Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 19.djvu/422

 416 Southern Historical Society Papers.

blood would have allowed. General Grant wrote on August i8th, 1864 : " It is hard on our prisoners that we cannot exchange them ; but it is humane for the active army. Should we exchange prisoners we must fight the South until the last man falls. Should we exchange prisoners Sherman would be beaten, and our own safety endangered."

Grant could scarcely have paid a more splendid tribute to the Southern Army.

To put the whole odium of this matter of the prisoners on Jefferson Davis is a climax of injustice which condemns itself.

His life was a conflict from the cradle to the grave ; but he stood in good and evil fortune great and in his deepest humiliation sublime in the strength of his soul. He was as a man and a Christian an example in history. Clarus et vir fortissimus.

[From the Richmond Times, January 24, 1892.]

GENERAL JOSEPH R. ANDERSON.

Hero of an Incident of the Battle of Games' Mill.

The 2yth of June, 1862, dawned bright and beautiful over Rich- mond, with the armies of Lee and McClellan confronting each other on the Chickahominy. A. P. Hill's division on the previous evening had crossed that stream at Meadow Bridge, and moving down to Mechanicsville had enabled Longstreet to cross on that turnpike. Lee and McClellan had had their first deadly grapple with each other at Mechanicsville and Ellyson's Mill, and McClellan had withdrawn his troops to the heights of Games' Mill, where Fitz John Porter with his Pennsylvania "Bucktails," supported by artillery, held a position naturally strong, but which had been rendered almost im- pregnable by earthworks and an abattis of felled trees. Hill, feeling his way, reached the front of Porter about noon, or a little later, and formed line of battle. His first line was composed of a brigade of Georgians, the second of General Charles W. Field's brigade, con- sisting then of the Fortieth, Forty-seventh, Fifty-fifth and Sixtieth Virginia regiments, and the Twenty-second Virginia battalion.