Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 05.pdf/260

Rh are troublesome, but some errors crept into our last issue which must be corrected.

In General Fitz. Lee's article, page 185, (twelve lines from the bottom), "occupied" should read unoccupied. On page 188, instead of "General Warren, Meade's Chief of Artillery," it should read Chief of Engineers. Page 192, "concluded" should read "couched;" and on same page, instead of attacked Meade's key-point, it should be "unlocked."

"" at Washington has excited, from time to time, considerable interest. For years closely guarded from all save a favored few, its occasional outgivings have only served to sharpen the appetite of those interested in such matters, and to make them all the more anxious to have access to the rich store of material for the future historian which they contain. A more liberal spirit seems to prevail with the present Secretary of War, and some of our friends have recently been allowed to inspect important documents. Indeed, the outrage of keeping those documents locked up to Confederates, and open to every writer on the other side who might desire to defame our leaders or falsify our history, has become so patent to all right-thinking men that there have been denials that access has ever been denied to any seeker after historic truth. The Washington Post of March 14 published what purported to be an "interview" of one of its reporters with Adjutant-General Townsend, in which he denies that access is refused to any save to those who might use them in prosecuting false claims against the Government; and, while this is not distinctly stated, it is strongly intimated that this has always been the rule of the Department. Now, we will do General Townsend the justice to believe that the reporter misrepresented him, or else that he is personally ignorant of what has occurred in reference to those archives. At all events, we hold ourselves prepared to prove before any fair tribunal that General R. E. Lee tried in vain to get access to his own battle reports and field returns; that General E. P. Alexander, Colonel Wm. Allan, Colonel Charles Marshall, and a number of Confederate gentlemen have been refused the privilege of seeing papers which they wished for purely historical purposes; that the Executive Department of the State of Virginia has been rudely refused to see or to have copied its own records, which were seized and carried off after the capture of Richmond; that Governor Vance, of North Carolina, has been refused access to his own letter-books to disprove charges made against him from garbled extracts of those letters furnished by the Department; and that, in a number of instances, there has been this same unfair use of those archives.

But the correspondence between our Society and the War Department settles the whole matter beyond controversy. That correspondence was inaugurated by Secretary Belknap with a view of obtaining such Confederate documents, reports, &c., as were not in the Bureau at Washington. The Secretary of the Society promptly responded, and offered to give the