قراءة كتاب History of Kershaw's Brigade With Complete Roll of Companies, Biographical Sketches, Incidents, Anecdotes, etc.

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History of Kershaw's Brigade
With Complete Roll of Companies, Biographical Sketches, Incidents, Anecdotes, etc.

History of Kershaw's Brigade With Complete Roll of Companies, Biographical Sketches, Incidents, Anecdotes, etc.

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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part, how proudly they faced the foe, how grandly they fought, how nobly they died, I shall attempt not to depict; and yet—

[8] Could heart and brain and hand and pen
But bring to earth and life again
The scenes of old,
Then all the world might know and see;
Your deeds on scrolls of fame would be
Inscribed in gold



I am indebted to many of the old comrades for their assistance, most notably Judge Y.J. Pope, of the Third South Carolina; Colonel Wm. Wallace, of the Second; Captain L.A. Waller, for the Seventh; Captains Malloy, Harllee, and McIntyre, of the Eighth; Captain D.J. Griffith and Private Charles Blair, of the Fifteenth; Colonel Rice and Captain Jennings, of the Third Battalion, and many others of the Twentieth. But should this volume prove of interest to any of the "Old Brigade," and should there be any virtue in it, remember it belongs to Y.J. Pope. Thrice have I laid down my pen, after meeting with so many rebuffs; but as often taken it up after the earnest solicitation of the former Adjutant of the Third, who it was that urged me on to its completion.

To the publisher, E.H. Aull, too much praise cannot be given. He has undertaken the publication of this work on his individual convictions of its merit, and with his sole conviction that the old comrades would sustain the efforts of the author. Furthermore, he has undertaken it on his own responsibility, without one dollar in sight—a recompence for time, material, and labor being one of the remotest possibilities.

D. AUGUSTUS DICKERT.

Newberry, S.C., August 15, 1899.



[9]

CHAPTER I



SECESSION.

Its Causes and Results.


The secession bell rang out in South Carolina on the 20th of December, 1860, not to summon the men to arms, nor to prepare the State for war. There was no conquest that the State wished to make, no foe on her border, no enemy to punish. Like the liberty bell of the revolution that electrified the colonies from North to South, the bell of secession put the people of the State in a frenzy from the mountains to the sea. It announced to the world that South Carolina would be free—that her people had thrown off the yoke of the Union that bound the States together in an unholy alliance. For years the North had been making encroachments upon the South; the general government grasping, with a greedy hand, those rights and prerogatives, which belonged to the States alone, with a recklessness only equalled by Great Britain towards the colonies; began absorbing all of the rights guaranteed to the State by the constitution, and tending towards a strong and centralized government. They had made assaults upon our institutions, torn away the barriers that protected our sovereignty. So reckless and daring had become these assaults, that on more than one occasion the States of the South threatened dissolution of the Union. But with such master minds as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun in the councils of the nation, the calamity was averted for the time. The North had broken compact after compact, promises after promises, until South Carolina determined to act upon those rights she had retained for herself in the formation of the Union, and which the general government guaranteed to all, and withdrew when that Union no longer served the purposes for which it was formed.

Slavery, it has been said, was the cause of the war. Incidentally it may have been, but the real cause was far removed from the institution of slavery. That institution existed at[10] the formation of the Union, or compact. It had existed for several hundred years, and in every State; the federation was fully cognizant of the fact when the agreement of the Union was reached. They promised not to disturb it, and allow each State to control it as it seemed best. Slavery was gradually but surely dying out. Al0ong the border States it scarcely existed at all, and the mighty hand of an All-wise Ruler could be plainly seen in the gradual emancipation of all the slaves on the continent. It had begun in the New England States then. In the Caribbean Sea and South America emancipation had been gradually closing in upon the small compass of the Southern States, and that by peaceful measures, and of its own volition; so much so that it would have eventually died out, could not be denied by any who would look that far into the future, and judge that future by the past. The South looked with alarm and horror at a wholesale emancipation, when they viewed its havoc and destruction in Hayti and St. Domingo, where once existed beautiful homes and luxuriant fields, happy families and general progress; all this wealth, happiness, and prosperity had been swept away from those islands as by a deadly blight. Ruin, squalor, and beggary now stalks through those once fair lands.

A party sprang up at the North inimical to the South; at first only a speck upon the horizon, a single sail in a vast ocean; but it grew and spread like contagion. They were first called agitators, and consisted of a few fanatics, both women and men, whose avowed object was emancipation—to do by human hands that which an All-wise Providence was surely doing in His own wise way. At first the South did not look with any misgivings upon the fanatics. But when Governors of Northern States, leading statesmen in the councils of the nation; announced this as their creed and guide, then the South began to consider seriously the subject of secession. Seven Governors and their legislatures at the North had declared, by acts regularly passed and ratified, their determination "not to allow the laws of the land to be administered or carried out in their States." They made preparation to nullify the laws of Congress and the constitution. That party, which was first called "Agitators," but now took the name of'"Republicans"—called at the South the "black Republicans"—had [11] grown to such proportions that they put in the field candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States. Numbers increased with each succeeding campaign. In the campaign of 1860 they put Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin forward as their standard bearers, and whose avowed purpose was the "the liberation of the slaves, regardless of the consequences." This party had spies all over the Southern States, and these emissaries incited insurrection, taught the slaves "that by rising at night and murdering their old masters and their families, they would be doing God's will;" that "it was a duty they owed to their children;" this "butchery of the sleeping and innocent whites was the road to freedom." In Virginia they sent down armed bands of whites, roused the negroes at night, placed guns, pikes, and arms of every kind in the hands of the poor, deluded creatures, and in that one night they butchered, in cold blood, the families of some of the best men in the State. These cold blooded butcheries would have done credit to the most cruel and blood thirsty of the primeval savages of the forest. These deeds were heralded all over the North as "acts of God, done by the hands of men." The leader of this diabolical plan and his compeers were sainted by their followers and admirers, and praises sung over him all over the North, as if over the death of saints. By a stupendous blunder the people of the South, and the friends of the Union generally, allowed this party to elect Lincoln and Hamlin. The South now had no alternative. Now she must either remain in a Union, where our institutions were to be dragged down; where the laws were to be obeyed in one section, but not in another; where

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