From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign: A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw — John Shaqi
From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign: A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier SawDame, William Meade
History
From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign: A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw
Dame, William Meade
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives, Confederate
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.
=Those Who Answered the Call=
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
Army became Bishops of the Episcopal Church after the war.
Of the men who thus gathered from all the Southern land, the first
raised regiments were drawn to Virginia, and there organized into an
army whose duty it was to cover Richmond, the Capital of the
Confederacy--just one hundred miles from Washington, which would
naturally be the center of military activities of the hostile armies.
=An Army of Volunteers=
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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