Companions of the Army of the Cumberland, I have mentioned these incidents attending the beginning of the war for the Union, not for your enlightenment, for they are well known to you, but to lay the foundation for convincing our children and grandchildren who do not know: that the country at large does not yet appreciate the patriotism, chivalry, heroism and fortitude of the Confederate soldier.
It seems that we, while yet alive, should rise and testify to them of what we have seen and known, for we soldiers of the Union have had ample praise and honor to the ends of the earth: but they have been comparatively forsaken even by their selfish and perfidious professed friends in Europe who once encouraged them.
After Appomattox high officials in England who had first urged them to war, and the English press, which had encouraged it by constant agitation and misrepresentation, now turned against them in their adversity.
The London Dispatch of June 10, 1865, used, among much else that was false, the following language:
"It was clear that a people who had not heart enough to destroy their property that they might defend their rights were neither fit to fight, nor worthy of any fate but that of submission to oppression, that they were not soldiers, that they were wholly unworthy of their cause, and that they were only fit subjects to tyranny."
To which the late Confederate General, Robert H. Anderson, of Georgia, replied in the public press, proving by statistics that the whole Confederate army had lost more in killed and wounded in four years' war than the entire British army of the whole British Empire had lost in the wars of the preceding one hundred years.
But here was a terrible war where the combatants on neither side had any purpose of conquest, subjugation or exploitation, and to our successors it is hard to explain how it came about. It may probably be better explained by the fable of the two knights traveling in opposite directions who met opposite a road sign painted black on one side and white on the other. After salutations the knight on the black side remarked the strangeness of painting a sign black, whereupon he on the other, ever ready to correct errors, informed his new acquaintance that the sign was not black, but white. After disputation they decided to settle the question by combat, so after jousting about for a while their positions became so changed that black was white and white was black, when each glancing at the sign, one said to the other: "What are we fighting about?" "Well, you said the sign was black." "Why, so I did, and it did look black to me then, but now I see that you were right and it is white."
And so with the Union and Confederate soldiers.
The die was cast for war by political and fanatical agitators, and millions of the best men in the world rose to arms, nearly one-half of them minors, ready to sacrifice their lives as patriots for what they believed their rights assailed and likely to be lost; but after jousting about for four long and bloody years they found that each was jousting for the same object; that the Confederates had formed their Confederacy, their Constitution and their laws almost identical with those of the Union.
Shortly after the war in a conversation with Mr. Lanham, a member of Congress from Texas and a warm personal friend, he told me in discussing our different parts in the war that his father and mother and neighbors taught him the war was a holy and righteous one; so that at the age of fourteen he enlisted, believing religiously in what he had been taught, until he came to a halt in Pickett's charge at Gettysburg and saw a Union soldier about his own age, a bright-faced boy who asked for water from his canteen. Asking how badly he was hurt, the boy replied: