In conclusion,
your Committee would express their daily increasing conviction of the value and importance of the work in which we are engaged, and would beg our friends everywhere who intend to help us to do so at once. The time may not have come when a perfectly impartial history of the late war can be written, but the time is rapidly passing by when you can contribute your mite towards collecting the material from which the historian of the future shall do justice to as pure a cause as any for which patriot blood was ever shed — as gallant a people as ever fought for the right — as noble an army of heroes as ever trod the earth. By order of the Executive Committee.J. Wm. Jones, Secretary. Dabney H. Maury, Chairman. Office Southern Historical Society, Richmond, Va., Nov. 1st, 1876.