-form and come again, but that was the last charge they made. We lay there some time waiting for them to return, but our part of the fighting was over for that day.

Just before the charge was made we were moved farther up the line to the left to guard against a flanking charge which the enemy was expected to make. This position placed us in full view of the charge.

When the assaulting columns arrived, they moved into position sheltered by the hills, and formed their lines in the ravine between the works and Cemetery Ridge. When all were ready they moved slowly up the hill, three columns deep, until they were in full view of both armies. Then the charge began. With ringing shouts and waving flags they moved rapidly across the field, through the plunging shots of the Federal artillery, and cheered by their comrades who were holding the works on each side of the crater. They dashed up to the brink of the ditch, halted a moment as if mapping out their work, fired a rolling volley into the ditch filled with Yankees, the most of them being negroe, at their feet; then, turning the butts of their guns, they sprang into the ditch among them. The slaughter was terrible. The soldiers were excited; they were reckless; they burst the negroes' skulls with the butts of their guns like eggshells. The officers tried to prevent it, but they were powerless. It was "No quarter for the Rebels" that morning, and it is no quarter for them now. The fight was soon ended.

The Yankee (lead lay in heaps between the works, the wounded trying to crawl out from under the dead. Many of them came out on our side and made their way down to the little rivulet that ran from the spring above down through the works, filled up on water, and died like flies. I saw numbers of them lying on their faces in the stream with the water dammed above them until it ran over their heads. A great many died in the field before reaching the water.

I went up to the spring after the battle was over to wash the powder smoke off my hands and face. A Rhode Island soldier walked by me, saying he was a prisoner, and asked the nearest way to Petersburg. He was told to keep on to the rear and he would find the city. He said he knew their commanders made a mistake when they sent the negroes in to fight us, and that "white men fighting white men is different from white men fighting negroes."

If the armies of Gen. Grant had been victorious at the crater, and could have planted their guns on Cemetery Ridge, the siege of Petersburg would have been at an end ; the thin lines of Gen. Lee in front of that little city---the Cockade City, as it was known among the soldiers---would have been broken, and perhaps the city destroyed, and not only the soldiers who were unable to escape, but the helpless noncombatants also all would have been at the mercy of the brutal negroes, whose battle cry, "No quarter," would doubtless have been maintained. But a kind Providence willed it otherwise, and when the sun went down on that dreadful day it showed our lines restored and our men in them.

The next day was spent in burying the dead. The white flag was planted midway between the lines, and nearly all day the soldiers of both armies crowded their works near the crater watching the details at work and studying the works on the other side. It was our first chance to stand up and look over since the beginning of the siege. Large pits were dug and the dead placed in them until nearly full; then the dirt was packed on them and leveled over. The enemy wanted to mound up the pits; but our men refused, fearing they would use the mounds for breastworks. The most of our dead were carried back to Blandford Cemetery and buried.

A brass twelve-pounder howitzer was thrown to within thirty feet of the Yankee works. A sixty days' furlough was offered any one who would crawl down there in the dark and tie a long rope to it so it could be hauled in, but the undertaking was so dangerous that no one would attempt it.

Confederate Veteran, Vol. XI, No. 9 Nashville, Tenn., September, 1903.

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EXECUTION OF CAPT. HENRY WIRZ

Dr. W. J. W. Kerr

The story told by Dr. W. J. W. Kerr in vindication of Capt. Henry Wirz, of Switzerland, Military Commandant of the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Ga., who was hanged by a drumhead court-martial after the close of the war, was most thrilling in its various details. Dr. Kerr was so affected by the recital of the condemnation of his friend that several times his voice broke and be was unable to continue:

"So far as is known to myself or to any member of this association, I am the only living medical officer who was on duty at Andersonville prison during the year 1864 out of sixty-eight. I knew Capt. Wirz as no other man knew him, and I have been requested to give, as far as I am able, an account of this the most unfortunate man that belonged to our army; a man who was born in a foreign country; a man who fell a martyr to the cause he espoused so nobly and heroically; a man who had his life taken away not by truthful witnesses but by a court-martial ruled over and domineered by a judge advocate and a president whose names will go down to posterity as having been connected with one of the foulest murders and the most infamous proceedings that have ever occurred at any trial of this kind since the world began.

"On February, 1864, Capt. Wirz was ordered by Gen. Winder to report to Col. Persons, commandant of the military prison at Andersonville. As he was conversant with several languages, he was preeminently fitted to deal with the motley crew under his charge. He found the prison in a very unsatisfactory and unsanitary condition, and at once set to work to change and improve it. At the time of his arrival at the prison there were only seven or eight thousand prisoners in a sixteen-acre stockade, hut in a short time the prison began to be badly crowded, so that by the last of May there were nearly 19,000 prisoners in it, nearly 1,500 to the acre. Capt. Wirz went to work to enlarge the prison, and by the middle of June had enlarged it to twenty-five acres, and had erected several buildings inside it to shelter the sick. But by the middle of July the prison was again filled to overflowing, there being 36,000 prisoners in it. The heat of summer and the crowded condition of the prisons made a great deal of sickness, and the death rate was quite heavy. Here let me say that the hard-heartedness and cruelty charged against Capt. Wirz is as false as hell itself! Several times has he gone into the hospital with me, and I have seen his eyes fill with tears when he would see and speak of the suffering and distress there that could not be prevented. Through his advice a number of men were selected from the prison and paroled unconditionally to go to Washington and report the conditions to the United States government, and try to get an exchange of prisoners. Right well do some of you recollect Stanton's reply: 'We have got plenty of men; and if some of them die at Andersonville, what does it matter? We can whip the South much quicker by not exchanging prisoners and forcing the South to feed and guard them, and thus weaken their army; and by holding their men in prison, reduce their strength that much.' And yet, gentlemen, the whole blame of the deaths at Andersonville was placed on Wirz instead of on Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War of the United States government, and his associates.

"After the surrender, Capt. Wirz, being very much abused by some of the prisoners who had been turned loose, wrote to Gen. Wilson, then in command of cavalry at Macon, that he, Wirz, was being badly treated, and he would thank him if he would send a guard to protect him. Now, look at the cowardly and dastardly manner resorted to have him arrested. Gen. Wilson immediately sent one Capt. Henry E. Noyes down to Andersonville, who went to Capt. Wirz and told him that he had come down after the prison records, which were delivered him at once. Noyes then told him that if he would come to Gen. Wilson, in order to furnish verbally any information that Gen. Wilson might need, he should have safe conduct going and coining, and would not be molested in any way. On his arrival at headquarters he was, in violation of every promise made to him and of every regulation of civilized warfare, seized, placed in close confinement, and sent to Washington, D. C., put in the old capitol prison, and held there, without letting his family see him until his mock trial began, which for one-sidedness and false swearing has hardly any equal in history. Holt and others had determined to hang him, and, it mattered not what the evidence was, it could not have changed their determination.

"One hundred and fifty-eight prisoners were placed on the stand for or against Wirz, and every witness who swore to the killing of and cruelty to prisoners swore that it was during the last of August and the month of September, 1864, when these alleged crimes were committed, and sixty-five of them, both for prosecution and defense, swore that during this whole time Capt. Wirz was either sick in bed or on sick leave, and such was the truth.

"Now, let us look at the character of Capt. Wirz, as shown by the official 'Records of the War of the Rebellion,' published by the United States government.[ Here Dr. Kerr read several letters taken from the official records of the United States government, written by Capt. Wirz to Capt. Chapman, Acting Adjutant of Post, and Col. Chandler, C. S. A., earnestly entreating, and even imploring, that he be furnished better provisions for prisoners and better means for taking care of them.]

"'With the means at my disposal,' said Capt. Wirz, 'it is utterly impossible to take proper care of the prisoners. As long as 30,000 men are confined in one inclosure the proper policing and cleansing are impossible. A long confinement has depressed the spirits of thousands, and they are entirely indifferent. The rations are the same as those issued to our own men, one-third of a pound of bacon and one and one fourth pounds of corn meal, or one pound of fresh beef in lieu of the bacon. Occasionally beans, molasses, and rice are issued. A good deal could yet he said as to how and why the prison is not in a better sanitary condition, but I deem it unnecessary, as you have yourself seen where the fault lies. I hope your official report will make such an impression on the authorities at Richmond that they will issue the necessary orders to enable us to get what we badly need.'

"Now compare this following letter with Capt. Wirz's, and see which is the heartless villain. This is an extract from a letter written by Col. A. J. Johnson, in command of the Federal prison at Rock Island: æIn the first place, instead of placing them [the Confederate prisoners] in fine, comfortable barracks with three large stoves in each, and as much coal as they can burn both day and night, I would place them in a pen with no shelter but the heavens, as our poor men were at Andersonville. Instead of giving them the same quality, and nearly the same quantity, of food as that the troops on duty receive, I would give them as nearly as possible the same quality and quantity of provisions that the fiendish Rebels gave our men, and instead of a constant issue of clothing, I would let them wear rags, as our poor men in the hands of the Rebels were compelled to do.'

"The Rock Island prison was established in December, 1863, and existed a little more than a year. During that time 2,484 Confederates were sent for confinement there. Nineteen hundred and twenty of them died there. Only 564 that entered its portals survived. Compare this with the worst death rate in any Southern prison, and the charges of neglect and cruelty are utterly disproved.

"After the farce of a trial which would be a disgrace in any civilized country was finished, a verdict of 'guilty' was pronounced, and was approved by President Andrew Johnson. After the trial quite a number of prominent Northern men made an effort to have the sentence changed. A few days before Wirz was executed, Mr. Louis Schade, counsel for the defense, made his last appeal. 'It was Capt. Wirz,' said Mr. Schade, in his letter, 'who furnished our boys with writing materials, that they might prepare a petition for exchange to be sent to Washington; who let about fifty drummer boys escape, in order that they might not endure the horrors of the stockade; and who sent twenty-six men North, that they might see, for the purpose of exchange, the President and the Secretary of War. If I had the government patronage and the prospect of an office or two, as has been the case with some of the witnesses in this trial, I do not doubt in the least that I can within four weeks find enough testimony to hang every member of the Wirz Military Commission, on any charge whatever, provided it is done before such a tribunal.'

Dr. Kerr has power to entertain the listener indefinitely, owing to his varied and active service during the war. In his arms, it will be remembered, Albert Sidney Johnston breathed his last. He told an amusing story of how he outwitted some Federal soldiers who were seeking his life. He was on trial with Capt. Wirz, and after WirzÆs execution he was attached to a hospital in Macon. Some of Gen. Wilson's brigade were in barracks near the town, and one of them recognized him and swore to have him hung as a spy. He went to camp for a friend, by whom he hoped to prove the charge, and while he was gone a friend of Dr. Kerr's rushed him up to his room, cut off his beard, trimmed his hair, smeared his face, breast, and arms with a mixture that made him look like a Mexican. Arrayed in fitting garments, he sallied forth and held conversation with the soldiers who came to hang him. Then he went to his hospital and spread the report of his own apprehension, court-martial, and hanging. All the staff believed him, and he was not recognized until he could no longer control his laughter.

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