The orator introduced.
Rev. Dr. J. William Jones, who entered the Confederate army as a private in the Thirteenth Virginia,
General Hill's old regiment, and who is known throughout the length and breath of the Southland for his devotion to the
Southern cause and its memories, introduced the orator of the day,
General James A. Walker.
Dr. Jones said:
[
368]
Mr. President, Comrades of the Arm y of Northern Virginia,
Soldiers of the Confederacy, Ladies and Gentlemen.
If the personal allusion may be pardoned, I will say that I count myself one of the happiest, if not the happiest, man in all this vast crowd assembled here to-day.
Always happy to meet the men who wore the gray—for if there is one man on earth whom I honor and love above another, it is the true Confederate soldier—I delight to mingle in reunions of the survivors of every army of the
Confederacy as they gather from
Maryland to
Texas.
But it is for me always a peculiar pleasure to attend a Confederate gathering in historic, battle-scarred heroic old
Richmond, and to mingle with the men who followed
Lee and
Jackson and
Longstreet and
Ewell and
A. P. Hill [great applause], and ‘
Jeb’
Stuart; the men who composed the Army of Northern Virginia, the noblest army of heroic patriots that ever marched under any flag, or fought for any cause, ‘in all the tide of time.’
