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 Statement of Captain Milton Rouse. 35

days : an education, knowledge of things human and divine, they prized beyond all price in their leaders and teachers, and craved its passion for their husbands and brothers and sons. The Spartan mother gloried in the bravery of their husbands and fathers, and demanded it in their sons. " Bring me this or be brought back upon it," said one as she gave him his shield to go out to battle. But your mothers, my comrades, as Dr. Foote says, gloried in the enterprise and religion and knowledge and purity of their husbands and chil- dren and would forego comforts and endure toil that their sons might be well instructed enterprising men. Their daughters, the women of our day, with devotion not less than Spartan, buckled on the swords of their husbands and sons, who needed no injunction to return with them only with honor, and when they came not back, these same women devoted themselves to the education of the sons left dependent upon them.

Like Esther Gaston of old, they nursed the wounded fathers, and like the wife of Justice Gaston they educated the sons.

Of how many of their sons may it be said :

Happy he

With such a mother, faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall, He shall not blind his soul with clay.

Statement of Captain Milton Rouse in Regard to the Charge that he Violated his Parole.

In Volume XIX, Series I, Official Records of the War of the Re- bellion, there is a report of a United States Military Commission appointed to enquire into the surrender of Harpers Ferry. In that report I am charged by several witnesses as having violated my parole. As this book is a government official publication, I desire the courtesy of the SOUTHERN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PAPERS to place on record my denial and refutation of the charge.

About the 5th September, 1862, I was wounded in a skirmish with some cavalry at Cooke's woods, near Charlestown, and was captured next day while in a buggy on my way to the residence of Mr. Paul Smith, near Summit Point. The capturing party were under com- mand of a Colonel B. F. Davis, who claimed to be a Mississippian, and a relative of Hon. Jefferson Davis. Colonel Davis rode up to