But there are other memories of heroic type, suggested by this locality, which come nearer home to our hearts, whose mournful splendor time cannot pale! Here, and within fifteen miles of this city, in Spotsylvania county, more great armies manoeuvred, more great battles were fought, more men were engaged in mortal combat and more officers and privates were killed and wounded than in any similar territory in the world. More men fell in the battles of this one small county during the Civil war than Great Britain has lost in all her wars of a century; and more men were killed and wounded in four hours at the battle of Fredericksburg than Great Britain had lost in killed, wounded and prisoners in her eight months' war in South Africa. When the fog lifted its curtain from the bleak plains about Fredericksburg on the morning of December 13, 1862, the sun flashed down on a spectacle of terrible moral sublimity! One hundred thousand Union veterans, with two hundred and twenty cannon, were in "battle's magnificently stern array," and in motion, with nothing to obscure their serried ranks from the view of their expectant adversaries, safely entrenched on the sloping hills adjacent. The different sub-divisions of this great army were commanded that day by consummate masters of the art of war, whose names and brilliant exploits now illumine the pages of our national history, but its commander-in-chief was deficient in both strategic and tactical ability, and his most conspicuous merit seemed to be his perfect faith in the courage and invincibility of his army. General Burnside did not overrate the magnificent courage and sublime self-sacrifice of his army, whose contempt of death that day on the open plains about Fredericksburg seemed to strike the electric chain wherewith we all are bound, and a thrill of admiration swept down the line of Lee's army for four miles whilst yet the battle raged; but General Burnside did underrate the strength of the positions which, without inspection or information, he rashly assailed, and he did underrate the valor of the men who held those positions. The appalling magnitude of his mistake was soon apparent, alike to his officers and his men, and yet column after column of that devoted army advanced, without a halting step, to the carnival of death, over a plain swept by the ceaseless and terrible fire of protected infantry and artillery--a plain of which General E. P. Alexander, in command of the Confederate artillery, posted on the heights, remarked the evening before, that "not a chicken could live there when his guns were opened." No honors awaited the daring of these heroes that day; no despatch could give their names to the plaudits of their admiring countrymen, their advance was uncheered by the hope of emolument or fame; their death would be unnoticed, and yet they marched to their doom with unblanched cheeks and unfaltering tread.