The writer had been permanently disabled by wounds before
Appomattox, and therefore cannot speak, personally, of what occurred there, and there are no official reports to appeal to. From what we have heard of the surroundings there—the scattered condition of the different commands, the desultory firing, and the confusion incident to that event—we should think it difficult, if not impossible, to decide, with any degree of certainty, what troops were really entitled to the honor claimed here by
North Carolina.
We do know, however, that this honor is claimed by troops from several of the
Southern States; and we have heard it asserted, with great plausibilty, that the last fighting was done by troops from
Virginia.
We cannot prolong this report to discuss the merits of these several claims, a discussion which would, in our opinion, be both fruitless and unsatisfactory.
In the Army of Northern Virginia nearly every Southern State was represented.
The Confederate
Secretary of War said of that army in his report of November 3, 1864, that it was one ‘in which every virtue of an army and the genius of consummate generalship
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had been displayed.’
And this again, we believe, is the world's verdict.
Is this not glory enough to give us all a share?
Let us, then, not be envious and jealous of each other, where all did their part so well.
Virginia makes no boast of the part borne by her in that the greatest crisis of her history.
She only claims that
she did her duty to the best of her ability. She has, therefore, no apologies to make either for what she did or may have failed to do. It is true that she was somewhat reluctant to join the
Confederacy; not because she had any doubt of the right of secession, or of the justice of the
Confederate cause; but only because of her devotion to the
Union of our fathers, which she had done so much to form and to maintain from its foundation.
But when she did cast her lot with her Southern sisters, she bore her part with a courage and devotion never surpassed;
and the record shows this in no uncertain way. In the address issued and signed by every member of the Confederate Congress in February, 1864,
not written by a Virginian, she is thus referred to:
‘In
Virginia, the model of all that illustrates human heroism and self-denying patriotism, although the tempest of desolation has swept over her fair ___domain, no sign of repentance for her separation from the
North can be found.
Her old homesteads dismantled; her ancestral relics destroyed; her people impoverished; her territory made the battle-ground for the rude shocks of contending hosts, and then divided with hireling parasites mockingly claiming jurisdiction and authority, the Old Dominion still stands with proud crest and defiant mien, ready to trample beneath her heel every usurper and tyrant, and to illustrate afresh her
Sic Semper Tyrannis, the proudest motto that ever blazed on a nation's shield or a warrior's arms.’
On such testimony as this,
Virginia can safely rest her title to share equally with her Southern sisters in the ‘wealth of glory’ produced by the war, and this
equality is all she asks or would have.
She disdains to pluck one laurel from a sister's brow.
