Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 20.djvu/374

 368 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Mr. President, Comrades of the Army of Northern Virginia,

Soldiers of the Confederacy, Ladies and Gentlemen :

If the personal allusion may be pardoned, I will say that I count myself one of the happiest, if not the happiest, man in all this vast crowd assembled here to-day.

Always happy to meet the men who wore the gray for if there is one man on earth whom I honor and love above another, it is the true Confederate soldier I delight to mingle in reunions of the sur- vivors of every army of the Confederacy as they gather from Mary- land to Texas.

But it is for me always a peculiar pleasure to attend a Confederate gathering in historic.battle scarred heroic old Richmond, and to mingle with the men who followed Lee and Jackson and Longstreet and Ewell and A. P. Hill [great applause], and "Jeb" Stuart; the men who composed the Army of Northern Virginia, the noblest army of heroic patriots that ever marched under any flag, or fought for any cause, " in all the tide of time."

A HAPPY TASK TO DISCHARGE.

And yet a still greater happiness is mine to-day; for, as I look out on this crowd I see the faces and forms of men by whose side I have marched along the weary road, bivouacked in the pelting storm, or went into the leaden and iron hail of battle the men of the noble old Thirteenth Virginia regiment and the grand old Third Corps assembled to honor themselves by doing honor to our peerless leader the brave and accomplished soldier, the chivalric Virginia gentleman, the devoted patriot, the martyr hero of our dying cause, "gallant and glorious Little Powell Hill."

I am only to introduce the fitly-chosen orator of the day, and I shall not, of course, be guilty of the gross impropriety of attempting a speech myself, but I am sure that you will pardon me if I say just this: Richmond is fast becoming the " Monumental City."

Her peerless Washington, surrounded by his compatriots of the Revolution of '76 her Lee her Jackson her Wickham her monu- ment to "the true hero" of the war, the private soldier, now being erected her monument to "the flower of cavaliers," dashing, glori- ous Jeb Stuart, which is to be erected in the near future and the projected grand monument to our noble Christian President, soldier,