Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/225

Rh wisdom and patriotism of our forefathers, the founders of the government, could not solve, they left to be decided by the sword in the hands of their descendants. It fell to our lot, my comrades, under God's providence to take part in a war that was inevitable from the adoption of the Constitution. How we bore ourselves in the struggle for what we were taught — for what we believed, and still believe — to have been the right of that controversy, is now history.

Nor need we fear the history that is being written. Its causes will be the subject of dispute probably as long as our government itself shall last. But our opponents themselves are now doing justice to the conduct of our people during the struggle, however much they deprecate the war itself The time has passed for unfair and sensational accounts of battles. The Century Magazine is giving carefully prepared accounts by the actors on both sides, the chief historical danger of which is personal, and not sectional injustice; and Scribner's recent series are in the main fair and impartial histories of the campaigns of the war. That of " The Artny Under Pope'" is eminently so; while that of "The Virginia Campaign of 1864 and 1865," by the late General A. A. Humphreys, is written with as much candor as ability. General Humphreys does, or at least attempts to do, justice to both sides, and closes his work with the soldierly remark :

"It has not seemed to m.e necessary to attempt a eulogy upon the Army of the Potomac or the Army of Northern Virginia."

It was not necessary for that distinguished officer to eulogize the Army of the Potomac, nor is it necessary, if it were becoming in us, to boast of the conduct of the Army of Northern Virginia. If the fairness of a true historical temper had not already manifested itself in the military writers of the country, the publication by Congress of the official records of the war, both of the Union and of the Confed- erate armies, simultaneously and chronologically, puts an end to any historical misrepresentation, and gives to the world the cotempora- neous account of each battle and engagement, Federal and Confed- erate, side by side. In view of these publications, we need no longer fear the misrepresentations of Pope's vain-glorious dispatches, nor of Doubleday's sensational and egotistical account of Gettysburg, nor yet the absurd mis-statements of Badeau ; nor need we fear on our side that Jackson's reputation will suffer from the criticisms of Long- street.

In conclusion, my comrades, let me allude to an incident which has happened since this address has been written, which has touched