Page:Confederate Cause and Conduct.djvu/121

 Rh On the 2nd of July, 1863, when the battle of Gettysburg was being fought, and when President Davis had every reason to believe we would be victorious, he wrote:

"My whole purpose is, in one word, to place this war on the footing of such as are waged by civilized people in modern times, and to divest it of the savage character which has been impressed on it by our enemies, in spite of all our efforts and protests."

Hoke's Great Invasion, p. 52.

Of course, we do not pretend to say that there were not individual cases of depredation committed, and even on our own people, by some of our soldiers. Indeed, it was often necessary for our army to subsist on the country through which it marched, which was perfectly legitimate. And when we remember the sufferings and privations to which our armies had to be subjected by reason of our lack of necessary supplies of almost all kinds, it is amazing that so little "foraging" was done by our men. But what we do contend for and state, without the least fear of contradiction, is that the conflict was conducted throughout on the part of the South—by the Government at home and the officers in the field—upon the highest principles of civilized warfare; that if these were ever departed from, it was done without the sanction and against the orders of the Confederate authorities. And that exactly the reverse of this is true as to the Federal authorities, we have established by the most overwhelming mass of testimony, furnished almost entirely from Northern sources.

But we cannot protract this paper; it is already much longer than we intended or desired it should be. We would like to have embraced in it a full discussion of the treatment of prisoners on both sides; but we must leave this, and the treatment of Mr. Davis whilst a prisoner, for some future report. If any one desires, in advance of that, to see a full discussion of these subjects, we refer, as to the former, to the very able articles by Rev. J. William Jones, D. D., in Vol. I., Southern Historical Society Papers, beginning with page 113, and running through several numbers of that volume, in which he adduces a mass of testimony, and completely vindicates the South. He shows—