Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/516

 510 Southern Hhtorical Society Papers.

Chickahominy, there were ninety-two regiments, of which forty-six regiments were North Carolinians. This statement I make upon the authority of one of the division commanders.

At the dedication of the Confederate cemetery in Winchester, Vir- ginia, some years ago, I was invited to deliver the oration, and the reason assigned by the committee for soliciting me for this task was that the North Carolina dead there exceeded the dead of any other- State ; showing that in all the glorious campaigns of Jackson, Ewell and Earlv, in that blood-drenched valley, North Carolina soldiers ■were either very numerous or else had an unusual share of the hard fighting ; neither of which facts would be so much as suspected by reading the popular histories of those compaigns. Dead men do tell iales, and tales which cannot be disputed

Almost the only commands in Lee's army which were intact and serviceable at Appomattox, were North Carolina brigades, and the statement is made, and so far as I know without contradiction, that she surrendered twice as many muskets as any other State. At Greensboro', too, Hoke's divis^ion, containing three brigades of North Carolina troops, in splendid condition and efficiency, constituted one- third or more of Johnston's entire army.

I mention these facts, not by way of ill-tempered or untasteful boasting, but by way of a proper self-assertion, a quality in which the people of my Slate are charged, and justly charged, with being deficient ; and also because they testify to a state of things which in the handsof a just and discriminating historian must greatly redound to the credit and honor of North Carolina. For I shall not scruple to make the statement here which I have often made elsewhere, and I make it without the fear of giving ofifence to brave and great men, that the writers who have hastened to pen biographies of the great and illustrious leaders which Virginia gave to the Confed- eracy, have been too anxious to eulogize their heroes to give due attention to the forces which wrought their plans into such glo- rious results — the plain men, whose deeds gave their leaders so much renown. The history of the British Kings had been often written, said Macaulay, but no one had ever written the history of the British people, which was the more useful to be learned. So we are having many histories and biographies of the great generals and chieftains of our war, but we have not and are not likely to have soon, any history of the Confederate people — of the thousands upon thousands who rushed forward under the banners of these chieftains ; of the numbers who died; of the sufferings they endured, the sacrifices