Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/6

Rh ciously during that day in the woods. This position runs along the unfinished roadbed of the section of the Manassas Gap railroad, which was intended to give an independent line from Manassas to Alexandria. The war came on before the line was completed, and the crumbling banks and cuts still stand, after twenty years, only to mark the site of numberless deeds of heroic valor. Jackson availed himself of the protection offered by the cuts and hills of the railroad, and here met and repulsed during the 29th the tremendous assaults, which Pope made in the hope of overwhelming his meagre forces before Lee could bring Longstreet to his aid. A veritable stone wall his men proved here for a second time on this historic field. The fury of Pope's attacks that day fell on Jackson's left, held by A. P. Hill; and here Gregg's brigade of South Carolinians fought with unsurpassed courage from morning till late in the afternoon. More than six hundred of his one thousand, five hundred men had fallen around the heroic Gregg, when, with ammunition exhausted, he replied to General Hill that he 'thought he could still hold his position with the bayonet.'"

Colonel Marshall, of Baltimore, who, you recollect, was military secretary of General Lee, in an address before the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia, delivered in 1874, in discussing some of the disputed questions of the war, observes :

"It has been sixty years since Waterloo, and to this day writers are not agreed as to the facts of that famous battle.

"It is not fourteen years since our war began, and yet who, on either side, of those who took part in it, is bold enough to say that he knows the exact truth with reference to any of the great battles in which the armies of the north and south met each other?"

The justice of this remark of Colonel Marshall is well illustrated, my comrades, in the history of the battle in which we took the prominent part mentioned by Colonel Allan. No battle of the late war has been so much studied and discussed as that of the second day of the Second Manassas, Friday, the 29th August, 1862. The second defeat of the Federal forces on Bull Run, following other reverses, created such exasperation in the Northern minds that the administration in Washington, as well as the commander under whom the disaster had occurred, found it necessary to offer a sacrifice to appease at once the anger and fears of the people. A distinguished officer, one from whose skill and valor we of Gregg's brigade had already suffered, and had reason to appreciate, was selected as the victim. General Porter was tried, convicted and cashiered, "condemned," as the Board of Officers who re-examined his case say, "for not having taken part in his own battle." Twenty odd years after, the country is still discussing the justice of that con-