MAP OF MORGAN’S RIDE AROUND CINCINNATI 376 PORTRAIT: MAJOR A. E. RICHARDS 400 _Commanding Mosby’s men at Mt. Carmel fight_ MAP SHOWING APPROXIMATELY MORGAN’S CHRISTMAS RAID 434 PORTRAIT: GENERAL JOHN H. MORGAN 446 PORTRAIT: GENERAL STARNES 462 MAP SHOWING LINE OF FORREST’S PURSUIT AND CAPTURE OF STREIGHT, AND WISDOM’S RIDE 474 PORTRAIT: EMMA SANSOM 476 EMMA SANSOM MONUMENT, GADSDEN, ALA., AND SANSOM HOME 484 PORTRAIT: JOHN H. WISDOM 492 THE BLACK CREEK BRIDGE 492 MAP OF BATTLEFIELD OF FLEETWOOD HILL 524 PORTRAIT: GENERAL J. E. B. STUART 532 PORTRAIT: GENERAL MARMADUKE 556 PORTRAIT: GENERAL JOSEPH WHEELER 572 “_Fighting Joe_” MAP OF WHEELER’S PURSUIT OF GARRARD AND McCOOK, AND IVERSON’S PURSUIT AND CAPTURE OF STONEMAN 578 FOREWORD Forty-eight years and a half have passed, since the last drum-beat of the Confederate States was heard and the furling of their flag forever closed the most wondrous military tragedy of the ages. Numbers and character considered, the tribute the South paid to War has no equal in human records. Fifteen hundred years ago on the Catalaunian Plain, where Attila, King of the Huns, styled “The Scourge of God,” joined battle with the Romans under Oetius, and the Visigoths led by Thorismund, tradition has it that hundreds of thousands of dead were left on the field. The men who followed the cruel and remorseless Attila were a vast horde, organized for war, with plunder as the highest aim of a soldier’s life, and the Romans and Visigoths were men who followed war solely for the opportunity it afforded to enslave, rob and despoil those they conquered. On both sides the men who filled the ranks had neither intelligence nor patriotism, and with each, war was a profession or pastime, devoid in most cases of any exalted purpose, even the dream of a conviction, or the faintest gleam of a principle. If the dead on that fatal field were numbered by the hundreds of thousands, their demise was a mere incident in the conflicts which were carried on for no truth, and in their loss the world suffered but little more than if as many beasts of burden had been sacrificed on some heathen altar to appease the God of War.