Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 2.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[218] “creatures” appointed by Mr. Davis “to the exclusion of regular officers whom he disliked were.” Why, upon the side of the Confederates, among others Generals R. E. Lee, A. S. Johnston, J. E. Johnston, Kirby Smith, Hood, Hardee, Stuart and Fitz. Lee, and on that of the Federals, Generals McClellan, Sedgwick, Stoneman, Sumner, Wood, Thomas, Sturgis, Emory, Casey, Smith, Palmer, and others. We give this simply as a specimen of the value of this historian's assertions. As for the distinguished objects of his denunciation upon our own side, we conceive them in no manner of danger from the blows of this champion; and as regards the epithet which he applies to his old commander and comrades, why it is a family quarrel, in which we are not at all interested. We are merely calling attention to the absurd and reckless misstatements of this rival of De Tocqueville, and the utter worthlessness as a record of facts of the book which we are informed by the editor displays “careful search, cool judgment, and a manifest purpose to be just to all.”

When, for instance, he speaks of the Southern army and navy officers who designed their commissions in order to take part with their native States as traitors and deserters, we have no reply to make, for the remark deserves none. It merely serves to bring into bold relief the petty malignity and profound ignorance of its author. He would seem from this to be in the same state of hopeless darkness in regard to the law-military as in regard to the Constitution of the United States, and we could hardly make use of stronger language. But when he declares that the resignations of the army officers embraced “all together two hundred and sixty-nine names, out of about six hundred, which the regular army contained,” we would call attention to the fact already pointed out by General Jordan, of General Beauregard's staff, that, in the first place, this is a gross understatement of the whole number of army officers; and that, in the second, the list of two hundred and sixty-nine includes not only the names of men who did not enter the Confederate army, but even those of some who actually became generals in the Federal service.

Of a similar character is the statement that among those who had resigned their commissions were included “most of the higher class of officers in the military department, and occasionally the entire corps of officers belonging to one regiment.”

This also has been contradicted by the writer above referred to. In no single regiment did the number of resignations amount to