Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/547

 The Campaign from the Wilderness to Peter shurg. 541

For the heaviest column, transports were ready to bring suppHes and reinforcements to any one of three convenient deep-water bases — Acquia creek, Port Royal and the White House.

The column next in importance had its deep-water base within nine miles of a vital point in our defences. In the cavalry arm (so important in a campaign in a country like ours) they boasted over- whelming strength.

The Confederate forces in Virginia, and those which could be drawn to its defence from other points, numbered not more than seventy- five thousand men. Yet our great commander, with stead- fast heart, committing our cause to the God of battles, calmly made his dispositions to meet the shock of the invading hosts. In sixty days the great invasion had dwindled to a siege of Petersburg (nine miles from deep-water) by the main column, which, "shaken in its structure, its valor quenched in blood, and thousands of its ablest officers killed or wounded, was the army of the Potomac no more."

Mingled with it in the lines of Petersburg lay the men of the sec- ond column, which, for the last forty days of the campaign, had been held in inglorious inaction at Bermuda Hundreds by Beauregard, except when a portion of it was sent to share the defeat of June 3d on the Chickahominy, while the third and fourth columns, foiled at Lynchburg, were wandering in disorderly retreat through the moun- tains of West Virginia, entirely out of the area of military opera- tions. Lee had made his works at Petersburg impregnable to assault, and had a movable column of his army within two days' march of the Federal capital. He had made a campaign unexam- pled in the history of defensive warfare.

My comrades, I feel that I have given but a feeble picture of this grand period in the history of the time of trial of our beloved South — a history which is a great gift of God, and which we must hand down as a holy heritage to our children, not to teach them to cherish a spirit of bitterness or a love for war, but to show them that their fathers bore themselves worthily in the strife when to do battle be- came a sacred duty. Heroic history is the living soul of a nation's renown. When the traveler in Switzerland reads on the monument near Basle the epitaph of the thirteen hundred brave mountaineers who met the overwhelming hosts of their proud invaders, and " fell, not conquered, but wearied with victory, giving their souls to God and their bodies to the enemy " ; or when he visits the places sacred to the myth of William Tell, transplanted by pious, patriotic fraud from the legends of another people to inspire the youth of that