[32] who had driven McClellan to his gunboats and chased Pope to Washington; who had slaughtered Burnside at Fredericksburg and routed Hooker at Chancellorsville; who had held Fort Sumter against all comers; who had left their dead from Charleston to Gettysburg, from Gettysburg to Chickamauga, and from Chickamauga to Knoxville, and from Knoxville to the Wilderness; who had defeated a much greater man than Sherman—Grant himself—in every engagement from the Wilderness to Petersburg; had killed and wounded in a month more men in Grant's army than they had in their own; who had yielded at last, not to Grant, nor to Sherman—not to arms, but to starvation? As General Preston has so well expressed it:1
We surrendered no army of 200,000 equipped soldiers as at Sedan, but, at Appomattox, a starving skeleton, with scarce blood enough left to stain the swords of our conquerors; our surrender was not to New England, but to death!It was on the wives and children of these men that Sherman warred. In American histories ‘Tarleton's Quarter’ was, for near a century, the proverb for cruelty and barbarity. But when Tarleton crossed at Rocky Mount in pursuit of Sumter, and mercilessly slew his men at Fishing Creek, he did so when battling against men whom the rules of war justified his slaying when its fortunes placed them in his power. It remained for Sherman, at Hanging Rock, the scene of Sumter's great battle, to proclaim there war against women and children—women and children, the descendants of the heroes who had died on that very spot eighty years before for American freedom. But, my comrades, I must not dwell on these things. Let us turn aside from them. Let us still strive to think of Rocky Mount and Hanging Rock as the glorious battlefields of our forefathers, rather than as the scenes of pillage of those who called themselves our countrymen. Let us think rather of Tarleton's massacre of Bufort's men at the Waxhaw and of the destruction of Sumter's at Fishing Creek; for however dreadful those deeds, and distressing to the recollection, they bring no tinge of shame or cry for vengeance, but only of pity for the slaughter of brave men who fell by the accidents of war. Dwell upon those horrors of the Revolution, rather than upon these deeds in our war of men calling themselves American—seeds committed under Sherman's sanction. Yes, my friends, let us forget, if we can, these atrocities, though
