Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 17.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[144] fair Creole city was already in Packenham's grasp, it was the wild soldiery of Tennessee who, laying behind their mud breastworks, peered out through the lifting fog at the scarlet array of the English veterans as the latter, fresh from their victories over the best troops of Europe, advanced for the first time to meet defeat.

In 1836 Samuel Houston, sprung from the soil of that very county which now holds the ashes of Lee and Jackson, won the battle of San Jacinto, and achieved Texan independence. In 1845, under James K. Polk, of Tennessee, a Southern President, it was admitted into the Union, and a little later the American armies, led by two Southern generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, and composed more than half of Southern soldiers, made good the cause of the Lone Star State, enlarged its boundaries, and acquired New Mexico and California. Thus was stretched the canopy of the wide heavens that now spread over the American republic; and, counting the constellation of forty-two stars that glitter in it forget not, ye who have sentiment of justice, that over thirty of them were sown there by measures and by deeds in which Southern States and Southern soldiers took a leading part, and in which the patriotism and love of Union of the South never faltered.