قراءة كتاب From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw
CONTENTS
| Introduction | 1 |
| The cause of conflict and the call to arms—Those who answered the call—An army of volunteers—Our great leader—The call comes home—First Company Richmond Howitzers—Back to civil life—Origin of this narrative. | |
| I. Sketch of Camp Life the Winter Before the Spottsylvania Campaign | 17 |
| Morton’s Ford—Building camp quarters—“Housewarming” on parched corn, persimmons and water—Camp duties—Camp recreations—A special entertainment—Confederate soldier rations—A fresh egg—When fiction became fact—Confederate fashion plates—A surprise attack—Wedding bells and a visit home—The soldiers’ profession of faith—The example of Lee, Jackson and Stuart—Spring sprouts and a “tar heel” story. | |
| II. Battle of the Wilderness | 63 |
| “Marse Robert” calls to arms—The spirit of the soldiers of the South—Peace fare and fighting ration—Marse Robert’s way of making one equal to three—An infantry battle—Arrival of the First Corps—The love that Lee inspired in the men he led—“Windrows” of Federal dead. | |
| III. Battles of Spottsylvania Court House | 96 |
| Stuart’s four thousand cavalry—Greetings on the field of battle—“Jeb” Stuart assigns “a little job”—Wounding of Robert Fulton Moore—A useful discovery—Barksdale’s Mississippi Creeper—Kershaw’s South Carolina “rice-birds”—Feeling pulses—Where the fight was hottest—Against heavy odds at “Fort Dodge”—“Sticky” mud and yet more “sticky” men—Gregg’s Texans to the front—Breakfastless but “ready for customers”—Parrott’s reply to Napoleon’s twenty to two—The narrow escape of an entire company—Successive attacks by Federal infantry—Eggleston’s heroic death—“Texas will never forget Virginia”—Contrast in losses and the reasons therefore—Why Captain Hunter failed to rally his men—Having “a cannon handy”—Grant’s neglect of Federal wounded. | |
| IV. Cold Harbor and the Defense of Richmond | 189 |
| The last march of our Howitzer Captain—The bloodiest fifteen minutes of the war—Federal troops refuse to be slaughtered—Dr. Carter “apologizes for getting shot”—Death of Captain McCarthy—A Summary. |
INTRODUCTORY
In 1861 a ringing call came to the manhood of the South. The world knows how the men of the South answered that call. Dropping everything, they came from mountains, valleys and plains—from Maryland to Texas, they eagerly crowded to the front, and stood to arms. What for? What moved them? What was in their minds?
Shallow-minded writers have tried hard to make it appear that slavery was the cause of that war; that the Southern men fought to keep their slaves. They utterly miss the point, or purposely pervert the truth.
In days gone by, the theological schoolmen held hot contention over the question as to the kind of wood the Cross of Calvary was made from. In their zeal over this trivial matter, they lost sight of the great thing that did matter; the mighty transaction, and purpose displayed upon that Cross.
In the causes of that war, slavery was only a detail and an occasion. Back of that lay an immensely greater thing; the defense of their rights—the most sacred cause given men on earth, to maintain at every cost. It is the cause of humanity. Through ages it has been, pre-eminently, the cause of the Anglo-Saxon race, for which countless heroes have died. With those men it was to defend the rights of their States to control their own affairs, without dictation from anybody outside; a right not given, but guaranteed by the Constitution, which those States accepted, most distinctly, under that condition.
It was for that these men came. This was just what they had in their minds; to uphold that solemnly guaranteed constitutional right, distinctly binding all the parties to that compact. The South pleaded with the other parties to the Constitution to observe their guarantee; when they refused, and talked of force, then the men of the South got their guns and came to see about it.
They were Anglo-Saxons. What could you expect? Their fathers had fought and died on exactly this issue—they could do no less. As their noble fathers, so their noble sons pledged their lives, and their sacred honor to uphold the same great cause—peaceably if they could; forcibly if they must.
So the men of the South came together. They came from every rank and calling of life—clergymen, bishops, doctors, lawyers, statesmen, governors of states, judges, editors, merchants, mechanics, farmers. One bishop became a lieutenant general; one clergyman, chief of artillery, Army of Northern Virginia. In one artillery battalion three clergymen were cannoneers at the guns. All the students of one Theological Seminary volunteered, and three fell in battle, and all but one were wounded. They came of every age. I personally know of six men over sixty years who volunteered, and served in the ranks, throughout the war; and in the Army of Northern Virginia, more than ten thousand men were under eighteen years of age, many of them sixteen years.
They came of every social condition of life: some of them were the most prominent men in the professional, social, and political life of their States; owners of great estates, employing many slaves; and thousands of them, horny-handed sons of toil, earning their daily bread by their daily labor, who never owned a slave and never would.
There came men of every degree of intellectual equipment—some of them could hardly read, and per contra, in my battery, at the mock burial of a pet crow, there were delivered an original Greek ode, an original Latin oration, and two brilliant eulogies in English—all in honor of that crow; very high obsequies had that bird.
Men who served as cannoneers of that same battery, in after life came to fill the highest positions of trust and influence—from governors and professors of universities, downward; and one became Speaker of the House of Representatives in the United States Congress. Also, it is to be noted that twenty-one men who served in the ranks of the Confederate
