Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 8.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[562]

General Lee to the rear.

By Professor W. W. Smith, of Randolph Macon College.

[In our narrative, in our January, 1880, number, of three occasions on which the men vociferated to General Lee to “go to the rear,” we promised to give in some future issue the sketch of one of the incidents written at the time by Professor W. W. Smith, then a private in the Forty-ninth Virginia regiment. We have been unable to find the sketch to which we then referred, but are glad to be able to give an extract from a speech made by Professor Smith on “Memorial day” in Warrenton, Va., June, 1878, in which the incident is eloquently given, if not with the fresh enthusiasm of the boy soldier which characterized the sketch Mr. Smith wrote the day after the bloody struggle at Spotsylvania.

We regret that we have not space for the whole speech, but give the extract as follows:]

We are met, comrades, to pay a brother's tribute to those who marched shoulder to shoulder with us in the army of Northern Virginia, whose hearts we knew,

True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.

How our hearts beat more quickly at the recollection of that grand old army! When I think of the humble private, foot-sore and weary, toiling on after his tattered standard, shoeless and ill-clothed, munching his hard-tack, and eating his bacon raw to make it last the longer, yet all with a cheerfulness unfailing, because, forsooth, it was the best his country had to give; of the grand men who led our lines and breathed their spirit into lesser souls; of the glorious knight of the nodding plume; of the fierce, fiery God of War so meekly bowing to his God, but to his God alone; and then as my thought rests in the contemplation of the grand chieftain, who united in one majestic person the ardor of patriotism, the sublimity of genius, the dignity of greatness, whose name lit each eye and inspired every heart, himself so calm, so true — as thus the grand picture of our country and its cause, of that glorious army, and that most glorious leader rises before my mind, I think that surely

Never hand waved sword from stain so free,
Nor purer sword led a braver band,
Nor braver bled for a fairer land,
Nor fairer land had a cause so grand,
Nor cause a chief like Lee.