Address of Colonel Edward McCrady, Jr.
Comrades of the Army of Northern Virginia,and Ladies and Gentlemen: In the article on the subject of ‘Army’ in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, the author, the distinguished and accomplished British officer, General G. Pomeroy Colley, C. B., who soon after fell in that wretched little Boerer war in the Transvaal, after giving a brief sketch of the armies of the world, ancient and modern, of the rise and organization of each, and of all the great levees of history, closing with an account of the American army, and its strange military history, says:
‘The total number of men called under arms by the Government of the United States between April, 1861, and April, 1865, amounted to 2,759,049, of whom 2,656,053 were actually embodied in the armies. If to these we add the 1,100,000 men embodied by the Southern States during the same time,1 the total armed forces reach the enormous amount of nearly four millions drawn from a population of only thirty-two millions—figures before which the celebrated uprising of the French Nation in 1793, or the recent efforts of France and Germany in the war of 1870-1871 sink into insignificance.’I have thought, my comrades, that instead of taking for the subject