Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 39.djvu/21

 "Missionary Ridge." 9

that war tragedy before their very eyes, it is no wonder that President Roosevelt exulted in galloping with Prince Henry of Germany along Missionary Ridge, pointing out the steepness and height of its lofty sides and dilating on the incomparable, irresistible assault the Federals must have made in sweeping up it and scattering the Rebels from its summit in 1863. In- deed, no battlefield in America has excited more interest, and, to all who visit it, more perplexity. The universal feeling of casual observers, North or South, is amazement that an army, and especially a Southern army, could be driven from such a position as that.

A certain infallible and divine authority warns us, "judge not by appearances." In war the counsel is peculiarly apt. Take Harper's Ferry, for instance. Well do I remember the satis- faction felt in the South at the beginning of the war when our troops seized and occupied Harper's Ferry. "Impregnable posi- tion," etc., but when General Joseph E. Johnston went there he pronounced the place untenable. And when Stonewall Jack- son a year or so after invested the place, he effectually demon- strated it to be so by capturing it and catching as in a trap 11,000 or more Federal troops, with immense store of war ma- terial, and by killing, in addition, their commander-in-chief and a large number of his men and wounding a still greater number.

The mere being on a hill, or even a mountain, does not guarantee security, as any old soldier knows. The real ques- tion is, "Can that hill or that mountain be flanked? And has the enemy men enough to do it?" "Thermopylae" has been useful, 'tis true, for firing the blood of school boys in fervid declamations, but if the Persians had flanked it in the first place, as they eventually did, they could have taken it without any loss at all worth mentioning.

Now, that is the way the Confederates lost Lookout Moun- tain and Missionary Ridge. They were "flanked" from both, and by overwhelmingly superior numbers of the enemy. It was foolish for General Bragg to put his men in a similar trap at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. But let me turn directly to my story.