"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 =The Cause of Conflict and the Call to Arms= 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.