Robert Stiles, Four years under Marse Robert

[160] the order was from “Old Jack” himself, that he could not imagine what he wanted with me; he hoped not to have me shot for some violation of military law. “However,” said he, “you had better take one of the sergeant's horses and go and find out for yourself” --which I proceeded at once to do; but had not gotten beyond the confines of camp before I heard the captain calling again, the utterance of my name this time alternating with shouts and peals of laughter. On riding up I found him reading, for the second time, an autograph note from General Jackson, addressed to Captain Mc-Carthy, and to the following effect: that if we had not already received orders to move we would receive them in a few moments; that Robert Stiles must not report to him until further orders; that he didn't want any “untried man” about him when about to move.

The relations of our captain to the better soldiers in the battery were peculiar and enjoyable. On duty he was our commanding officer, off duty our intimate friend. I used to call him “the intelligent young Irishman,” and to tell the following story in explanation: Just before the Howitzers left Richmond, in the spring of 1861, General Magruder called upon Major Randolph to send him a suitable man for a courier, adding, “intelligent young Irishman preferred” and McCarthy was sent as “filling the bill.” The captain had long been “laying for me,” as the saying is, and now he had his revenge-“Old Jack” had conferred upon me orthodox Presbyterian baptism as “the untried man,” and so far as the captain was concerned, certainly the name “stuck.”

What would he and I have given, two or three days later, to recall the action of the next few moments. I distinctly remember the general appearance of General Jackson's note. It was written in pencil on a small half sheet of bluish paper, evidently torn from a letter, and I remember, too, how Captain McCarthy-laughing still-tore it up, when he had read it out three or four times, and how the fragments floated adown the air. I told Mrs. Jackson of the circumstance not long after the war, and she pronounced the contents of the note, and particularly the last clause, to be strongly illustrative of the directness and concentration which rendered