[251]
These pertinent questions will be considered, it is hoped, by Confederate veterans throughout the length and breadth of the Army of Northern Virginia, and will be determined fairly, by those especially who were present for duty on the last day of the war at Appomattox Courthouse.
This last charge occurred on the morning of the 9th of April, 1865, and my recollection is that we retired some time before noon of that day. I heard no further firing along our infantry or cavalry lines.
Our cavalry had been sorely pressed on all sides from Petersburg to Appomattox Courthouse.
The demand on this branch of the service had been necessarily extremely exacting—not only to work in the advance of our columns, but in protecting the rear and flanks of our several lines of retreat, and to serve in the places of disabled and knocked out staff officers and couriers—and our ranks meantime were naturally reduced greatly in number by the death, wounds, and capture of men and horses, and in effectiveness by details, dismounts, fatigue, and hunger, that told most severely on our staggering horses, that had become a burden either to be abandoned or led dismounted; until at the last our entire brigade force was about equal to a depleted regiment at the latter end of the war.
This text is part of:
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.