"The Commanding General considers that no greater disgrace could befall the army, and through it our whole people, than the perpetration of barbarous outrages upon the unarmed and defenseless, and the wanton destruction of private property that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country....
"It will be remembered that we make war only upon armed men.
(Signed) R. E. Lee, General."
What a contrast! Robert E. Lee would have thrust his right hand into the fire and burned it off inch by inch before he would have written such words as Halleck and Sherman wrote.
W. T. Sherman was utterly incapable of entertaining or expressing such high and noble sentiments as emanated from Lee in the above-quoted order.
It is true that Early burned Chambersburg, but this was done in retaliation for wanton destruction of private houses in Virginia by the Yankee General Hunter, upon the refusal of the town to pay an indemnity in money.
VIRGINIA DISMEMBERED
A most atrocious act of the Yankee Government during the war, high-handed and inexcusable and without any semblance of law, right or necessity, was the dismemberment of the State of Virginia, when the old Mother of States was despoiled of one-third of her territory. West Virginia, cleft as it was from the side of the old Mother State by the sword, when in the throes of war, left that mother bleeding, and robbed of her richest mineral territory. Not that it would make the United States Government any stronger or richer, but only to satiate the hatred, revenge and malice of the Yankee nation. Virginia! The proud Old Dominion, that in 1795 voluntarily gave to the young Republic that vast northwestern domain, 250,000 square miles in extent, which her sons, during the Revolutionary War, single-handed and alone, under the leadership of the indomitable George Rogers Clark, wrested from the British and their Indian allies, and which now comprises the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and that part of Minnesota east of the Mississippi River; yet her original domains, as one of the thirteen States as fixed and adjusted after Kentucky was formed, and the ceding to the United States of this great western empire; the oldest, foremost, and proudest of the States, on whose shores the first English settlement on the continent was made, whose ter-centennial in this year of Grace, 1907, is being celebrated, and on whose sacred soil the fires of liberty were kindled and fanned into flame by the burning words, "Give me liberty or give me death," which fell from the lips of her own Patrick Henry; yet Virginia, the proud old Mother of States and statesmen, her borders extending from the sands on the ocean shore on the east to the Ohio River on the west, must be cut in twain, in hatred, in malice and in revenge.
These facts, the treatment of prisoners, and destruction of private property, are here recorded that the truth of history may be vindicated, and that the cold-blooded and cruel atrocities of the enemies of the South may not be forgotten. Multiplied instances of cruelty and vandalism might be here written down, but the subject is distasteful.