Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 38.djvu/387

Rh It has been creditably asserted that General R. E. Lee, upon the surrender at Appomattox, said, "The war has only begun." Obviously, the war between the Cavalier and the Puritan, which will last while there is a vestige of the former and the latter are in evidence; many of whom yet mourn and apotheosize John Brown, justly condemned. The seditionary and murderous raid of this Puritan disciple at Harper's Ferry, Va., in October, 1859, was cut short by Lieutenant-Colonel R. E. Lee, Umited States Army, aided by Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, of the First United States Cavalry, who, with Lieutenant Green and a detachment of marines, broke into "Brown's Fort." Instantly Brown was on the ground with a cut from Stuart's sabre—as the story goes. Grabbing the culprit and lifting him to his feet, the Lieutenant said, "You are 'Ossowattomie' Brown." "Yes, Lieutenant Stuart, I am 'Ossowattomie' Brown," trembling as he answered. Old "Ossowattomie" Brown, hunted in Kansas by United States Cavalry, under Stuart and others, for the murder of fifty citizen settlers, because salveholders, making model laborers, harmless and happy, out of savage negroes, with cannibals for daddies. But this, in the satanic minds of Brown and his Puritan abolition co-conspirators, was a crime against the cardinal virtues!

Lee, Jackson and Stuart were cast in the same mould of perfect manhood; shared the identical, matchless civilization; like ancestry and evolution, precisely as did Washington and his confreres. And while these three incomparable leaders, with their paladins and warriors, kept the field, their army was demonstrably invincible. The "invincible Confederate infantry" was a by-word in the Brithish Army.

When the mysterious mind of Providence decreed the fate of the heroic Confederate people, He removed His servam, Stonewall Jackson, as has been said. Likewise, Stuart fell, and it was sealed. And in the death throes of Lee's scarred, bloody, decimated army A. P. Hill fell. His was the name last on the lips of Lee and Jackson in the delirium of death.

But other Confederate armies likewise had their illustrious dead on the field of patriotic valor and glory: Albert Sidney Johnston, at Shiloh; Bishop Leonidas Polk, at Kennesaw; John Morgan, the Mosby of the West, at Greenville, Tenn. O holocaust of matchless leaders, chief and subordinate, martyrs all!