Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/266

 260 Southern Historical Society Papers.

however gloriously he had fought. Numbers, material and disci- pline at last triumphed over individual heroism. I need not recall the agony of those last days. Let me rather quote again from Colonel Chesney's memoir of General Lee. He says: "The day will come when the evil passions of the great civil strife will sleep in oblivion, and North and South do justice to each other's motives and forget each other's wrongs. Then history will speak with clear voice of the deeds done on either side, and the citizens of the whole Union do justice to the memories of the dead, and place above all others the name of the great chief of whom we have written. In strategy mighty, in battle terrible, in adversity as in prosperity a hero indeed. With the simple devotion to duty and the rare purity of the ideal Christian knight he joined all the kingly qualities of a leader of men."

It was in one of these last terrible days, my comrades, that your first captain and your last colonel fell, mortally wounded. In the fight at Hatcher's Run, on the 3Oth March, 1864, Colonel C. W. McCreary was shot through the lungs and died as he was carried to the breastworks. I need not remind you how admirable a soldier he was, how brave in battle, how skilfully he could handle a regi- ment in action, and how gentle he was to all around him. Educated in the State Military Academy, he was fully prepared for the com- mand of the regiment to which he succeeded and which he led so gallantly and successfully in many engagements. I can still hear his voice ringing through the din of battle as he aligned the regiment for some desperate work. You had reason to be proud of him while he lived, and to mourn him when he died, and should now revere his memory.

It is, my comrades, one of the greatest misfortunes of our defeat that not even the names of those who fought and bled and died in our glorious struggle have been preserved, and that unless collected and enrolled by us now will soon be forgotten and their memory lost with the cause for which they warred. Let it be the sacred duty, then, of those of us who survive to gather up the names of our fellow- soldiers, and let these lines, from the pen of one who served his State from the first to the last of the war, be the epitaph of those who, like him, have passed away :

" Believing

That they fought, for Principle against Power, For Religion against Fanaticism,, For Man's Right against Man's Might,