Notes and Queries.
Sabine Pass—Who will send us a detailed sketch of that heroic defence? An exchange, in announcing the recent death of Jack White, says: White was one of the forty Irishmen who held Sabine Pass against the entire Federal fleet during the war, and received the personal thanks of President Jefferson Davis, who designated these men as the forty bravest men of the Confederacy. ‘The Federal force on that occasion consisted of three Federal brigades, commanded respectively by Brigadier-Generals W. H. Emory, Godfrey Weitzel, and F. S. Nicholson, all under the command of Major-General William B. Franklin, aggregating 6,000 Federal soldiers, and a fleet of gunboats. The defeat of this force was probably the most heroic exploit of the war, and out of solid shame the Federal Government dropped the record thereof from their war annals.’ Roster of the A. N. V: The following note should have had earlier publication, but was somehow overlooked. We warmly second the call of Colonel Allan for the help of those who were in position to know the facts in correcting and perfecting our Roster. We purpose publishing soon others of the rosters which Colonel Scott has so carefully prepared, and with copies of which he has kindly favored us.I think there was no such organization as 8th Virginia battalion in Armistead's brigade. Who and What Conquered the South? We give, without comment, the answer to this question contained in an article by Mr. Richard Grant White, high authority with the cultured classes of the North, in the September number of the North American Review: ‘The South had fought to maintain an inequality of personal rights and an aristocratic form of society. The North had fought, not in a crusade for equality and against aristocracy, but for money; for the riches it had acquired, and that the newly-developed means of acquiring riches might not be destroyed; for nothing else. After the first flush of enthusiasm caused by the bombardment of Fort Sumter— “firing on the flag” —had subsided, before which no insult, no defiance, and notably—very notably—no enthusiasm for liberty and equality had been able to awaken enough fighting spirit in the North to lead the administrators of the Federal Government to take any important steps for its preservation—after this excitement had subsided, and yet the war must needs be prosecuted or the Government destroyed, the contest became one of money for the sake of money. The war was virtually carried on by the moneyed men, the business men of the North. They furnished its “sinews,” and this they did for their own interest. Many of them grew rich by the war; most of them saw that in its successful prosecution lay their [476] future prosperity. The war time was a money-making process. The Federal Government was victorious simply because it had the most men and the most money. The Confederate cause failed simply because its men and money were exhausted; for no other reason. Inequality came to an end in the South; equality was established throughout the Union; but the real victors were the money-makers, merchants, bankers, manufacturers, railway men, monopolists, and speculators. It was their cause that had triumphed under the banner of freedom. General Grant has been roughly handled by caricaturists and paragraphists as a beggar. Verily, his reward has been small at the hands of those to whom he rendered his chief service. If the business men of the North had given him an income of one thousand dollars a day, and General Sherman one of five hundred, they would have insufficiently acknowledged what those stubborn soldiers did for them.’
