rs of age, many of them sixteen years.

They came of every social condition of life: some of them were the most
prominent men in the professional, social, and political life of their
States; owners of great estates, employing many slaves; and thousands of
them, horny-handed sons of toil, earning their daily bread by their
daily labor, who never owned a slave and never would.

There came men of every degree of intellectual equipment--some of them
could hardly read, and per contra, in my battery, at the mock burial of
a pet crow, there were delivered an original Greek ode, an original
Latin oration, and two brilliant eulogies in English--all in honor of
that crow; very high obsequies had that bird.

Men who served as cannoneers of that same battery, in after life came to
fill the highest positions of trust and influence--from governors and
professors of universities, downward; and one became Speaker of the
House of Representatives in the United States Congress. Also, it is to
be noted that twenty-one men who served in the ranks of the Confederate
Army became Bishops of the Episcopal Church after the war.

Of the men who thus gathered from all the Southern land, the first
raised regiments were drawn to Virginia, and there organized into an
army whose duty it was to cover Richmond, the Capital of the
Confederacy--just one hundred miles from Washington, which would
naturally be the center of military activities of the hostile armies.

=An Army of Volunteers=

The body, thus organized, was composed _entirely of volunteers_. Every
man in it was there because he wanted to come as his solemn duty. It was
made up of regiments from every State in the South--Maryland, Virginia,
North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee. Each State had its quota, and
there were many individual volunteers from Kentucky, Missouri and
elsewhere. That army was baptized by a name that was to become immortal
in the annals of war--"The Army of Northern Virginia."

What memories cluster around that name! Great soldiers, and military
critics of all nations of Christendom, including even the men who fought
it, have voiced their opinion of that army, and given it high praise.
Many of them, duly considering its spirit, and recorded deeds, and the
tremendous odds against which it fought, have claimed for it the highest
place on the roll of honor, and in the Hall of Fame, among all the
armies