Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 01.djvu/434

 the claims commission that General Wade Hampton burned Columbia, when he knew he did not.

Nor have written and published his story of all these things.

The Southern army lost nothing when Sherman decided to fight against Louisiana.

Had General Thomas followed his natural inclinations and adhered to his allegiance to Virginia, and accepted the commission of Colonel, which he had procured from Governor Letcher, his native State would have been the better off by one more able and brave Virginian fighting in defence of principles cherished throughout his life, and for his home and for his kindred. Of all those native-born Virginians who turned their swords against Virginia, there is but one who added strength to the opposing section.

Thomas, alone, of them all, was able and efficient in the armies of those to whom he transferred his allegiance.

And while Virginia holds up to the emulation of her youth the examples of Lee, of Jackson, and of Johnston, she will ever deplore that a son so brave and so able as Thomas was did not fight by their side.

He has now gone to his account. What motives, what influences decided his course, God alone knows. But he was a loss to the Southern army, and a tower of strength to the army of the North.

They had none like that Virginian Thomas.

He was sedate, reflective, calm, self-reliant, resolute.

There was in his demeanor, in the massive proportions of his person, in his clear blue eye, in the kindliness of his countenance and of his manly voice, all that impresses men with that personal magnetism so potent in the crisis of a battle, and when we remember that his whole life does not furnish one act or word of wrong or insult to woman, or one instance of intentional untruth, the personal contrast between General Thomas and "the General of the Army" is completed.

The History of the Army of the Cumberland is certainly worthy of the superficial compliment bestowed upon it by "the General of the Army" "on the handsome style in which this book is printed and bound."

The discussion of the principles which underlay the revolution with which the author opens his subject might have been judiciously omitted, for Chaplain Van Horne does not seem to know that in the South the leaders were behind the people in their