Confederate Generals Quotes

Atticus said naming people after Confederate generals made slow steady drinkers.

The Constitution of the Unitied States of America Preamble We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Article I - The Legislative Branch Section 1 - The Legislature All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

The bees in my stomach are dead and getting used to it.

This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That’s what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.

Night was coming on in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide.

We could see the children's toys here and there, and we saw a game that the children had made themselves out of dirt, deer antlers and abalone shells, but the game was so strange that only children could tell what it was. Perhaps it wasn't a game at all, only the grave of a game.

I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg. - Lieutenant General James Longstreet to General Robert E. Lee after the initial Confederate victories on day one of the Battle of Gettysburg.

She had a voice that made Pearl Harbor seem like a lullaby.

The flies were teaching an advanced seminar in philosophy as they crawled up the crack of my ass

One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.

We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco. "Promise me till your dying day, you'll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It's the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!" "I promise," I said and it was a promise that was kept.

Freehold meant it had been terraformed and colonized but wasn’t affiliated with any corporate confederations. Basically freehold generally meant shitshow so I hadn’t been expecting much from them. But they were surprisingly easy to work for.

It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.

It's all right," she said. "It's all right." That was really a very nice sound. There should be a bird that does that: that sings when you are impotent.

Frederick the Great once stated: “Little minds try to defend everything, but sensible people look at the main point.

One could think of seagulls. It’s really a very simple thing to do… seagulls: past, present and future passing almost like drums to the sky.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, “the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.” The main point of the Klan’s orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members. The last one, Robert Byrd, died in 2010 and was eulogized by President Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton called him her “mentor.” The sordid history of the Democratic Party in the early twentieth century is also married to the sordid history of the progressive movement during the same period. Progressives like Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood and a role model for Hillary Clinton—supported such causes as eugenics and social Darwinism. While abortion was not an issue in Sanger’s day, she backed forced sterilization for “unfit” people, notably minorities. Sanger’s Negro Project was specifically focused on reducing the black population.

IV. THE GENERAL STRIKE How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.

Apparently, I was taking U.S. History again this year, which was the only history taught at Jackson, making the name redundant. I would be spending my second consecutive year studying the “War of Northern Aggression” with Mr. Lee, no relation. But as we all knew, in spirit Mr. Lee and the famous Confederate general were one and the same. Mr. Lee was one of the few teachers who actually hated me. Last year, on a dare from Link, I had written a paper called “The War of Southern Aggression,” and Mr. Lee had given me a D. Guess the teachers actually did read the papers sometimes, after all.

The right of self-determination of the peoples includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development. Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people. Democratic confederalism is a non-state social paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a democratic nation. Democratic confederalism is based on grassroots participation. Its decision-making processes lie with the communities. Higher levels only serve the coordination and implementation of the will of the communities that send their delegates to the general assemblies. For limited space of time they are both mouthpiece and executive institution. However, the basic power of decision rests with the local grassroots institutions.

He realized that in war, the mechanics boiled down to bringing decisive firepower to bear against your enemy more effectively than he can against you.

In a chapter headed ‘Independent Command: Suffolk,’ he downplayed Lee’s instructions to Longstreet, and in so doing advanced the Lost Cause assertion that the operation was a failure.

Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, 'Near Asheville,' he said. 'That's Thomas Wolfe country.' 'Yeah,' I said. Lee Mellon didn't have any Southern accent. 'You don't have much of a Southern accent,' I said. 'That's right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,' Lee Mellon said. I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway. I couldn't argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.

Consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like Julius Lester or the Chicago-based Dr John Wallace, who object to Twain's use—in or out of 'context'—of the expression 'nigger.' An empty and formal 'debate' on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier, and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. He composed a caustic and brilliant report on the treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold of the Belgians. With William Dean Howells he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose McKinley's and Roosevelt's pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of Swift and Defoe for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with Winston Churchill in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war in Cuba. Does this count as history? Just try and find any reference to it, not just in textbooks but in more general histories and biographies. The Anti-Imperialist League has gone down the Orwellian memory hole, taking with it a great swirl of truly American passion and intellect, and the grand figure of Twain has become reduced—in part because he upended the vials of ridicule over the national tendency to religious and spiritual quackery, where he discerned what Tocqueville had missed and far anticipated Mencken—to that of a drawling, avuncular fabulist.

In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause—the belief that the South didn’t lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South’s true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.

A rump group of rebel soldiers formed a colony west of Vera Cruz called Carlota, which soon burgeoned into a community of five thousand people. Among southern generals flocking to sanctuary in Mexico were Jubal Early, Edmund Kirby Smith, Sterling Price, J. B. Magruder, and Joseph Shelby as well as governors of three southern states and members of the Confederate cabinet. With Maximilian’s connivance, these refugees began to advertise in southern newspapers that cheap land and labor were plentiful in Mexico.

Because of that final sentence, no Confederate soldier, from Lee on down, could ever be prosecuted for treason; in effect, this was a general amnesty. There could never be a proscription list to poison the peace with the spirit of vengeance and hatred. Grant had ruled it out.

To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen.

Indeed, the raid has been mythologized, inspiring several films, most notably in 1926 The General, in which, interestingly, Buster Keaton portrays the conductor, Fuller, as the hero, whereas the Unionists are depicted as ruthless train wreckers, demonstrating the enduring tacit sympathy to the Confederate cause.

The truck looked just like a Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times. But the truck ran, even though it didn't have a gas tank. There was an empty fifty-gallon gasoline drum on the bed of the truck with a smaller gasoline can on top of it, and there was a syphon leading from that can to the fuel line. It worked like this. Lee Mellon drove and I stayed on the back of the truck and made sure everything went all right with the syphon, that it didn't get knocked out of kilter by the motion of the truck. We looked kind of funny going down the highway. I'd never had the heart to ask Lee Mellon what happened to the gas tank. I figured it was best not to know.

He died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn't quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America. Poor devil. I heard it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.

For the ammunition and equipment required for the infantry and artillery, a good laboratory and workshop had been established at Richmond. The arsenals were making preparations for furnishing ammunition and knapsacks; but generally, what little was done in this regard was for local purposes. Such was the general condition of ordnance and ordnance stores in May, 1861.

warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

Putting the Lost Cause to work, however, necessitated a good measure of willful forgetting. Confederate memorialists proved equal to the task. "The world has been wickedly taught and foolishly believes that we resorted to war solely to preserve our institution of African slavery," General John S. Preston told a SASC meeting in Columbia in 1870. If anyone knew what had led to the Civil War, it was Preston, who not only attended the South Carolina Secession Convention but also served as the state's official delegate to Virginia's secession convention. The North and South were antagonistic societies whose differences were fundamentally rooted in slavery and race, he had told the Virginia convention in February 1861. But a decade later, Preston preached that slavery had not been the animating cause of secession at all.

Around this time, Mark Twain belonged to a small, irregular Confederate company and later claimed for comic effect that he had been pursued by Grant’s troops. As he said facetiously, “I did not know that this was the future General Grant or I would have turned and attacked him. I supposed it was just some ordinary Colonel of no particular consequence, so I let him go.”35 In fact, Twain had been in the vicinity weeks earlier.

Article V For the most convenient management of the general interests of the United States, delegates shall be annually appointed in such manner as the legislatures of each State shall direct, to meet in Congress on the first Monday in November, in every year, with a powerreserved to each State to recall its delegates, or any of them, at any time within the year, and to send others in their stead for the remainder of the year.

There can be no discredit to a conquered people for accepting the conditions offered by their conquerors. Nor is there any occasion for a feeling of humiliation. We have made an honest, and I hope that I may say, a creditable fight, but we have lost. Let us come forward, then, and accept the ends involved in the struggle....Let us accept the terms, as we are in duty bound to do. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Letter to New Orleans Times, March 18, 1867.

What may surprise many is that one of Lincoln’s greatest obstacles in preserving the Union was anti-war sentiment from folks not in the South, but in the North. Many Americans in the North saw no reason why States could not withdraw peacefully, if they wanted, from a political union freely entered into. These persons were called “Copperheads” by abolitionists and all others who supported Lincoln’s war policy. What is not well known is the fact that the four living former presidents of the time (Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan) all supported the Southern cause and disagreed with Lincoln’s aggressive policies. (John Brechinridge, Vice-President under Buchanan, 1856–1860, became a Confederate General in November of 1861.) They all recognized the Constitutional principle that the federal government does not have the authority to force a State to stay in the Union. Was

a general convention of the United States was proposed to be held, and deputies were accordingly appointed by twelve of the states charged with power to revise, alter, and amend the Articles of Confederation. When these deputies met, instead of confining themselves to the powers with which they were entrusted, they pronounced all amendments to the Articles of Confederation wholly impracticable; and with a spirit of amity and concession truly remarkable proceeded to form a government entirely new, and totally different in its principles and its organization. Instead of a congress whose members could serve but three years out of six-and then to return to a level with their fellow citizens; and who were liable at all times, whenever the states might deem it necessary, to be recalled-- Congress, by this new constitution, will be composed of a body whose members during the time they are appointed to serve, can receive no check from their constituents.

The canton of Schwitz has the honor of giving the name to the whole confederation, because the first battle for independency was fought there; yet it consists only of villages divided into six quarters, the first of which is Schwitz, where the ordinary regency of the country resides. The sovereign is the whole country; that is to say, the sovereignty resides in the general assembly of the country, where all the males of sixteen years of age have a right of entry and suffrage.

Good Morning. This is Mr. Gold of Paramount Pictures Corporation. We are carrying out an authorized survey of the territory for a forthcoming "A" picture of the famous Confederate raid of 1861 which resulted in the capture of General Sherman at Muldraugh Hill. Yes, that's right. Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead. What's that? Clearance? Sure we've got clearance. Let me see now...yes, here it is. Signed by Chief of Special Services at the Pentagon. Sure, the Commanding officer at the Armored Center will have a copy. Okay and thanks. Hope you'll enjoy the picture. 'Bye.

Grant believed that generous terms were essential to pacification. In Grant's eyes, the surrender was a triumph of right over wrong: proof of the moral and material superiority of the North's free-labor democratic society over the South's slave-labor autocratic one. Grant's hope, in extending clemency, was to change hearts and minds--to effect Confederate repentance and submission. In Lee's view, by contrast, the United States' victory was one of might over right, attributable to brutal force, not to skill and virtue. Although Lee rejected the option of guerrilla warfare as impractical and dishonorable, he did not admit moral defeat or counsel submission.

Hoping to defuse the community’s anger, Black leaders in Selma planned a march. They would walk the fifty-four miles from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and to voter suppression. On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat voting rights leader Amelia Boynton unconscious.

Nashville was a prize. Johnston had left in a hurry, abandoning huge quantities of supplies — half a million pounds of bacon, much bread and flour, and bales of new tents, the latter greatly welcomed by the Federals, who had left their own tents far behind them. The Federals were having their first experience in occupying a Confederate capital, and they found numerous timid citizens who were ready to turn their coats and cuddle up to the invaders: dignified gentlemen who called on generals to explain that they personally had always been Union men, to identify leading Rebels in the community, to tell where Confederate supplies had been hidden, and in general to make themselves useful.

What is that statue?" I asked. "A Civil War general--probably Lee's," Amzie said. "What else is on the courthouse lawn?" The statue stood on one side of the entrance and a beautiful tree on the other. "What kind of tree is that?" I asked. "I don't know for sure," Amzie replied, "but I think it's an oak. Big, ain't it? Strong, too. Been there a long time." For a moment he sat still and full of thoughts. "Let's look around town," I said. "Wait," he replied. "You just gave me a thought. There's a picture of the South if I ever saw one. That Southern general and that tree. One is the dead past and the other the living present. This South is sure caught in between--between life and death.

Robert E. Lee had done his duty and, however heartbroken, was prepared to do his duty still. Having devoted himself to winning the war, until the bitter end, he was now beginning the transition to an equally fervent commitment, reuniting the two halves of the divided country. As he slowly rode back to his camp, some fifteen minutes away, advance soldiers began to shout, “General, are we surrendered?” Lee struggled for words to express his sense of despair and came up short; he was speechless. But soon, two solid walls of men began to line the road, and when he came into view, they began to cheer wildly. At the sound and the sight, tears started to roll in the general’s eyes, and his men, too, began to weep.

Article VIII All charges of war, and all other expenses that shall be incurred for the common defense or general welfare, and allowed by the United States in Congress assembled, shall be defrayed out of a common treasury, which shall be supplied by the several States in proportion to the value of all land within each State, granted or surveyed for any person, as such land and the buildings and improvements thereon shall be estimated according to such mode as the United States in Congress assembled, shall from time to time direct and appoint. The taxes for paying that proportion shall be laid and levied by the authority and direction of the legislatures of the several States within the time agreed upon by the United States in Congress assembled.

And among the things most odious to my mind is to find a man who enters upon a public office, under the sanction of the Constitution, and taking an oath to support the Constitution—the compact between the States binding each for the common defense and general welfare of the other—and retaining to himself a mental reservation that he will war upon the institutions and the property of any of the States of the Union. It is a crime too low to characterize as it deserves before this assembly. It is one which would disgrace a gentleman—one which a man with self-respect would never commit. To swear that he will support the Constitution, to take an office which belongs in many of its relations to all the States, and to use it as a means of injuring a portion of the States of whom he is thus an agent, is treason to everything that is honorable in man.

On April 1, 1865, in Virginia, Pickett was defending an intersection known as Five Forks, six miles south of the Appomattox River and a good bit closer to the Southside Railroad, the last remaining supply line to Richmond. While thirty thousand Union troops led by Little Phil Sheridan approached from the southeast, Pickett’s twelve thousand, spread two miles wide behind fences and in ditches, braced to meet them. Pickett’s supreme commander, Robert E. Lee, was headquartered ten miles away, near Petersburg. Should Pickett fall to Sheridan, Lee would be forced from Petersburg, the Federals would capture Richmond, and the Confederate cause would be lost. Someone mentioned shad. The spring spawning run was in full penetration of the continent. The fish were in the rivers. Tom Rosser, another Confederate general, had caught some, and on the morning of April 1st ordered them baked for his midday dinner, near Hatcher’s Run, several miles from Five Forks. He invited Pickett and Major General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee, to join him. Pickett readily accepted, and rode off from his battle station with Lee. The historian Shelby Foote continues the narrative (“The Civil War,” vol. 3, p. 870): “Neither told any subordinate where he was going or why, perhaps to keep from dividing the succulent fish too many ways; with the result that when the attack exploded—damped from their hearing, as it was, by a heavy stand of pines along Hatcher’s Run—no one knew where to find them. Pickett only made it back to his division after half its members had been shot or captured, a sad last act for a man who gave his name to the most famous charge in a war whose end was hastened by his threehour absence at a shad bake.

On September 2, the day the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated George McClellan for president, news flashed across the country of the fall of Atlanta to General William Tecumseh Sherman after a long siege. Just as the Democrats met to declare the war a failure and crafted a platform that would lead to a negotiated Confederate independence of some kind, Sherman famously sent a telegram to Washington: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Confederates’ rising hopes plummeted, and many war-weary Northerners, represented by the famous New York diarist George Templeton Strong, saw victory now on the immediate horizon: “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!! It is . . . the greatest event of the war.”45 The Democrats’ peace platform put Lincoln’s apparent moderation in a different light; and Douglass had seen a devotion in the president’s heart and mind

Trump was hardly in office when Democrats and their media allies began tarring him and his top aides as “white nationalists.” There were no facts to support the charge, only innuendo, and tortured interpretations of the word “nationalism” and of presidential rhetoric. One of the worst examples was the Charlottesville, Virginia, historical monument controversy. In that city, leftist protesters demanded the removal of “Confederate” monuments and memorials. The term “Confederate” in their usage extended even to statues of Thomas Jefferson and explorers Lewis and Clark (for being “white colonists”). This sparked a protest by conservatives who objected to the statue removals—not because they were racists, but because they didn’t want to see the removal of these reminders of America’s history. A “Unite the Right” rally was planned for August 11–12, 2017, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Unfortunately, the rally attracted extremist groups, including neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, and the KKK. During the rally, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of leftist protestors, killing a woman. In response, Trump made a series of statements condemning the Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and racism in general. In one of those speeches, he added, “You also had some very fine people on both sides.”115 Even though he had just condemned racism in his previous breath, many Democrats and pundits condemned Trump for calling racists “fine people.” This was not only absurd but dishonest. The “fine people on both sides” to whom he referred were those who wanted to remove the statues because they were reminders of slavery and those who wanted to preserve the statues because they were reminders of history. Trump never praised racists as “fine people”—he condemned them in no uncertain terms. But to the

Ironically, one concession Davis did make concerned the explosive question of turning slaves into Confederate soldiers. After dismissing as “too controversial” the entreaty by General Patrick Cleburne that slaves be armed and enlisted to fight for the South, Davis finally embraced the notion very late in the game. The Confederate Congress began debating the issue in the early months of 1865, creating a star-burst of vituperation in Richmond. The bombastic old General How-ell Cobb of Georgia roared, “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong!” Davis rebuked him this way: “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone, ‘Died of a Theory.’ ” In the end, less than a month before Lee’s surrender, the Confederate Congress approved a bill providing for the partial emancipation and enlistment of slaves in the Confederate armies. The lawyer in Cleburne might have found the debate interesting had he lived to see it, which he did not. He was slain leading his division during Hood’s charge on Franklin, Tennessee, in November 1864.

Before they came in Lee had a couple of adventures. He first clashed with a sergeant of a Mississippi regiment who wandered over the wet field. Lee called out sharply: "What are you doing here, sir, away from your command?" "That's none of your business," the ragged soldier said. "You are a straggler, sire, and deserve the severest punishment." The sergeant shouted in rage, "It is a lie, sir. I only left my regiment a few minutes ago to hunt me a pair of shoes. I went through all the fight yesterday, and that's more than you can say; for where were you yesterday when General Stuart wanted your cavalry to charge the Yankees after we put 'em to running? You were lying back in the pine thickets and couldn't be found; but today, when there's no danger, you come out and charge other men with straggling." Lee laughed and rode off. Behind him an officer baited the sergeant, who thought he had been talking with a "cowardly Virginia cavalryman". "No, sir, that was General Lee." "Ho-o-what? General Lee, you say?" "Yes." "Scissors to grind, I'm a goner." The sergeant tore out of sight along the muddy road.

Article V For the most convenient management of the general interests of the United States, delegates shall be annually appointed in such manner as the legislatures of each State shall direct, to meet in Congress on the first Monday in November, in every year, with a powerreserved to each State to recall its delegates, or any of them, at any time within the year, and to send others in their stead for the remainder of the year. No State shall be represented in Congress by less than two, nor more than seven members; and no person shall be capable of being a delegate for more than three years in any term of six years; nor shall any person, being a delegate, be capable of holding any office under the United States, for which he, or another for his benefit, receives any salary, fees or emolument of any kind. Each State shall maintain its own delegates in a meeting of the States, and while they act as members of the committee of the States. In determining questions in the United States in Congress assembled, each State shall have one vote. Freedom of speech and debate in Congress shall not be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Congress, and the members of Congress shall be protected in their persons from arrests or imprisonments, during the time of their going to and from, and attendence on Congress, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.

Longstreet reached Catoosa Station the following afternoon, September 19, but found no guide waiting to take him to Bragg or give him news of the battle he could hear raging beyond the western screen of woods. When the horses came up on a later train, he had three of them saddled and set out with two members of his staff to find the headquarters of the Army of Tennessee. He was helped in this, so far as the general direction was concerned, by the rearward drift of the wounded, although none of these unfortunates seemed to know exactly where he could find their commander. Night fell and the three officers continued their ride by moonlight until they were halted by a challenge out of the darkness just ahead: “Who comes there?” “Friends,” they replied, promptly but with circumspection, and in the course of the parley that followed they asked the sentry to identify his unit. When he did so by giving the numbers of his brigade and division—Confederate outfits were invariably known by the names of their commanders—they knew they had blundered into the Union lines. “Let us ride down a little way to find a better crossing,” Old Peter said, disguising his southern accent, and the still-mounted trio withdrew, unfired on, to continue their search for Bragg. It was barely an hour before midnight when they found him—or, rather, found his camp; for he was asleep in his ambulance by then. He turned out for a brief conference, in the course of which he outlined, rather sketchily, what had happened up to now in his contest with Rosecrans, now approaching a climax here at Chickamauga, and passed on the orders already issued to the five corps commanders for a dawn attack next morning. Longstreet, though he had never seen the field by daylight, was informed that he would have charge of the left wing, which contained six of the army’s eleven divisions, including his own two fragmentary ones that had arrived today and yesterday from Virginia. For whatever it might be worth, Bragg also gave him what he later described as “a map showing prominent topographical features of the ground from the Chickamauga River to Mission Ridge, and beyond to the Lookout Mountain range.” Otherwise he was on his own, so far as information was concerned.

When the commander of one of the brigades Gilbert had sent to reinforce McCook approached an imposing-looking officer to ask for instructions as to the posting of his troops—“I have come to your assistance with my brigade!” the Federal shouted above the uproar—the gentleman calmly sitting his horse in the midst of carnage turned out to be Polk, who was wearing a dark-gray uniform. Polk asked the designation of the newly arrived command, and upon being told raised his eyebrows in surprise. For all his churchly faith in miracles, he could scarcely believe his ears. “There must be some mistake about this,” he said. “You are my prisoner.” Fighting without its commander, the brigade gave an excellent account of itself. Joined presently by the other brigade sent over from the center, it did much to stiffen the resistance being offered by the remnants of McCook’s two divisions. Sundown came before the rebels could complete the rout begun four hours ago, and now in the dusk it was Polk’s turn to play a befuddled role in another comic incident of confused identity. He saw in the fading light a body of men whom he took to be Confederates firing obliquely into the flank of one of his engaged brigades. “Dear me,” he said to himself. “This is very sad and must be stopped.” None of his staff being with him at the time, he rode over to attend to the matter in person. When he came up to the erring commander and demanded in angry tones what he meant by shooting his own friends, the colonel replied with surprise: “I don’t think there can be any mistake about it. I am sure they are the enemy.” “Enemy!” Polk exclaimed, taken aback by this apparent insubordination. “Why, I have only just left them myself. Cease firing, sir! What is your name, sir?” “Colonel Shryock, of the 87th Indiana,” the Federal said. “And pray, sir, who are you?” The bishop-general, learning thus for the first time that the man was a Yankee and that he was in rear of a whole regiment of Yankees, determined to brazen out the situation by taking further advantage of the fact that his dark-gray blouse looked blue-black in the twilight. He rode closer and shook his fist in the colonel’s face, shouting angrily: “I’ll soon show you who I am, sir! Cease firing, sir, at once!” Then he turned his horse and, calling in an authoritative manner for the bluecoats to cease firing, slowly rode back toward his own lines. He was afraid to ride fast, he later explained, because haste might give his identity away; yet “at the same time I experienced a disagreeable sensation, like screwing up my back, and calculated how many bullets would be between my shoulders every moment.

He followed events in Tennessee and Kentucky, where guerrilla attacks by Confederate generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan behind Union lines dispelled any lingering notions that widespread Unionist sentiment remained in the South.

Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India by J. S. Furnivall Page 308: Like a confederation a plural society is a business partnership rather than a family concern, and the social will linking the sections does not extend beyond their common business interests. It might seem that common interest should tie them closely, for a dissolution would involve the bankruptcy of all the partners. But the tie is strong only so far as this common interest is recognized. Perhaps the only plural society inherently stable is the Hindu society in India. Here there are separate groups or classes, partly racial, with distinct economic functions. But in India caste has a religious sanction, and in a plural society the only common deity is Mammon. In general, the plural society is built on caste without the cement of a religious sanction. In each section the sectional common social will is feeble, and in the society as a whole there is no common social will. There may be apathy even on such a vital point as defense against aggression. Few recognize that, in fact, all the members of all sections have material interests in common, but most see that on many points their material interests are opposed. The typical plural society is a business partnership in which, to many partners, bankruptcy signifies release rather than disaster.

It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen.

Soon your ashes fly to the veterans’ cemetery at Arlington, where once a Confederate general would have counted you among his mules and pigs. This poet’s coat is your last poem. I want to write a poem like this coat, with buttons and pockets and green cloth, a poem useful as a coat to a coughing man.

Each year Hamilton’s largest public events—Confederate Memorial Day, General Robert E. Lee’s birthday, and numerous gatherings of the United Confederate Veterans’ Williams Camp Meeting, made up of every old veteran still living in the county—drove home these messages, at the heart of which was the eternal crusade for white superiority. With whites unwilling to face up to the wrong their leaders had wrought by starting and continuing a hopeless war, or to bring their economy in line with reality, or to democratize their system after the war to welcome blacks and poor whites alike, the main thrust of southern life became the preservation of its traditions and the creation of myths. For fifty years they’d carried their propaganda north, laced with lurid tales of black inferiority, disease, and criminality. They’d been enormously successful in this. Since the early 1900s, mainstream, even liberal, magazines like Harpers, the Atlantic Monthly, and Good Housekeeping often played their tune.

A statue of a lone Confederate general towers over the Clarksville town center. To hear my grandpa tell it the general was built looking sternly over the Black side of town as a warning regarding where the town's heart lies. As if there were any question.

Of the 52 Confederate generals who had crossed the Potomac in the past three weeks, no less than 17 — barely under one third — had become casualties in the past three days. Five were killed outright or mortally wounded... When the lost was lengthened by 18 colonels either killed or captured, many of them officers of high promise, slated for early promotion, it was obvious that the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered a loss in leadership from which it might never recover. A British observer was of this opinion. He lauded the offensive prowess of Lee's soldiers, who had marched out as proudly as if on parade in their eagerness to come to grips with their opponents on the ridge across the way; "But they will never do it again," he predicted. And he told why. He had been with the army since Fredericksburg, ticking off the illustrious dead from Stonewall Jackson down, and now on the heels of Gettysburg he asked a rhetorical question of his Confederate friends: "Don't you see your system feeds upon itself? You cannot fill the places of these men. Your troops do wonders, but every time at a cost you cannot afford." (pp. 577-578).

While all this was occurring, elsewhere about the Republic celebrators of the Fourth suffered shattered fingers, wounded heads, and blinded eyes from excessive use of fireworks. In New York City, eighty-eight conflagrations were started by fireworks. In Montgomery, Alabama, the first Confederate capital, thirteen guns were fired in salute to the reunited nation; in Richmond, Virginia, the second Confederate capital, flags of the United States and Virginia were hoisted together for the first time since 1860. In New Orleans, parades and rhetorical exercises honored the day, but in Charleston, South Carolina, only the Negroes celebrated. An attempt was made in Oronogo, Missouri, to raise the Confederate flag, but an opposing party gathered and threatened to shoot the perpetrators of the deed. In Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, the Confederate flag and a banner bearing the names of the Democratic party’s candidates for President and Vice-President, Tilden and Hendricks, were suspended from the dome of the county courthouse. In Wyoming, ranchers heard rumors from friendly Indians that General Custer had suffered a great defeat north of Powder River, but none believed the story. Late in the day, a Helena, Montana, newspaper received a brief dispatch dated July 2 from Stillwater: “Muggins Taylor, a scout from General Gibbon, arrived here last night from Little Horn River and reports that Gen. Custer found the Indian camp of 2,000 lodges on the Little Horn and immediately attacked it. He charged the thickest portion of the camp with five companies … The Indians poured a murderous fire from all directions, Gen. Custer, his two brothers, his nephew, and brother-in-law were all killed, and not one of the detachment escaped.

Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day? The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865. When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals. The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles. But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork. As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck. The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies. According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year. Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune. Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage. Cornbread - a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat - symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate. You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup. Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year. Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth. So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.

Men can't all think alike, and the trouble with the Southern people always has been that they won't tolerate any difference of opinion. If God Almighty had intended all men to think just alike, He might just as well have made but one man....My opinion is that the only true solution for Southern troubles is for the people to accept cordially and in good faith all the results of the war, including the reconstruction measures, the acts of Congress, negro suffrage, etc., and live up to them like men. If they would do this, and encourage Northern immigration, and treat all men fairly, whites and blacks, the troubles would soon be over, and in less than five years, the South would be in the enjoyment of greater prosperity than ever. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Interview with correspondent from the Indianapolis Journal, September 24, 1874.

In making soldiers...we first teach men how to stand straight and to look right and left, then to march, etc., and, finally, by gradual discipline, they are brought to move with the precision of machinery.' So, the government, he [Longstreet] concluded, ought to accomplish the great end of Reconstruction 'by gradual steps.' -- from Interview with the Indianapolis Journal, September 24, 1874.

...both sides, in the civil war, committed mistake when they put engineer officers at the head of large armies.... -- JAMES LONGSTREET (referring to George McClellan and Robert E. Lee), Interview with the Chicago Tribune, January 29, 1871.

Gen. Pendleton may lecture and create a sensation that will put money in his pocket, but he will never convince the fighting men who are left of Longstreet's corps that the grim commander at whose word they so often threw themselves against the battalions of the north, was a traitor to the cause he sacrificed for. No matter what his politics may be; no matter how much derided, vilified and abused, Longstreet's name will go sounding down the corridors of time as one of the best, bravest, and most unassuming officers the southern confederacy produced. -- 'One of Longstreet's Foot Cavalry,' Morning Republican (Little Rock, AR), May 14, 1873.

...the power of battle is in generalship more than in the number of soldiers. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (1876)

She shares my general philosophy about white people, which exists as a repetitious vacillation between bemusement, annoyance, fury, and pity, and is a vital core value for any appropriately aware black person to possess. Admittedly, this sounds quite a bit like racism. And perhaps it would be, if black people could be racist toward whites. (We can’t, btw. We can be prejudiced, but actual racism is bias plus power. The only “reverse racism” is when white people wear Confederate flag snapbacks backward.)

four new major generals, two were aging Confederate veterans who in combat referred to the Spanish as “the Yankees.

seemed to have any. Germany, according to Erzberger, was to utilize victory to gain control of the European continent for “all time.” All demands at the peace table were to be based on this premise for which three conditions were necessary: abolition of neutral states at Germany’s borders, the end of England’s “intolerable hegemony” in world affairs, and the breaking up of the Russian colossus. Erzberger envisioned a Confederation of European States analogous to the later Mandates system under the League of Nations. Some states would be under German “guidance”; others, such as Poland and the Baltic group annexed from Russia, would be under German sovereignty for “all time,” with possible representation but no voting power in the Reichstag. Erzberger was not sure which category Belgium would fit into, but in either case Germany was to retain military control over the entire country and over the French coast from Dunkirk down to and including Boulogne and Calais. Germany would also acquire the Briey-Longwy iron basin and Belfort in Upper Alsace which she had failed to take in 1870. She would also take the French and Belgian colonies in Africa. Morocco, curiously enough, was excepted as likely to be too much of a drain on Germany’s strength. No mention was made of England’s colonies, which suggests that Erzberger may have been considering a negotiated settlement with England. In reparations the vanquished nations were to pay at least 10 billion marks for direct war costs, plus enough more to provide veterans’ funds, public housing, gifts to generals and statesmen, and pay off Germany’s entire national debt, thus obviating taxes on the German people for years to come.

Even though the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery, it left a loophole that let the dominant caste enslave people convicted of a crime. This gave the dominant caste incentive to lock up lowest-caste people for subjective offenses like loitering or vagrancy at a time when free labor was needed in a penal system that the dominant caste alone controlled. After a decade of Reconstruction, just as African-Americans were seeking entry to mainstream society, the North abandoned its oversight of the South, pulled its occupying troops out of the region, and handed power back to the former rebels, leaving the survivors of slavery at the mercy of supremacist militias nursing wounds from the war. The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them. The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness. It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen. Well into the twentieth century, heirs to the Confederacy built a monument with Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved in granite, bigger than Mount Rushmore, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. If the Confederacy had lost the war, the culture of the South and the lives of the lowest caste did not reflect it. In fact, the return to power of the former Confederates meant retribution and even harder times to come.

And in this connection I’d like to evoke W. E. B. Du Bois and chapter 4 of Black Reconstruction, which defined the consequence of the Emancipation Proclamation as a general strike. He uses the vocabulary of the labor movement. And as a matter of fact, chapter 4, “The General Strike,” is described in the following manner: “How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the Black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.

[The] object of politics is to relieve the distress of the people and to provide for their future comfort. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Letter to the New Orleans Times, June 8, 1867.

I have some little reputation, but my men made it all for me. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Article in -Sumter Republican-, October 29, 1864.

We have in the past a brilliant, an unsurpassed record. Let our future eclipse it in our eagerness for glory, our love of country, and our determination to beat the enemy. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Article in -Sumter Republican-, October 29, 1864.

They saw themselves as champions of the Lost Cause--the creed, dominant among Southern whites, that proclaimed that the Confederate cause was righteous and would be vindicated; that Reconstruction was a travesty; and that the racial caste system must persist. [Jubal] Early and his ilk positioned Lee as the symbolic embodiment of the Lost Cause, and they worked relentlessly to immortalize him as a saintly, faultless, marble man/

It does not look like generalship to lose a battle and a cause and then lay the responsibility upon others. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (1896)

Those of us who bore prominent parts in the struggle should recognize its failure. And should submit to the responsibilities of that failure, as belonging to us all in proportion to our positions. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Letter to Henry B. Dawson, March 27, 1876.

There is nothing that I shudder at more than the idea of a separation of the Union." Jackson wrote James Hamilton, Jr., of South Carolina in June 1828. " Should such an event ever happen, which I fervently pray God to avert, from that date I view our liberty gone - It is the durability of the confederation upon which the general government is built that must prolong our liberty. The moment it separates, it is gone.

His rise was meteoric. He started the war in the summer of 1861 as a second lieutenant; by July 3, 1863, just two years later, he was a freshly minted twenty-three-year-old brigadier general at the last, climactic day of the Battle of Gettysburg. As Confederate general George Pickett mounted his famous charge against the Union forces, a lesser-known confrontation occurred on the other side of the battlefield.

Mr. Seward, of New York, as we have seen, was a member of that Committee—the man who, in 1858, had announced the "irrepressible conflict," and who, in the same year, speaking of and for abolitionism, had said: "It has driven you back in California and in Kansas; it will invade your soil." He was to be the Secretary of State in the incoming Administration, and was very generally regarded as the "power behind the throne," greater than the throne itself.

On the other hand, the party originally known as Republican, and afterward as Democratic, can scarcely claim to have been distinctively or exclusively such in the primary sense of these terms, inasmuch as no party has ever avowed opposition to the general principles of government by the people. The fundamental idea of the Democratic party was that of the sovereignty of the States and the federal, or confederate, character of the Union.

The Convention representing the conservative, or State-Rights, wing of the Democratic-party (the President of which was the Hon. Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts), on the first ballot, unanimously made choice of John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, then Vice-President of the United States, for the first office, and with like unanimity selected General Joseph Lane, then a Senator from Oregon, for the second.

The misconception is so palpable as scarcely to admit of serious answer. The Declaration of Independence opens with a general proposition. "One people" is equivalent to saying "any people.

In all free governments the constitution or organic law is supreme over the government, and in our Federal Union this was most distinctly marked by limitations and prohibitions against all which was beyond the expressed grants of power to the General Government. In the foreground, therefore, I take the position that those who resisted violations of the compact were the true friends, and those who maintained the usurpation of undelegated powers were the real enemies of the constitutional Union.

The initiatory step of the policy subsequently developed was found in one sentence: "Therefore, all manufacturers of arms and munitions of war are hereby requested to report to me forthwith, so that the lawfulness of their occupations may be known and understood, and all misconstruction of their doings avoided." There soon followed a demand for the surrender of the arms stored by the city authorities in a warehouse. The police refused to surrender them without the orders of the police commissioners. The police commissioners, upon representation that the demand of General Butler was by order of the President, decided to surrender the arms under protest, and they were accordingly removed to Fort McHenry. Baltimore was now disarmed.

For no better reason, so far as the public was informed, than a vote in favor of certain resolutions, General Banks sent his provost-marshal to Frederick, where the Legislature was in session; a cordon of pickets was placed around the town to prevent any one from leaving it without a written permission from a member of General Banks's staff; police detectives from Baltimore then went into the town and arrested some twelve or thirteen members and several officers of the Legislature, which, thereby left without a quorum, was prevented from organizing, and it performed the only act which it was competent to do, i.e., adjourned.

General (then Colonel) Early, commanding a brigade, informed me of some wounded who required attention; one, Colonel Gardner, was, he said, at a house not far from where we were. I rode to see him, found him in severe pain, and from the twitching, visible and frequent, seemed to be threatened with tetanus. A man sat beside him whose uniform was that of the enemy; but he was gentle, and appeared to be solicitously attentive. He said that he had no morphine, and did not know where to get any. I found in a short time a surgeon who went with me to Colonel Gardner, having the articles necessary in the case. Before leaving Colonel Gardner, he told me that the man who was attending to him might, without hindrance, have retreated with his comrades, but had kindly remained with him, and he therefore asked my protection for the man. I took the name and the State of the supposed good Samaritan, and at army headquarters directed that he should not be treated as a prisoner. The sequel will be told hereafter.

To Brigadier-General G. T. Beauregard, "Commanding Provisional Army, C. S. A." "Montgomery, April 11th. "General Beauregard, Charleston. "We do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter, if Major Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that, in the mean time, he will not use his guns against us, unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter. You are thus to avoid the effusion of blood. If this or its equivalent be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable. (Signed) "L. P. Walker, Secretary of War.

Was it an insurrection? When certain sovereign and independent States form a union with limited powers for some general purposes, and any one or more of them, in the progress of time, suffer unjust and oppressive grievances for which there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the association, is such withdrawal an insurrection? If so, then of what advantage is a compact of union to States? Within the Union are oppressions and grievances; and the attempt to go out brings war and subjugation.

These officers were—first, Samuel Cooper, a native of New York, a graduate of the United States Military Academy in 1815, and who served continuously in the army until March 7, 1861, with such distinction as secured to him the appointment of Adjutant-General of the United States Army. Second, Albert Sidney Johnston, a native of Kentucky, a graduate of the United States Military Academy in 1826, served conspicuously in the army until 1834, then served in the army of the Republic of Texas, and then in the United States Volunteers in the war with Mexico. Subsequently he reëntered the United States Army, and for meritorious conduct attained the rank of brevet brigadier-general. After the secession of Texas, his adopted State, he resigned his commission in the United States Army, May 3, 1861, and traveled by land from California to Richmond to offer his services to the Confederacy. Third, Robert E. Lee, a native of Virginia, a graduate of the United States Military Academy in 1829,

The avowed purpose and declared obligation of the Federal Government was to occupy and possess the property belonging to the United States, yet one of the first acts was to set fire to the armory at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, the only establishment of the kind in the Southern States, and the only Southern depository of the rifles which the General Government had then on hand.

It was held by General John B. Magruder, who skillfully improved its natural strength by artificial means, and there, on the ground memorable as the field of the last battle of the Revolution, in which General Washington compelled Lord Cornwallis to surrender, Magruder, with a small force, held for a long time the superior forces of the enemy in check.

The President of the United States, in his message of July 4, 1861, to the Federal Congress convened in extra session, said: "It is thus seen that the assault upon and reduction of Fort Sumter was in no sense a matter of self-defense on the part of the assailants. They well knew that the garrison in the fort could by no possibility commit aggression upon them. They knew—they were expressly notified—that the giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison was all which would on that occasion be attempted, unless themselves, by resisting so much, should provoke more." Mr. Lincoln well knew that, if the brave men of the garrison were hungry, they had only him and his trusted advisers to thank for it. They had been kept for months in a place where they ought not to have been, contrary to the judgment of the General-in-Chief of his army, contrary to the counsels of the wisest statesmen in his confidence, and the protests of the commander of the garrison.

Before the convention for coöperation with the Confederate States had been adopted by Virginia, that knightly soldier, General Bonham, of South Carolina, went with his brigade to Richmond; and, throughout the Southern States, there was a prevailing desire to rush to Virginia, where it was foreseen that the first great battles of the war were to be fought; so that, as early as the 22d of April, I telegraphed to Governor Letcher that, in addition to the forces heretofore ordered, requisitions had been made for thirteen regiments, eight to rendezvous at Lynchburg, four at Richmond, and one at Harper's Ferry. Referring to an application that had been made to him from Baltimore, I wrote: "Sustain Baltimore if practicable. We will reënforce you." The universal feeling was that of a common cause and common destiny. There was no selfish desire to linger around home, no narrow purpose to separate local interests from the common welfare. The object was to sustain a principle—the broad principle of constitutional liberty, the right of self-government.

is enough to say that I always held, and repeatedly avowed, the principle that a Senator in Congress occupied the position of an ambassador from the State which he represented to the Government of the United States, as well as in some sense a member of the Government; and that, in either capacity, it would be dishonorable to use his powers and privileges for the destruction or for the detriment of the Government to which he was accredited. Acting on this principle, as long as I held a seat in the Senate, my best efforts were directed to the maintenance of the Constitution, the Union resulting from it, and to make the General Government an effective agent of the States for its prescribed purpose.

Another objection made to the right of secession is based upon obscure, indefinite, and inconsistent ideas with regard to allegiance. It assumes various shapes, and is therefore somewhat difficult to meet, but, as most frequently presented, may be stated thus: that the citizen owes a double allegiance, or a divided allegiance—partly to his State, partly to the United States: that it is not possible for either of these powers to release him from the allegiance due to the other: that the State can no more release him from his obligations to the Union than the United States can absolve him from his duties to his State. This is the most moderate way in which the objection is put. The extreme centralizers go further, and claim that allegiance to the Union, or, as they generally express it, to the Government—meaning thereby the Federal Government—is paramount, and the obligation to the State only subsidiary—if, indeed, it exists at all.