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[116]

But this was not all. They had not even the reward which is naturally dear to a soldier's heart—I mean the due recognition of gallantry in action. By a strange oversight there was no provision in the Confederate army for recognizing either by decoration or by promotion on the field, distinguished acts of gallantry. No ‘Victoria Cross,’ or its equivalent, rewarded even the most desperate acts of valor.

Now with these facts before him, the historian will find it impossible to believe that these men drew their swords and did these heroic deeds and bore these incredible hardships for four long years for the sake of the institution of slavery. Everyone who was conversant, as I was during the whole war, with the opinions of the soldiers of the Southern army, knows that they did not wage that tremendous conflict for slavery. That was a subject very little in their thoughts or on their lips. Not one in twenty of those grim veterans, who were so terrible on the battlefield, had any financial interest in slavery. No, they were fighting for liberty, for the right of self-government. They believed the Federal authorities were assailing that right. It was the sacred heritage of Anglo-Saxon freedom, of local self-government, won at Runnymede, which they believed in peril when they flew to arms as one man, from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. They may have been right, or they may have been wrong, but that was the issue they made. On that they stood. For that they died.

Not until this fact is realized by the student of the great war will he have the solution of the problem which is presented by the qualities of the Confederate soldier. The men who made up that army were not soldiers of fortune, but soldiers of duty, who dared all that men can dare, and endured all that man can endure, in obedience to what they believed the sacred call of Country. They loved their States; they loved their homes and their firesides; they were no politicians; many of them knew little of the warring theories of Constitutional interpretation. But one thing they knew—armed legions were

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