[284]
wronged a gallant soldier, and had a right to expect that he would hasten to make the amende honorable. How far he has done so we leave our readers to judge from a statement of the facts.
We received, in due course of mail, the following letter:
From this letter it will appear that he gives up the statement that Armistead fought on the Federal side at First Manassas, but still adheres to the charge, that ‘dying in the effort to extend the area of slavery over the free States, he saw, with a clearer vision, that he had been engaged in an unholy cause, and said to one of our officers, who leaned over him, ‘Tell Hancock I have wronged him, and have wronged my country!’’
In the edition sent us there is a foot-note, written in red ink, after the statement concerning Armistead's action at First Manassas, to the following effect: ‘This is a mistake.
A Richmond paper erroneously stated that a Lieutenant Abercrombie, who went over to them, and who had been an officer in the regular army, was engaged on our side in the first battle of Bull Run.
Camp rumor made the name Armistead.’
We ought, perhaps, to be duly grateful to General Doubleday for making even this small concession, especially if he sees that it goes into the third edition of his book.
And we are greatly obliged to him
This text is part of:
Richmond, VA. 1883.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.