Trotwood's Monthly, Vol. II, No. 3, June, 1906

Transcriber’s Note: New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain. The table of contents lists a poem “WHY SHOULD I FEAR TO DIE?” that doesn’t actually appear in the magazine.

Copyright 1906 by Trotwood Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Entered as second class matter Sept. 8, 1905, at the Postoffice at Nashville, Tenn., under the Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.

By John Trotwood Moore
It was the last of April when I journeyed to New Orleans to study the battlefield I had wished so often to see. No battlefield has ever appealed to me as has that—none has come near it to me, in sentiment, except when I stood in the trenches of Valley Forge and saw the blizzard-swept lines where Patriotism stood in the last ditch.
Looking toward the British line.
New Orleans is easily the greatest signal victory ever won on American soil. History shows nothing in its class except King’s Mountain. Everything else in the Civil War that we now regard as decisive was an evenly matched, mathematically planned contest, between great armies, in which, so far as the records go, one lost about as much as the other, with victory at last on the banner of the side with the most troops, the most guns, the better equipment and the best food for marching men.
Shiloh, Stone River, Chickamauga, in the West—Bull Run, Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, in the East—these were all great steel-sheathed locomotives rushing full speed to a head-on collision.
And, after the collision, there was scrap-iron all around.
But New Orleans was a steel ram striking a man-of-war, and the man-of-war was not. There is only one way to explain the miracle of the unexpected—the incongruity of the Incongruous—and that is, Providence.
Now, Providence had selected Jackson for this job.