A Soldier's Recollections: Leaves from the Diary of a Young Confederate E-Book

Randolph Harrison McKim

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 500

Beschreibung

A Soldier's Recollections: Leaves from the Diary of a Young Confederate recounts the experiences of Randolph Harrison McKim during the Civil War. Heraklion Press has included a linked table of contents.

Leseprobe

FOREWORD

       I HAVE set down in the pages that follow some of my experiences and observations during my service with the Army of Northern Virginia, first as a private soldier, then as a staff officer, and finally as a chaplain in the field. I served in the ranks under Gen. Jos. E. Johnston and Gen. Thos. J. Jackson; as a staff officer under Brigadier-Gen. Geo. H. Steuart in the army of Gen. R. E. Lee; and as a chaplain in the Second Virginia Cavalry under Col. Thos. T. Munford, in the brigade of Gen. Fitzhugh Lee.

       It has not been my purpose to write a history of the campaigns in which I took so humble a part, but simply to present a few pen and ink sketches of the life and experience of a Confederate soldier, in the hope that I may thereby contribute in some small degree to a better understanding of the spirit of the epoch—both of the soldiers who fought the battles, and of the people on whose behalf they dared and suffered what they did.

       In telling this plain and unvarnished story I have been aided by the diary, or rather the diaries, which I kept during the war, and from which I have freely quoted, just as they were written, without recasting the sentences, or improving the style, or toning down the sentiments they contain. The thoughts and the opinions expressed, and the often crude form in which they are cast, are just those of a young soldier, jotted down on the march, or by the camp-fire, or in the quiescent intervals of battle, without any thought that they would ever be put into print. This I have done believing that I would thus best attain my object, —to show the mind and the life of the Confederate soldier as they were while the struggle was going on. But there was a hiatus in my material. My diary for the larger part of one of the four years of the war was lost, and therefore I have omitted those months from my narrative.

       I have also tried to give the point of view of the young men of the South in espousing the cause of the Confederacy, and to remove some misapprehensions still entertained in regard to the motives which animated the men who followed the banner of the Southern Cross.

       In connection with the Gettysburg campaign, I have undertaken to discuss the much mooted question of the action of Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, with the cavalry under his command. This I have felt constrained to do because of the view (erroneous, as I believe) presented by Col. John S. Mosby in his recent book on the subject.

       I have also reproduced an article written many years ago by request, and published in the Southern Historical Society Magazine, telling the story of the part taken at Gettysburg by the Third Brigade of Johnson’s Division, Ewell’s Corps. And in the Appendix I have placed an Oration upon the Motives and Aims of the Soldiers of the South, delivered in 1904 before the United Confederate Veterans.

       Fully sensible how much I stand in need of the reader’s indulgent good-will as he follows me in this simple story of an obscure soldier’s life in the Army of Northern Virginia, I still hope that what I have recorded may, here and there, throw a side-light on the conditions under which the Confederate soldier lived and fought those four stern, fateful years, and give fresh emphasis to his purity of motive and his heroic constancy in danger and adversity.

       One closing word as to the spirit in which I have undertaken this modest contribution to the literature of the Civil War. I am not, in these pages, brooding over the ashes of the past. The soldiers of the Southern Cross have long ago bowed to the decree of Almighty God in the issue of the great conflict. His will is wiser and better than ours. We thank God that to-day the sun shines on a truly reunited country. We love our Southland; we are Southern men; but we are glad that sectionalism is dead and buried, and we claim our full part in working out the great destiny that lies before the American people. We may not forget —we veterans of the Civil War—that the best of our life and work lies behind us: morituri salutamus. But whatever of life remains to us we have long ago dedicated to the service of our common country. We joyfully accept our share in the responsibilities, the opportunities, the strenuous conflicts, of the future, against foes within and without, for the moral and material glory of our country. We are Americans in every fibre; and nothing that pertains to the honor, to the welfare, to the glory, of America is foreign to us

A SOLDIER'S RECOLLECTIONS

CHAPTER I.ON THE BRINK OF THE MAELSTROM

       ON a bright morning in the month of April, 1861, there is a sudden explosion of excitement at the University of Virginia. Shouts and cheers are heard from the various precincts where the students lodge. Evidently something unusual has occurred. The explanation is soon found as one observes all eyes turned to the dome of the rotunda from whose summit the Secession flag is seen waving. It has been placed there during the night by persons then unknown. Of course it has no right there, for the University is a State institution and the State has not seceded; on the contrary the Constitutional Convention has given only a few days before a strong vote or the Union.

       But it is evident the foreign flag is a welcome intruder in the precincts of Jefferson’s University, for a great throng of students is presently assembled on the lawn in front of the lofty flight of steps leading up to the rotunda, and one after another of the leaders of the young men mounts the steps and harangues the crowd in favor of the Southern Confederacy and the Southern flag waving proudly up there. Among the speakers I recall Wm. Randolph Berkeley, the recently elected orator of the Jefferson Society.

       So general was the sympathy with the Southern cause that not a voice was raised in condemnation of the rebellious and burglarious act of the students who must have been guilty of raising the Southern flag. Not so general was the approval of the professors; some of these were strong Union men, among them one who was deservedly revered by the whole student body, Prof. John B. Minor, the head of the Law Department. Walking up under the arcades to his lecture room, he was shocked at the sight that met his eyes, and (so a wag afterwards reported) broke forth into rhyme as follows:

                       “Flag of my country, can it be

                       That that rages up there instead of thee!”

       Meantime the excitement waxed greater and greater, so much so that the students forsook their lecture rooms to attend the mass-meeting on the lawn. In vain did Prof. Schele de Vere endeavor to fix the attention of his class by the swelling periods of his famous lecture on Joan of Arc. The proceedings outside on the lawn interested them much more than the tragic fate of the Maid of Orleans, and one after another they rose and stalked out of the lecture room to join in the overture to another and more tremendous tragedy then unfolding itself to the world, until the baffled professor of modern languages gave up the attempt and abruptly closed his lecture.

       At this juncture the burly form of Dr. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, professor of mathematics, was seen mounting the steps of the rotunda, his great head as usual far in advance of the rest of his body. At once there was silence in the throng. To him the students gave a respectful attention, such as, I fear, in their then mood, they would not have given to Professor Minor. For Dr. Bledsoe was an enthusiastic advocate of Secession, to such an extent that he would not infrequently interlard his demonstration of some difficult problem in differential or integral calculus—for example, the lemniscata of Bernouilli—with some vigorous remarks in the doctrine of States’ rights.

       At this juncture, however, the big-brained professor spoke to the young men in a somewhat different strain. He began by saying he had no doubt the students who had put up that flag were “the very nicest fellows in the University,” but, inasmuch as the State of Virginia had not yet seceded, the Secession flag did not really belong on that rotunda, and he hoped the students themselves would take it down,—"but,” he said, “young gentlemen, do it very tenderly.”

       The facts of the case were these. A group of seven students (of whom I was one) bought the bunting and had the flag made, seven stars and three bars, by some young lady friends who were bound to secrecy, and then, having supplied themselves with augers and small saws, they went to work after midnight and sawed their way through five doors to gain access to the roof of the rotunda, where, in their stocking feet, they at length succeeded, not without risk of a fatal fall, in giving the “Stars and Bars” to the breeze, just as the first faint streaks of dawn appeared on the eastern hills. They then scattered and betook themselves to bed, and were the last men in the University to hear the news that the Secession flag was floating over the rotunda!

       It was not many days after this occurrence that Mr. Lincoln issued his proclamation calling upon Virginia to furnish her quota of troops to coerce the seceded States back into the Union, and thereby instantly transformed the old Commonwealth from a Union State into a seceded State. All differences now disappeared among her statesmen and her people, and Virginia with entire unanimity threw in her lot with her Southern sisters “for better, for worse, for weal or for woe.”

       It was the threat of invasion that revolutionized the position of the State of Virginia. In illustration of this I refer to the case of a talented young man from Richmond who had been an extreme and uncompromising “Union man"— the most extreme among all the students at the University. He was also bold and aggressive in the advocacy of his opinions, so much so that he became very unpopular, and his friends feared “serious trouble and even bloody collision.” The morning President Lincoln’s proclamation appeared he had gone down town on personal business before breakfast, and while there happened to glance at a paper. He returned at once to the University, but not to breakfast; spoke not a word to any human being; packed his trunk with his belongings; left a note for the chairman of the faculty explaining his conduct; boarded the first train for Richmond, and joined a military company before going to his father’s house or taking so much as a morsel of food. What was the overwhelming force which thus in a moment transformed this splendid youth? Was it not the God-implanted instinct which impels a man to defend his own hearthstone?

   The visitor to the University to-day will see on the rotunda porch two large bronze tablets on the right and left of the central door, on which are graven the names of the alumni who laid down their lives in the Civil War for the independence of the South. There are just five hundred and three names.

       The number itself is significant. If five hundred died, there must have been more than two thousand five hundred, perhaps as many as three thousand, on the rolls of the Confederate armies, who called this University mother. We have no accurate register of the number of alumni who were living in 1861 and fit for military service. But we do know that of the six hundred and twenty-five who were students here when the tocsin of war sounded, five hundred and thirty hailed from the seceding States, and about five hundred and fifteen went to the front. Two of the professors followed their students,—our illustrious professor of Greek, Basil L. Gildersleeve, who was wounded fighting with Gordon in the valley of Virginia—he still lives, thank God! to adorn American scholarship—and Lewis Minor Coleman, our right royal professor of Latin, who fell gloriously while commanding a battalion of artillery at Fredericksburg.

       These numbers are significant. They bear eloquent witness, not only to the gallantry of our brother alumni, but to the unanimity of the Southern people in that great struggle, and they afford convincing proof of the falsity of the theory, held by some historians of the Civil War, that the uprising of the Southern people was the result of a conspiracy of a few ambitious leaders. When we see five hundred and fifteen out of six hundred and twenty-five students,representing the flower of the intellect and culture of the South— its yeomen as well as its aristocracy—spring to arm at the first sound of the long roll, we realize that the resistance offered to coercion in 1861 was in no sense artificial, but free and spontaneous, and that it was the act of the people, not of the politicians.

       This conclusion may be fortified by a comparison with the record of a great New England university. The memorial tablets at Harvard contain the names of one hundred and seventeen of her alumni who gave their lives to the cause of the Union, while the whole number who entered the Union army and navy was nine hundred and thirty-eight. If the same proportion of loss held among the men of our Alma Mater, then there would have been four thousand students and alumni of the University of Virginia in the army and navy of the Confederate States. But the proportion of killed in action was greater on our side, so that this total must be much reduced. We know from the records that not less than two thousand five hundred of the men who followed the battle flag of the Southern Cross were sons of this Virginia University. The actual number was probably considerably larger. Thus though her students and alumni of military age were less numerous than those of Harvard, in something like the proportion of four to seven, yet there were more than three times as many of them serving with the colors in the great conflict; and while one hundred and seventeen men of the Cambridge university laid down their lives for the Union, five hundred and three of the men of the University of Virginia died for the Southern cause—more than four times as many.

       As I think of some of these brave young fellows, I recall the scene that used to be presented many an afternoon on the slope of the hill directly to the south of the University lawn—D’Alphonse, the stalwart professor of gymnastics, leading his numerous pupils in singing the “Marsellaise,” or “Les Girondins.” The clear fresh voices of those fine young fellows come back to me as I write,—the fine tenor of Robert Falligant rising above the rest,—singing:

                       “Par la voix du cannon d’alarme,

                       La France appelle ses enfants,

                       Allons, dit le soldat, aux armes,

                       C’est ma mère, je la defends.

                        Chorus,

                        “Mourir pour la patrie,

                       Mourir pour la patrie,

                       C’est le sort le plus beau

                       Le plus digne d’envie!”

       Alas! how soon and how unexpectedly were those words to be exemplified on the field of battle, in the gallant deaths of many who sang them then, with little realization of their possible significance for them.

       There were two military companies organized at the University the autumn before the fateful cloud of Civil War burst upon the land. These were in no way connected with the organization of the institution, but were purely private and voluntary. One called itself “The Sons of Liberty,” the other took the name of “The Southern Guard.” To the latter I belonged, and when Virginia joined the Confederacy, these two companies of boys were ordered to Winchester, Va., to join in the movement of Gen. Thomas J. Jackson against Harper’s Ferry.

       I remember that after a long railway ride in box cars (which sadly tarnished our uniforms) we were detrained at Strasburg, and marched to Winchester, eighteen miles distant, beating handsomely in the march the regular companies of State militia that formed part of the expedition.

       The two University companies remained several weeks at Harper’s Ferry, and were then very properly ordered back to their studies. I did not tarry so long, but made my way to Baltimore, where stirring scenes had been witnessed on the 19th of April, when the Massachusetts troops en route to Washington were attacked by the populace.

       Arrived there I very soon found “nothing would be doing,” —advices from Confederate headquarters in Virginia discouraging any attempt in that quarter, and so after about a week’s sojourn, I returned to the University, promising my mother to stay till the end of the session.

       While in Baltimore at dear old “Belvidere,” the beautiful home of my childhood and boyhood, I had to endure the pain of my father’s displeasure, because of my espousal of the Southern cause. He himself had been in warm personal sympathy with the South, but through the strong intellectual influence of a near relative his political sympathy had been turned to the North. His heart was with my mother’s people, but his head turned him to the side of the Union. I mention it because this difference was, by reason of our great mutual attachment, very painful to us both.

       In an interview between us, when he had expressed himself in severe condemnation of my course, I turned and said with much feeling, “Well, father, I comfort myself with the promise, ‘When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.’ “ And so we parted never to meet again, for he died in January, 1865. A noble and high-minded man he was, and particularly devoted to me. Nothing but the strongest conviction of duty could have led me to act contrary to his wishes. During the whole war I constantly sent him messages of love, and sometimes wrote to him. When my marriage took place, February 26, 1863, he sent my bride a beautiful present with his likeness. My first child was named for him, “John,” to which I added “Duncan” for my much-loved cousin. When my ordination was approaching, in April, 1864, I wrote him as follows:

       “My father, I ask to be remembered at the family altar, that God may prepare me for the responsible office which I am about tremblingly to undertake after seven months’ study.”

       No picture of this crucial epoch is a true one which suppresses these most painful divisions of sentiment which often occurred in devoted families.

       When I returned to the University I had lost, first and last, six weeks at a critical part of my course. My “tickets,” this my second year, were French, German, moral philosophy, and senior mathematics. I determined to drop German and concentrate on the other three schools. And then, finding the “math.” examination coming on in ten days, I gave my whole time to preparation for that severe test. Such was the excitement among the students, many of whom were already leaving to join the Army, that study was very difficult, so I betook myself to a little one-room structure at the foot of Carr’s Hill on the north side isolated from other buildings, and there studied the differential and integral calculus from twelve to fourteen hours a day for the ten days before examination, Sunday excepted, with the result that on the day of the test I soon developed a severe headache, which nearly cost me my diploma. However, I passed, and later passed also in my other tickets, and received the three diplomas on Commencement day, much to my satisfaction.

       These, with diplomas in Latin and Greek taken the previous year, made the path clear to the coveted and difficult honor of M.A. the third year.But that “third year” never came. It was “knocked out” by four years in the school of war under Stonewall Jackson and Lee. And when these were passed, I had entered on the active duties of life.

       I wrote to my mother, June 20th, as follows: “I stand moral philosophy on Tuesday next. To-morrow and next day I am to read two essays in the Moral class,—one on two of Butler’s sermons, one on a chapter in the Analogy. I got through French examination very well, I believe, but I am scared about my last math. examination. I find that I mistook one of the questions.”

CHAPTER II.THE CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE INVOLVED IN THE CIVIL WAR

       SOMETHING may here be appropriately said, before proceeding with my narrative, upon the constitutional question involved in the action taken by Virginia in seceding from the Union, and the action of these young men at the University in obeying her summons and rallying to the standard of the Southern Confederacy.

       Virginia loved the Union which her illustrious sons had done so much to establish. She refused to secede from the Union until she was called upon to assist in the work of coercing the already seceded States back into the Union. This she refused to do. She would not raise her arm to strike down her Southern sisters. She would not be a party to the coercion of a sovereign State by the general government. That, she had been taught by the fathers of the Constitution, Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton, was an unconstitutional act. Alexander Hamilton had denounced the proposal to coerce a State as a mad project. Edmund Randolph said it meant “civil war.” So the project was abandoned in the Constitutional Convention. Her people believed that the several States possessed the inalienable right of dissolving the compact with their sister States whenever they became convinced that their sacred rights were no longer safe in the Union.

       All acknowledge that the right of Secession does not exist to-day. The fourteenth amendment has changed the character of the Federal Constitution. The surrender at Appomattox, moreover, involved the surrender of the right of Secession. Since the 9th of April, 1865, the Union has been indissoluble. That is universally acknowledged in the South to-day. But it was not so in 1861. Logically and historically the weight of evidence is clearly on the side of those who hold that the right of withdrawing from the Union existed from the foundation of the government.

       Mr. Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” held that, in adopting the Constitution, “they were making a government of a Federal nature, consisting of many co-equal sovereignties.” Washington held that the Union then formed was “a compact.” In a letter to Madison, Aug. 3, 1788, he uses this language, “till the States begin to act under the new compact.” John Marshall said in the debate on the adoption of the Constitution: “It is a maxim that those who give may take away. It is the people that give power, and can take it back. Who shall restrain them? They are the masters who give it.” This was said in discussing Virginia’s right “to resume her powers if abused.” Whatever he may have held late in life, this was his opinion in 1788 in the great debate on the Constitution. He was then in his thirty-third year. See Elliott’s Debates, III, p. 227. It is an historical fact that the Constitution was regarded as a compact between the States by the leaders of opinion in New England for at least forty years after its adoption. In the same quarter the sovereignty of the States was broadly affirmed, and also the right of a State to resume, if need be, the powers granted or delegated under the Constitution. When Samuel Adams objected to the preamble because it expressed the idea of “a National Government instead of a Federal Union of sovereign States,” Governor Hancock brought in the tenth amendment reserving to the States all the powers not expressly delegated to the General Government.

       Webster and Story apostatized from the New England interpretation of the Constitution. I may here recall the fact that the first threat of Secession came from the men of New England. Four times before the Secession of South Carolina, Secession was threatened in the North,—in 1802-1803, in 1811-1812, in 1814, and in 1844-1845. The first time it came from Col. Timothy Pickering, of Massachusetts, a friend of Washington and a member of his Cabinet; the second time from Josiah Quincy, another distinguished citizen of Massachusetts; the third time from the Hartford Convention of 1814; and the fourth time from the Legislature of Massachusetts. Josiah Quincy in the debate on the admission of Louisiana, Jan. 14, 1811, declared his “deliberate opinion that, if the bill passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved, . . . as it will be the right of all [the States], so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation,—amicably if they can, violently if they must.” In 1812 pulpit, press, and rostrum in New England advocated Secession. In 1839 John Quincy Adams declared “the people of each State have a right to secede from the Confederated Union.”

In 1844 and again in 1845 the Legislature of Massachusetts avowed the right to secede and threatened to exercise the right if Texas should be admitted to the Union. This was its language:

       “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation, but it is determined, as it doubts not the other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth.”

       This expresses exactly the attitude of the seceding States in 1861. Thus the North and the South at these two epochs (only a dozen years apart) held the same view of the right of withdrawal from the Union. And the ground of their apprehension was very similar. New England believed that the admission of Louisiana and Texas would give the South a preponderance of power in the Union, and hence that her rights within the Union would no longer be secure. The cotton States believed that the election of a sectional President by a party pledged to the abolition of slavery gave the North a preponderance of power in the Union and left their rights insecure. And when Virginia beheld the newly elected President preparing to coerce the seceding States by force of arms, she believed that the Constitution was being violated, and that her place was now with her Southern sisters.

       It is a fact full of significance that even Alexander Hamilton, strong Federalist as he was, could threaten Jefferson with the Secession of New England, “unless the debts of the States were assumed by the General Government.” And Madison spoke of the thirteen States as “thirteen sovereignties,” and again he said, “Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body.”

       Daniel Webster, in 1830 and again in 1833, argued that the Constitution was not a “compact,” not a “confederacy,” and that the acts of ratification were not “acts of accession.” These terms, he said, would imply the right of Secession, but they were terms unknown to the fathers; they formed a “new vocabulary,” invented to uphold the theory of State sovereignty. But in this Mr. Webster was wholly mistaken. Those terms we now know were in familiar use in the great debates on the Constitution. In 1787 Mr. Gerry, of Massachusetts, said, “If nine out of thirteen States can dissolve the compact (i.e., the Articles of Confederation), six out of nine will be just as able to dissolve the new one.” (It had been agreed that the consent of nine out of the thirteen States should be sufficient to establish the new government.) Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton, Washington all spoke of the Constitution as a “Compact,” and of the new government as a “Confederacy.” Both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in their acts of ratification, refer to the Constitution as a “solemn Compact.” We have then the authority of Webster himself for the opinion that these terms implied the right of Secession.

       Nor is this all. Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island all declared in their acts of ratification that the powers granted by them to the General Government “may be resumed by them.” Thus the right of Secession was solemnly asserted in the very acts by which these States ratified the Constitution. That assertion was part of the ratification. The ratification was conditioned by it. And the acceptance of these States as members of the Union carried with it the acceptance of the Constitution and the recognition of the right of Secession.

       This was recognized by Webster in his maturer years. See his speech Capon Springs, W.Va., in 1851.

       I have thought it just to my comrades of whom I am to write in these pages to give at the outset this defence of the course they took in 1861. They followed that interpretation of the Constitution, which they received from their fathers—from Jefferson and Madison and Washington—rather than that which can claim no older or greater names than those of Story and Webster.

       These arguments appeared to us convincing then. They are no less convincing to-day from the standpoint of things as they were in 1861. And we appeal to the candid judgement of history to decide whether, believing as we did, we were not justified in doing what we did. The most recent, and one of the ablest, of Northern historians acknowledged that “a large majority of the people of the South believed in the constitutional right of Secession,” and as a consequence believed that the war on the part of the National Government was “a war of subjugation.” But surely it is an act of patriotism to resist a war of subjugation, spoliation, and conquest, and by that standard the soldiers of the Confederate Armies must go down to history not as traitors, but as patriots. Our argument for the constitutional right of withdrawing from the Union may, or may not, appear conclusive, but at least the right of revolution, asserted by our sires in 1776, cannot be denied to their descendants of 1861.

On that ground I claim the assent even of those who still stoutly deny the right of Secession to the assertion that the armies of the South were composed not of traitors, but of patriots.

       There was a time, during those dark days of Reconstruction, when public opinion in the North demanded that we, who had fought under the Southern flag, should prove the sincerity of our acceptance of the results of the war by acknowledging the unrighteousness of our cause and by expressing contrition for the course we pursued.

       But could we acknowledge our cause to be unrighteous when we believed it just? Could we repent of an act done in obedience to the dictates of conscience? Our late antagonists— now, thank God, our friends— may claim that our judgement was at fault; that our action was not justified by sound reasoning; that the fears that goaded us to withdraw from the Union were not well-grounded; but, so long as it is acknowledged that we followed duty as we understood it, they cannot ask us to repent. We could not repent of obeying the dictates of conscience in the face of hardship, danger and death!

       And now I turn to the consideration of a grievous reproach often directed against the men who fought in the armies of the South in the Civil War. When we claim for them the crown of patriotism, when we aver that they drew their swords in what they believed to be the cause of liberty and self-government, it is answered that the corner-stone of the Southern Confederacy was slavery, and that the soldiers who fought under the banner of the Southern Cross were fighting for the perpetuation of the institution of slavery.

       That is a statement which I wish to repudiate with all the earnestness of which I am capable. It does a grievous injustice to half a million patriot soldiers who were animated by as pure a love of liberty as ever throbbed in the bosom of man, and who made as splendid an exhibition of self-sacrifice on her behalf as any soldiers who ever fought on any field since history began.

       In the first place, I ask, If slavery was the corner-stone of the Southern Confederacy, what are we to say of the Constitution of the United States? That instrument, as originally adopted by the thirteen colonies contained three sections which recognized slavery. (Art. 1, Sec. 2 and 9, and Art. 4, Sec. 2.) And whereas the Constitution of the Southern Confederacy prohibited the slave trade, the Constitution of the United States prohibited the abolition of the slave trade for twenty years (1789-1808)! And if the men of the South are reproached for denying liberty to three and a half million of human beings, at the same time that they professed to be waging a great war for their own liberty, what are we to say of the revolting colonies of 1776 who rebelled against the British crown to achieve their liberty while slavery existed in every one of the thirteen colonies undisturbed? Can not those historians who deny that the South fought for liberty, because they held the blacks in bondage, see that upon the same principal they must impugn the sincerity of the signers of the Declaration of Independence? We ask the candid historian to answer this question: If the colonists of 1776 were freeman fighting for liberty, though holding the blacks in slavery in every one of the thirteen colonies, why is the title of soldiers of liberty denied the Southern men of 1861, because they too held the blacks in bondage? Slavery was an inheritance which the people of the South received from the fathers, and if the States of the North, within fifty years of the Revolution, abolished the institution, it cannot be claimed that the abolition was dictated by moral considerations, but by differences of climate, soil, and industrial interests.

       Let me here state a fact of capitol importance in this connection: the sentiment in favor of emancipation was rapidly spreading in the South in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Wilson acknowledges that “their was no avowed advocate of slavery” in Virginia at that time. In the year 1826 there were one hundred and forty-three emancipation societies in the United States, and of these, one hundred and three were in the South. So strong was the sentiment in Virginia for emancipation that, in the year 1832, one branch of her Legislature came near passing a law for the gradual abolition of slavery; and I was assured in 1860 by Col. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was himself a member of the Legislature that year, that emancipation would certainly have been carried in the next session but for the reaction created by the fanatical agitation of the subject by the Abolitionists, led by Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Though emancipation was defeated at that time by a small vote, yet the Legislature passed a resolution postponing the consideration of the subject till public opinion had further developed. The Richmond Whig of March 6, 1832, said: “The great mass of Virginia herself rejoices that the slavery question has been taken up by the Legislature, that her legislators are grappling with the monster,” etc. A Massachusetts writer, George Lunt, says: “The States of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee were engaged in practical movements for the gradual emancipation of their slaves. This movement continued until it was arrested by the aggressions of the Abolitionists.”

       These facts are beyond dispute: 1. That from 1789 down to 1837 slavery was almost universally considered in the South a great evil; 2. That public opinion there underwent a revolution on this subject in the decade 1832-1842. What produced this fateful change, of sentiment? Not the invention of the cotton gin, for, that took place in 1793. No, but the abolition crusade launched by Win. Lloyd Garrison, Jan. 1, 1831. Its violence and virulence produced the result that might have been expected. It angered the South. It stifled discussion. It checked the movement toward emancipation. It forced a more stringent policy toward the slave. The publication of Garrison’s “Liberator” was followed, seven months later, by Nat Turner’s negro insurrection in which sixty-one persons—men, women, and children—were murdered in the night. President Jackson, in his message of 1835, called attention to the transmission through the mails “of inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of the slaves, in prints and various sorts of publications, calculated to stimulate them to insurrection, and to produce all the horrors of a servile war.”

       The conclusion is irresistible that but for that violent and fanatical movement slavery would have been peaceably abolished in Virginia, and then in other Southern States.

       Before leaving the subject I would like to recall one or two historical facts. Not the Southern people, but the Government of Great Britain, must be held responsible for American slavery. The colony of Virginia protested again, and again, and again to the British King against sending slaves to her shores—but her protest was in vain. In 1760 South Carolina passed an act prohibiting the further importation of slaves, but England rejected it with indignation. Let it be remembered, too, that Virginia was the first of all the States, North and South, to prohibit the slave trade, and Georgia was the first to incorporate such a prohibition in her Constitution. Virginia was in fact in advance of the whole world on this subject. She abolished the slave trade in 1778, nearly thirty years before England did the same, and the same length of time before New England was willing to consent to its abolition.

       But I am chiefly concerned to show that my comrades and brothers, of whom I write in these pages, did not draw their swords in defence of the institution of slavery. They were not thinking of their slaves when they cast all in the balance—their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor— and went forth to endure the hardships of the camp and the march and the perils of the battle field. They did not suffer, they did not fight, they did not die, for the privilege of holding their fellow men in bondage!

       No, it was for the sacred right of self-government that they fought. It was in defence of their homes and their firesides. It was to repel the invader, to resist a war of subjugation. It was in vindication of the principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

       Only a very small minority of the men who fought in the Southern armies—not one in ten—were financially interested in the institution of slavery. We cared little or nothing about it. To establish our independence we would at any time have gladly surrendered it. If any three men may be supposed to have known the object for which the war was waged, they were these: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee. Their decision agrees with what I have stated. Mr. Lincoln consistently held and declared that the object of the war was the restoration of the Union, not the emancipation of the slaves. Mr. Davis as positively declared that the South was fighting, for independence, not for slavery. And Robert E. Lee expressed his opinion by setting all his slaves free Jan. 8, 1863, and then going on with the war for more than two years longer. In February, 1861, Mr. Davis wrote to his wife in these words, “In any case our slave property will eventually be lost.” Thus the political head of the Confederacy entered on the war foreseeing the eventual loss of his slaves, and the military head of the Confederacy actually set his slaves free before the war was half over. Yet both, they say, were fighting for slavery!

CHAPTER III.FIRST EXPERIENCES OF A RAW RECRUIT

       NOW at length I had redeemed my promise to my mother, in leaving Baltimore, that I would not enter the army, at any rate till the end of the session of the University. But I had made another promise. On June 20th I had written her: “You know that of course I will join no company without papa’s consent. Though I did do it once, I shall not do it again.” Accordingly, when the session closed, I was minded to return to Baltimore and plead for permission to join the Southern Army. I even contemplated —in the event of being unable to get through the lines—to go up to the home of my aunt, Mrs. Garrett, some eighteen miles from the University, and settle down “quietly,” “trying to make myself useful teaching the children French and arithmetic.”

       But in cherishing such an idea I reckoned without the Zeitgeist. Day after day the spirit of the epoch wrought in me more and more mightily till I felt that I could no longer resist the call to follow the example of my kindred, my friends, and my fellow students, and enlist in the Southern Army.

       But there were two obstacles in the way: first, my rash promise just mentioned, that I would not enlist without my father’s consent, and secondly this: my young cousin, Robert Breckinridge McKim, was, to some extent, under my charge, and he stoutly insisted that if I joined the army he would do the same. In vain I reasoned with him that he was under age not yet eighteen—while I had just passed my nineteenth birthday—consequently my duty was to my country, his was to his mother.

       Unable to move him from his purpose, I said: “Very well, Robert, I will go with you to Baltimore and deliver you to your mother, then my responsibility will end.”

       But on our way to Winchester, intending to make our way into Maryland, I heard of the declaring of martial law in Baltimore and the planting of artillery in the public squares of our city. This intelligence swept away all further hesitation as to the course I ought to pursue. I saw that, if I did go back I should to a certainty be arrested as having been at Harper’s Ferry in arms against the government. And I strongly hoped that my father could no longer stand with Mr. Lincoln’s administration when be found that he “meant to establish a despotism and call it by the sacred name of Union.” Many other Union men had been swung over to the Southern side by this,— surely my father would be also. I remembered, too, how he had taught me that, next to God, my allegiance was due to my country before all other obligations. The fact is that by this time the cause of the South had become identified with liberty itself, and, being of military age, I felt myself bound by every high and holy consideration to take up arms to deliver Maryland from the invaders who were polluting her soil.

       At Bristoe Station, en route to Winchester, I had visited the troops at the front. There I saw several first cousins who were in the army, Wirt Harrison,and Major Carter Harrison, and Major Julien Harrison. I heard that thirty-six of my Harrison cousins were in the service. I saw many friends and fellow students in the uniform. And I confess I felt humiliated when I saw these men, already bronzed by camp life, while my face was as white as a piece of writing paper, and I was wearing citizen’s clothes.

       This experience intensified the conviction which had already taken possession of my mind, and I felt that now all hesitation was at an end.

       The following letter tells my mind at this period:

WINCHESTER, July 11, 1861.

MY DEAR MOTHER:

       I left the University last week expecting to be in Baltimore before now, but on my way I heard of the declaring of martial law and of the unlimbering of artillery in the public squares of our city. This was more than my endurance could stand and I determined to come up here and join Willie Murray’s company and aid in driving those insolent oppressors out of our city. I feel this to be my duty and I earnestly hope it will not be displeasing to either you or papa. I cannot but hope and trust that papa has before this awakened to a sense of the despotism which Lincoln is building up for himself, and that he is as desirous as I am to drive every Northerner from the State of Maryland. I would go home if I could and try and get his and your consent to my present course, but they are so strict now that I fear they would arrest me for having been to Harper’s Ferry, as there are so many informers nowadays. I am very sorry not to see you once more before joining, but it is impossible. I hope I may be among those who before long shall march into Baltimore and deliver her from her oppressors. Poor Baltimore! my heart bleeds for her. Bob McKim has come up here and joined a Virginia artillery company. Duncan is in the same company I am in. He is a splendid soldier and very enthusiastic. You need not be alarmed about me, my dear mother; there is some danger in case of battle, but very little; the Yankees cannot shoot.

       But, dear mamma, if anything should happen to me, remember that your son is not afraid to die for the liberties of his country, that he scorns being a Tory and that he can look up to Heaven and ask a blessing upon the cause he is engaged in, and commit his soul to God on the battle field, and then fear not the sting of death or the victory of the grave.

       When we entered the train which was to take us to Strasburg en route to Winchester, whence we meant to make our way into Maryland, I called Robert to me and told him I could no longer delay responding to the call of my country, and was resolved to join the army as soon as we reached Winchester, but he must continue on his way and do his duty by returning to his mother. I shall never forget the dear boy’s joy when be heard of my resolve. He sprang to his feet, clapped his hands, and said, “I shall follow your example,” nor could I dissuade him from his resolve.

       Arrived at Winchester, we made our way next morning, eighteen miles, to Darksville on the Martinsburg pike, where the army of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston was encamped. I enlisted July 11th, ten days before the battle of Manassas. We found the troops forming in line of battle to meet the reported advance of General Patterson, which was hourly expected. Naturally we sought the regiment of Maryland infantry, in whose ranks I soon found a place in the company of my dear friend Capt. Win. H. Murray. But Bob McKim, unable to find a musket, went over to the Rockbridge (Va.) Artillery, and decided to enlist in its ranks, as he had several friends in the company. The brave boy met his death at the battle of Winchester, May 25th, 1862, only ten months later, gallantly serving his piece.

       General Patterson did not advance, however, so we had no battle that day, but I had two little foretastes of army life which I will mention. Our captain having given instructions to the men as they stood in line of battle that, when any member of the company should be wounded, but one man should leave the field to care or him, my cousin Duncan McKim, who was immediately in front of me, turned to me and said with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips, “Randolph, when you fall, I’ll carry you off the field.” I thanked him, with rather a sickly smile, and thought that soldiering was getting to be a serious business.

       After waiting several hours for General Patterson’s call, to no purpose, about four P.M. we stacked arms, broke ranks, and charged upon the camp-fires, eager for dinner, which had been interrupted by the call to arms. Having had nothing to eat since early morning, and having ridden eighteen miles, and stood in the ranks several hours, my appetite was keen, and I gladly accepted Giraud Wright’s invitation to “dine” with him. My host provided the “dinner” by dipping a tin cup into a black camp kettle and procuring one iron spoon. He then invited me to a seat on a rock beside him and we took turns at the soup with the spoon, each also having a piece of hard-tack for his separate use. Alas! my dinner, so eagerly expected, was soon ended, for one or two spoonfuls of the greasy stuff that came out of the camp kettle completely turned my stomach, and I told my friend and host I was not hungry and would not take any more. Inwardly, I said, “Well, I may get used to standing up and being shot at, but this kind of food will kill me in a week!”

       I had expected a baptism of fire, and looked forward to it with some nervousness, but, instead I had had a baptism of soup which threatened an untimely end to my military career!

       The real experience of a soldier’s life now began in earnest. Drill and discipline were applied to the new recruit, by dint of which the raw material of young manhood was to be converted into a soldier. The man at the head of this military factory was Col. George H. Steuart, and he thoroughly understood his business. A “West Pointer,” and an officer in the old army, he was imbued with a very strong sense of the value of strict discipline. The First Maryland Infantry was under his command and he very soon “licked it into shape,” and it began to have a reputation for precision of drill and excellence in marching.

       These qualities were to be subjected to a practical test very soon, for not many days after the experience narrated in the last chapter, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston quietly broke camp near Winchester and took up his march for Manassas, there, to effect a junction with General Beauregard and help him win the first great, battle of the war. We marched late in the afternoon of July 18th, and by midnight were ten or twelve miles on our way. As we approached the village of Millwood Clarke County, I observed the home of my aunt, Mrs. Wm. Fitzhugh Randolph, brightly illuminated, and when I entered, the dear old lady met me with perplexity on her face and said, “Randolph, what am I to do? The soldiers have been coining in ever since five o’clock and they have eaten up everything I have in the house and still they keep coming.” “No wonder,” I replied “your house is right at the cross-roads, and you have it brightly illuminated, as if you expected them. Put out the lights and shut the doors and you will soon be at peace.”

       Well, the door that shut out the rest shut me in and I had a few hours sleep on a bed, after a refreshing “bite” in the dining-room. By four o’clock I was on the road again with one or two of my company approaching the river which the army was obliged to ford. As we trudged along, with knapsack and musket, in a lonely part of the road, we were overtaken by a mounted officer, muffled up in a cloak, who gruffly demanded what we were doing ahead of our regiment to which I hotly replied, “What business is that of yours?” One of my companions pulled me by the sleeve and said, “Man, that is General Elzey; you’d better shut up, or you’ll be arrested and put in the guard-house or shot for insubordination.” I suppose I must have known he was an officer, and that my reply was a gross breach of discipline. But obedience and submission to military authority was a lesson I had not yet learned in my seven days of soldiering. The general, however paid no attention to what I said, and my only punishment was the amusement of my fellow soldiers at my greenness. It was a lonely spot and it was still rather dark. Perhaps that accounts for the general’s making as if he did not hear my insubordinate reply.

       After wading the Shenandoah we took our way up through Ashby gap and were soon descending the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge. Near the great tree whose branches stretch into four counties we went into camp, and our mess was presently delighted by the approach of a well-furnished wagon from the farm of Mr. Robert Bolling, in charge of the old gentleman himself. He was the father of John Bolling, one of the privates in Murray’s company. Both John and his father were very popular men that day in Company H, and long lingered the delicious memory of those Virginia hams and well-fed poultry and goodies too numerous to mention.

       It was here I received a letter from my mother which showed that she had no idea I had enlisted in the army, or would do so. I immediately sat down and wrote her the following letter, wholly devoted to explaining my course of action and deprecating her displeasure and my father’s. It must have been indited just before taking the cars which were to convey us to the battle of Manassas, fought the next day. It contained no allusion to our forced march, or to the approaching battle.

PIEDMONT STATION,

Saturday, July 20, 1861.

MY MOST PRECIOUS MOTHER:

       Mr. Hall has just made his appearance and handed me your letter and dear Margie’s. It grieved me to the quick to find that you are still in ignorance of my real position in Virginia now, and I confess I almost felt self-reproached when you said that you were perfectly satisfied with my promise not to join the Southern Army “without my father’s consent.” I recollect full well writing the letter, and that was the thing which has kept me back so long from following what I have felt my duty to my country. This made me change my mind about joining when I had almost made up my mind to it some time ago, and this made me resolve to use every effort to get home and try and get consent to do so. I would not now be in the army, and would be at home, I expect, if the condition of things in Baltimore had not rendered it pretty certain that I would be arrested because I went in arms to Harper’s Ferry.

       I say then in justification of my course that I could not get home safely to get advice, and I felt very hopeful that papa, as most other Union men in Baltimore, had changed his sentiments when he found that the government means to establish a despotism and call it by the sacred name of Union. I do not now believe, after learning that I am disappointed to a great extent in this expected change so far, that papa will not finally cease to support what he has believed a free and righteous government, when he finds beyond contradiction that Lincoln has overthrown the government of our forefathers and abolished every principle of the Declaration of Independence.

       My dear, dear mother, I could hardly restrain tears in the midst of all the confusion and bustle of the camp this morning when I read your letter with those renewed expressions of your tender love for me. Oh, I hope you will not think me unworthy of such a love. If I have erred, do be lenient to me, you and papa both, and do not disown your son for doing what he felt to be a holy duty to his country. Papa, if you place yourself in my position, with the profound conviction I have of the holiness and righteousness of this Cause, ask yourself whether you would not have unhesitatingly done what I have done. You have yourself, in my hearing, placed the duty of country first in this world’s duties and second only to the duty I owe my God. How then am I reprehensible for obeying what my very heart of hearts told me was my country’s call, when I had some hope that your will would not be at variance with it, and I was unable to find out whether it was or not?

       I have suffered much in mind and still do suffer. At all events I am not actuated by selfish or cowardly motives. How easy it would have been to sit down at quiet Belvidere, preserving an inactivity which all my friends would have regarded as honorable, than at the possible loss of your parental love and care, and at the sacrifice of my comforts and the risk of my life, to do what I have done— enlist as a common soldier (i.e., a volunteer private) in the cause of liberty and right! Camp life is a hard life—I know by experience. Forced marches, scanty provisions sometimes, menial offices to perform, perfect discipline to submit to, are not attractive features to anyone. Then military life has little charm for me. I have no taste for it, and no ambition for military glory. But I am ready and willing to suffer all these hardships, and, when necessary, to lay my life upon the altar of my country’s freedom.

       I hope I do not seem to boast or to glorify myself in speaking thus, but if I know my own heart this is the truth, and God give me grace to be consistent with this profession. Do not, my precious mother, be too much alarmed and too anxious about me. I trust and hope that God will protect me from “the terror by night” and “the destruction that wasteth at noon-day.” I feel as if my life was to be spared. I hope yet to preach the Gospel of the Jesus Christ; but, my dear mother, we are in God’s hands, and He doth not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” He does all things well, and He will give you grace to bear this trial too. Farewell, dear mother and father, Telfair, Mary, and Margie. I am, in this life and the next,

       Your fond and affectionate

RANDOLPH.

       The following letter from my mother reflects the sentiment prevalent in Baltimore at that time:

BALTIMORE, July 1, 1860.

MY BELOVED CHILD:

. . . . . . . . . . .

       The plot thickens around us here, the usurpation becoming more and more dictatorial. Thankful I feel that we are not personally endangered, but I do not feel the less indignant at the outrageous arrest of our citizens, or the less sympathy for my neighbors who are subjected to the tyranny of the arbitrary power in Washington. We are such a loyal people, that it takes only 30,000 men to keep us quiet; and our police and marshal of police arrested! There will be no stop to this until you send them flying from Virginia, then we may have a chance to show our loyalty.