Confederate Monument in Confederate Cemetery.
(See [page 189])
Is there any other similar segment of space on the habitable globe so resplendent with stars of the first magnitude!
Seven Presidents of the United States and three of the greatest military leaders of modern times were born within two hours’ ride of this city, estimated according to the most improved modern methods of travel!
That meteoric Mars of naval warfare, John Paul Jones, lived and kept store in this town, and went from here to take command of a ship of our colonial navy. He was the first man who ever raised our flag upon a national ship, and he struck terror to the heart of the British navy by his marvellous naval exploits during the Revolution.
It was right here that Washington’s boyhood and youth were spent, and that he was trained and disciplined for his transcendent career, and it was to the unpretending home of his mother, still standing here—which you will visit—that Washington and Lafayette came when the war closed, to lay their laurels at her feet; and her ashes repose here, under a beautiful monument, erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
But there are other memories of heroic type, suggested by this locality, which come nearer home to our hearts, whose mournful splendor time cannot pale!
Here, and within fifteen miles of this city, in Spotsylvania county, more great armies manœuvred, more great battles were fought, more men were engaged in mortal combat and more officers and privates were killed and wounded than in any similar territory in the world. More men fell in the battles of this one small county during the Civil war than Great Britain has lost in all her wars of a century; and more men were killed and wounded in four hours at the battle of Fredericksburg than Great Britain had lost in killed, wounded and prisoners in her eight months’ war in South Africa.
When the fog lifted its curtain from the bleak plains about Fredericksburg on the morning of December 13, 1862, the sun flashed down on a spectacle of terrible moral sublimity!
One hundred thousand Union veterans, with two hundred and twenty cannon, were in “battle’s magnificently stern array,” and in motion, with nothing to obscure their serried ranks from the view of their expectant adversaries, safely entrenched on the sloping hills adjacent. The different sub-divisions of this great army were commanded that day by consummate masters of the art of war, whose names and brilliant exploits now illumine the pages of our national history, but its commander-in-chief was deficient in both strategic and tactical ability, and his most conspicuous merit seemed to be his perfect faith in the courage and invincibility of his army.