Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 08.djvu/527

Rh, and the Mississippi answered back to the Potomac, the wail of their waters was the death dirge of heroes, whose souls were one in strength, in courage, in consecration. But our rivers sang the sadder song. It was the miserere of siege and surrender, of retreat and disaster.

True you have your Gettysburg, your Petersburg and your Appomattox. And you lost your Jackson. But your hero conquered in dying, for he knew that Chancellorsville was his before he crossed the river and rested under the shade of the trees, while we lost our Sidney Johnston, and with our hero our hard-won Shiloh.

Your defeats were fewer than our victories, and yet we do not ask you to be generous, but simply just, in yielding your assent, when we say that the men of the armies of the west, on either side our great river, were your peers in spirit, in courage and in devotion, and that, tried (as you were not) by accumulation of disaster, in patient endurance they exceeded to the last, with a spirit that rose above reverses, and amid a darkness, illumined here and there with transient and deceptive gleams, illustrating that law laid down by your and our Lee—"that human virtue should be equal to human calamity."

[As General Pender was killed, and General Trimble, who succeeded to the command, very badly wounded, the report of the division was, by order of General Lee, made by Major Englehard. It should, of course, have a place in our "Gettysburg series," now nearly complete, as an important link in the chain, from which is to be wrought "the true story of Gettysburg."]

, November 4, 1863.

Major,—The Light Division of Major- General W. D. Pender, consisting of the brigades of Brigadier-Generals J. H. Lane, E. L. Thomas, A. M. Scales and S. McGowan (the latter commanded by Colonel A. Perrin of the Fourteenth South Carolina volunteers), which had encamped on the afternoon of the 30th of June on the north side of South mountain, Pennsylvania, moved from that position at 8 o'clock on the morning of the 1st of July, along the turnpike through Cashtown in the direction of Gettysburg, in rear of the division of Major-General Heth.