Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 35.djvu/44

 ladies of various organizations, the occasion being one highly enjoyable.

Captain J. C. McNeilly, who served gallantly in Lee's Army, in Virginia, the editor of the Vicksburg Herald, in an editorial in his issue of November 23rd, glowingly eulogizes Miss Johnston's address, which he entitles "A Confederate Iliad," an epic with lasting value depicting a type of the action and feeling that characterized the Confederate soldier—to be valued and treasured as a tribute to his courage, constancy, fidelity and fortitude, in facing and enduring peril and privation.

This is the history of the only Virginia troops engaged in the defense of Vicksburg, upon the battleground preserved in the amber of this great military park. Fighting for the South were many gallant Mississippians, and regiments from Alabama and Georgia, from the Carolinas, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri, Texas and Louisiana. On the other side, fighting for the North, were Massachusetts and New York, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and Michigan. These hundred or more men, this company known as the Botetourt Artillery, were the only Virginians. It is to them that this stone is raised, and it is to their war song that we listen to-day.

They were born, these men, in the State of Virginia, in the County of Botetourt, in a region of wheatfields and orchards, of smiling farms and friendly villages, of high blue mountains and clear flowing rivers. It is a county in which Mississippi should take an interest. Formed just one hundred and thirty-eight years ago, this November, in the tenth year of our Sovereign Lord, King George the Third, it was named Botetourt in honor of Norborne Berkeley, Baron Botetourt, then governor of the colony. The county seat was called Fincastle, after Lord Botetourt's home in England. The county was a frontier one, and included the present state of Kentucky, with a fair claim to Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. You upon the Mississippi should feel a stirring of the heart when the old county of Botetourt is spoken of, for apparently once you belonged to it. In this same month of November, the following act was passed by the General Assembly, sitting in Williamsburg, in Virginia: "And whereas