The Falling Flag Part 3

The Federal army officers and men bore themselves toward us as brave men should. I do not recollect, within my personal observation, a single act that could be called discourteous--nor did I hear of one.

On the other hand, much kindness and consideration were exhibited when circ.u.mstances made it warrantable--such as previous acquaintance, as was common among the officers of the old army, or a return of kindness when parties had been prisoners in our hands, as was the case with a portion of the Seventh regiment when it was the cavalry battalion of the Holcomb Legion, under Colonel Shingler, and the Fifth Pennsylvania cavalry.

Regular rations were issued to men and horses. An apology was offered, on one occasion, by the Federal Quartermaster, for not serving out horse feed, as General F. Lee's division of cavalry, who were, as I mentioned before, outside, up in the James River direction, had cut off a wagon train that held their provender, so we had to send out a forage detail in the neighborhood, with a pa.s.s from General Sheridan, to get through the Federal troops that filled the woods for miles around, for their name was legion. We stacked eight thousand stands of arms, all told; artillery, cavalry, infantry stragglers, wagon-rats, and all the rest, from twelve to fifteen thousand men. The United States troops, by their own estimate, were 150,000 men, with a railroad connecting their rear with Washington, New York, Germany, France, Belgium, Africa, "all the world and the rest of man-kind," as General Taylor comprehensively remarked, for their recruiting stations were all over the world, and the crusade against the South, and its peculiar manners and civilization, under the pressure of the "almighty American dollar," was as absolute and varied in its nationality as was that of "Peter the Hermit," under the pressure of religious zeal, upon Jerusalem.

Success had made them good natured. Those we came in contact with were soldiers--fighting men--and, as is always the case, such appreciate their position and are too proud to bear themselves in any other way.

They, in the good nature of success, were more willing to give than our men, in the soreness of defeat, to receive.

The effect of such conduct upon our men was of the best kind; the unexpected consideration shown by the officers and men of the United States army towards us; the heartiness with which a Yankee soldier would come up to a Confederate officer and say, "We have been fighting one another for four years; give me a Confederate five dollar bill to remember you by," had nothing in it offensive.

They were proud of their success, and we were not ashamed of our defeat; and not a man of that grand army of one hundred and fifty thousand men but could, and I believe would, testify, that, on purely personal grounds, the few worn-out half-starved men that gathered around General Lee and his falling flag held the prouder position of the two. Had the politicians left things alone, such feelings would have resulted in a very different condition of things.

Those of us who took serious consideration of the state of affairs, felt that with our defeat we had as absolutely lost our country--the one we held under the Const.i.tution--as though we had been conquered and made a colony of by France or Russia. The right of the strongest--the law of the sword--was as absolute at "Appomattox" that day as when Brennus, the Gaul, threw it in the scale at the ransom of Rome.

So far, it was all according to the order of things, and we stood on the bare hills men without a country. General Grant offered us, it was said, rations and transportation--each man to his native State, now a conquered province, or to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Many would not have hesitated to accept the offer for Halifax and rations; but, in distant Southern homes were old men, helpless women and children, whose cry for help it was not hard to hear. So, in good faith, accepting our fate, we took allegiance to this, our new country, which is now called the "United States," as we would have done to France or Russia.

With all that was around us--the destruction of the "Army of Northern Virginia," and certain defeat of the Confederacy as the result--no one dreamed of what has followed. The fanaticism that has influenced the policy of the Government, to treat subject States, whose citizens had been permitted to take an oath of allegiance, accepted them as such, and promised to give them the benefit of laws protecting person, property and religion, as the dominant party in the United States has done--exceeds belief.

To place the government of the States absolutely in the hands of its former slaves, and call their "acts" "laws;" to denounce the slightest effort to a.s.sert the white vote, even under the laws, treason; and, finally, force the unwilling United States soldier to use his bayonet to sustain the grossest outrages of law and decency against men of his own color and race! This has gone on until, lost in wonder as to what is to come next, the southern white man watches events, as a tide that is gradually rising and spreading, and from which he sees no avenue of escape, and must, unless an intervention almost miraculous takes place, soon sweep him away.