Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/14

viii handle. With a facile pen he has traced the history of his State, in so far as it was involved in the Confederate war.

Col. Robert White, of Wheeling, W. Va., a distinguished attorney familiar to the veterans of the South through his prominence in the order of United Confederate veterans as major-general commanding the West Virginia division, is a native of Hampshire county, of the original State of Virginia. As a captain of volunteers he reported to Col. T. J. Jackson at Harper s Ferry in the spring of 1861. Subsequently he raised a battalion of cavalry within the enemy s lines, which he commanded with gallantry, finally becoming colonel of the Twenty-third Virginia cavalry, of which his battalion was the nucleus. At the close of hostilities he had a record of gallant participation in fifty-six cavalry fights. In the preparation of the history of West Virginia he has given much time and pains to the collection of data in a field peculiarly unfavorable for the preservation of records, and his work will doubtless remain the authoritative statement of the Confederate history of that region.

Almost the last work of the lamented Major Jed Hotchkiss, of Staunton, Va., was the completion of his history of Virginia. Very soon after he laid down the pen with which he traced the record of the war in Virginia, and of the great army which was led by Robert E. Lee, he was called to the rest of the soldier and Christian. As topographer and staff officer under Garnett, Lee, Jackson, Ewell and Early, he was undoubtedly more familiar with the battlefields of Virginia than any other man, and it is fortunate for the students of to-day and of future generations that his account of the war in that region should be here preserved. Particularly in regard to the Valley campaigns of Stonewall Jackson and Early, and the campaigns of the Second corps of the army of Northern Virginia, he was an historical authority. Much of what he has written for this work is from his personal