Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 08.djvu/526

514 morale, their faith in their leader strengthening with every retreating step; in this they proved themselves the peers of their fathers, following Green through the Carolinas or Washington through the Jerseys, so that they wrung from their adversary the confession that, "It was a dark day for the Federal arms when they confronted the Confederates on the Chattahoochee."

And when the leader changed, and the plan changed, when retreat gave way to advance, and defence to attack, the same soldierly qualities shone even more conspicuously. Take that series of fragmentary and unsuccessful attacks from Peach Tree creek, July 20, passing in swift succession, to Franklin, November 30. Evacuating Atlanta, halting awhile on the Chattahoochee, winding among the hills of Alabama, crossing the Tennessee at Florence, flanking Columbia (a labor lost by the strange apathy at Spring Hill), struggling up that deadly slope at Franklin against that stream of leaden fire—Franklin, where the eagle-eyed, keen-sighted Forest was misled—for he said, at the head of our line: "Boys, they haven't any works worth naming; you'll go over them like a flash;" pressing for a fortnight before Nashville, and then hurled back in that biting winter, the roads streaked here and reddened there as the pitiless pike cut the blood-drops from shoeless feet; and recrossing that river, not a mob, but an army—an army which, rested and reformed, was off with the early spring to rejoin its trusted leader and strike its last blow for land and home among the pines of Carolina. I tell you that in after time, when history can be rightly written, it will place these men with those who fought in the heat at Monmouth, and endured the cold of Valley Forge. For myself, I rejoice that to-night I am privileged to pay this tribute to their spirit and their deeds, and permitted to place this laurel of remembrance on the tomb of their dead.

And in closing, suffer me to say to you who here to-night represent the glorious Virginia army, that at Donelson and Shiloh, at Murfreesboro and Chickamauga, at Chattanooga and Champion Hill, at Vicksburg and Atlanta, at Franklin and Nashville, men as true, as brave and as enduring as you, echoed and emulated your spirit, though denied your successes. The mouldered bones of them whose bodies sleep beside the rivers of the gulf, whose requiem the Cumberland, the Tennessee, the Chattahoochee and the Mississippi sang, encased as brave hearts and stout souls as those whose dirges were rolled to the Atlantic by the James, the Shenandoah, the Rappahannock and the Potomac. Yes, as the Chattahoochee responded to the Chickahominy, as the Tennessee called to the Shenandoah, and the Cumberland replied to the