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of the South to preserve their political and social inheritance by truthfully stating events was alike due to those to whom its regeneration must be confided, as well as to those who suffered for that cause.
Your career as a commander met my entire approval and secured my admiration.
It was such estimate concurrently held by General Lee and myself that led to your selection to command the vitally important and difficult campaign which you have described in your recent publication.
The means were known to be disproportionate to the task before you when you marched against General Hunter.
That they proved adequate, is glory enough for you and your associates.
It would be easy to show, if it were desirable now to enter upon that question, at whose door lies the responsibility of subsequent disasters.
You have rendered the more grateful and useful service of showing at whose door it does not belong.
Jefferson Davis.
University of Virginia.
General J. A. early:
I have thought much of this matter of the Army of Northern Virginia, and my earnest, honest belief is that you should write memoirs of its campaigns.
I don't know any nobler labor of love, even if you do not publish it.
If you write and leave it unfinished even, I will pledge myself to edit it and have it published as a true memorial of your love and affection for that noble army of martyrs.
General Lee ought to have done this thing.
Now that he is gone, the duty devolves on you to give the account of all the campaigns in detail from the beginning to the end. This is the only way to defeat the deplorable effects of thousands of books of misapprehension, because nobody has written authoritatively on the subject.
I do hope you will take the matter into consideration and undertake the work.
I will do everything I can to collect material for you. . . . Your address at Washington and Lee is the best piece of military criticism which has been written on our war, and I beg you earnestly and solemnly as a duty to that old Army of Northern Virginia to write a history of its campaigns; it would be most appropriate and essential.
General J. A. early:
Charles S. Venable.
University of Virginia.
General J. A. Earl.Y: I write, at the lapse of twenty-five years from the close of the war, on a matter in which you are interested as well as every man who served under you. It is due to yourself and to the truth of history that you should write a minute, calm and complete history of your campaigns, from the time you were detached from the army around Petersburg, in 1864, until the affair at Waynesboro.
My honest conviction is that your campaign will lose nothing by General J. A. Earl.Y: I write, at the lapse of twenty-five years from the close of the war, on a matter in which you are interested as well as every man who served under you. It is due to yourself and to the truth of history that you should write a minute, calm and complete history of your campaigns, from the time you were detached from the army around Petersburg, in 1864, until the affair at Waynesboro.
